From a lot of posts here I get that working as a dev in the US is now a total shitshow. But to give you my European perspective (I work in Germany): AI adoption hasn’t been as rapid here. People and companies are more skeptical about it, compared to the US.

I work as a web developer for an employer that is cautious about AI. I can use it, but I am not forced to. Tried it excessively for a few months (agents writing my code, playing a glorified manager and all of that jazz), but I noticed my own skills atrophying and me losing the general grasp of what my code actually does. And even though everyone and their dog claim that the models get better with each new release, I still run into hallucinations way too often. If you are very experienced in a field and you’ve been doing it for over a decade, you notice all of the small inconsistencies and bullshit answers - much quicker than a junior dev who didn’t have that experience yet.

So nowadays I only use Gemini for tool and library research or really simple boilerplate code. For everything else my own brain is the better solution. I am not actively against AI as a technology, but extremely opposed to paying a subscription to some techbro billionaire’s company to keep doing my job. Fuck Altman, Elon, Jensen and the Zuck.

If Ed Zitron is correct in all of his calculations, the frontier models will get so expensive they’ll become unprofitable for a lot of companies, so it would be a stupid decision to rely on them. I am looking forward to one day host good models on my own machine - though that day is not today, when capable GPU’s still cost thousands of dollars.

Thinkpad L390 Yoga. They crammed a 4.6 GHz CPU into a cooling system that was not designed for it, so the machine ran hot and throttled all of the time. The keyboard keys rubbed off after a few months of use. The Thinkpad logo was just a sticker that one day decided to stick to my hand because Lenovo used really cheap glue. It had a MicroEthernet port with a passive adapter that did nothing but break it out to a regular ethernet jack. The adapter cost 30€ and its cable turned into oil after a year.

I was able to undervolt the CPU and make it barely passable, then Microsoft released a Windows update that prevented undervolting. Gave it to a friend afterwards and got myself a GPD Win Max 2.

Maybe he bought that RAM before the crisis. I got a 64GB netbook last year, shortly before it became unobtainium.

Ghost Rider. First one was goofy action, but still kinda cool. Second one was boring, confusing and lame. But at least it had an exploding bucket-wheel excavator in it, which was the only good scene.

Were you homeschooled? That’s the only way I can imagine a kid could escape homework

Disclaimer: I’m from the EU, I don’t know if it’s more difficult in the US. But I escaped homework by simply not doing it. I got yelled at, there were a lot of talks between my parents and the school, teachers made fun of me in front of the whole class…but that just made me more angry and more unwilling to do them. :)

Ultimately, there was nothing they could do, except giving me bad grades, but I didn’t much care about those. I’ve been a little shithead.

What also helped was my parents not giving much of a fuck either, they trusted me to do what’s best for me.

I’ve been running some Linux servers for fun, at my last job we also had quite a few. The only admin quit, no documentation. Guess who got a big salary increase because he was the only one with the knowledge required to keep this shitshow running? Yep, that’s me.

Thanks to past me for installing every distro under the sun and sinking years into the commandline, shell scripting, web and mail servers just for the thrill. Linux is awesome.

Hell yeah, brother. I’m in the same boat. Sunk myself into my computer instead of doing boring tasks after school and now it’s my job.

Thanks for confirming! That’s the box I saw as well, after clicking on it it said I will get an email in five business days - and it really took the whole five days.

I don’t see it anymore either. Might be they’re testing out this feature and not all users get to see it.

I also think they’re more cautious about the EU. There are less consumer protection laws in the US, so they get fucked first.

If you want to try it out yourself: This is the book where it happened. Despite that email I can see all of the reviews again, so maybe it’s a feature they’re testing out.

It’s really shady to have a rating system and hide ratings within that system. Why have it at all then?

It was great!

The Expanse and For All Mankind. It already feels a bit like FAM is a prequel anyway.

I once shat my pants at work after drinking too much coffee and left a little stain on the chair. After my shift I swapped the chair with one from a morbidly obese coworker, who was absent that day.

Either everybody knew or nobody knew.

Skyrim.

I use the TVTime app. It’s a bit shit (mainly the atrocious loading times), but it works.

Y’all aren’t old at all.

We are old, you are ancient! 😄

Yes, by being able to feel the controls so can focus your eyes on the road in front of you.

I thought we would finally have haptic touchscreens in our devices. There were some experiments in the past, but it never happened outside of niche industry applications.

Makes me a little bit sad, because being able to feel elements is really useful - I can type blind on my Titan 2 phone (which has a real keyboard) and in cars, it would really improve safety.

I bought an ATI Rage Fury Maxx for a lot of money on eBay. It’s one of the first dual GPUs, based on the Rage 128 chip.

However, back then there was no flow control between the two graphic chips, which means a lot of games horribly stutter if one of them renders a bit faster than the other. There are a few games that work really well with it, and a shit ton of games that don’t.

The card is an absolute novelty, a piece of history and it looks cool. But there is no good reason for putting this in a retro computer, because even a regular Rage 128 will run better.

I don’t regret getting it, but I regret paying too much for it. 🫠