What strikes me is the stories that never get told. I met a retiree at a Java meetup once who had worked at Zilog during the z8000 era. He was surprised to meet someone who knew about that.
Especially, pre-web and pre-blogs there's a great deal of tech industry history that largely doesn't exist any longer unless it was especially notable and/or some author decided to spend a year or two writing about it.
I’ve been in software development since 2003. I’d never been layed off until Jan 2024. I had some dodged several. The signs were all there, company acquired about a year before, product didn’t really fit in their vision. That’s when the layoffs usually happen, a year or so into it. Yet I was still surprised. They got me, they finally got me! At first I thought it was a blessing. I had changed jobs fairly regularly but I hadn’t had any time off aside from the usually week or so here and there for 20 years. I casually started leetcoding and applying. Nothing. My network finally came through after 3 months of time off. The vacation was nice but I was low key starting to worry.
The situation is even worse now. Personally I think there will be a rebound in hiring eventually. Wrangling ai if nothing else. Otherwise, Vernor Vinge once said long term technical unemployment would be a sign of the singularity; just pray for a soft take off!
> once said long term technical unemployment would be a sign of the singularity; just pray for a soft take off
I think that's true, but in your case (mine as well), companies just don't really want to hire older people. People get touchy when this is brought up, but young recruiter women aren't attracted to them and are biased, younger guys/interviewers view them as some dragon to be slayed to prove themselves, etc. When they say they want "experienced", they mean not so junior so as to be clueless, but not so experienced that you see through their company bullshit.
> People get touchy when this is brought up, but young recruiter women aren't attracted to them and are biased
Age discrimination is real (I'm 56) but if you honestly think this way age discrimination isn't your biggest problem. You sound old fashioned and entitled in your thinking rather than experienced. That sort of stuff might fly on Facebook but if that's what you're presenting in your job search it's not going to fly.
I've been doing one of those "Randstad" recruiter support things after lay off, and one of the first things they hammer away is "Ageism is a thing" and have us remove our dates of graduation on our LinkedIns.
So I think ageism is a thing. Or according to the commenters here, it can't be, and maybe you just didn't think of it the right way.
those ones typically don't have the vested interest but are just as clueless and probably have a worse ageism bias. It's hard enough for technical people to assess talent; in-house recruiters at best are weak keyword matchers, at least IME.
Honestly, even assuming a bias, I doubt it's attractiveness. What's usually cited with hiring older employees is the additional social cost, as well as time off work (because they often have families to support and are more settled).
Having worked with a lot of recruiters, I promise -- promise! -- this is not a factor lol. Just because you find them attractive does not make the feeling mutual. They deal with enough shit from both management and engineers. They're friendly because of their job.
As a second knowledge bomb, the barista also does not find you charming.
> I promise -- promise! -- this is not a factor lol.
Study after study after study shows more attractive people do better by the numbers in just about every single metric you can come up with. I imagine a recruiter may bristle at that as much as they would the racial bias that is also measurable in recruiting, since it would be the recruiter committing the bias. It's there in the numbers though.
Jogging isn’t niche, but after being sedentary for ten years I had to start doing something. When I was young I could run a 7 minute mile which was nothing to brag about. Now at 50+ that seems like an impossibility. I’ve been doing walk/jog intervals for almost a year and I’m getting better, and focusing on not blowing out my knees.
Do you not see your own contradiction? Cars and drills don’t kill people, self driving cars can! Normal cars can if they’re operated unsafely by human. These types of uncritical comments really highlight the level of euphoria in this moment.
> It's simply not the wild west out here that you make it out to be
It is though. They are not talking about users using Claude code via vscode, they’re talking about non technical users creating apps that pipe user input to llms. This is a growing thing.
If the Dems win the house in the midterms he will be impeached again. If there are 60 votes in the senate he will be out. Dems are unlikely to win the senate, let alone 60 seats.
It’s a bizarre situation in that US elections have such a huge impact on a world that has no say.
I really hope the democrats won’t start the impeachment nonsense showbusiness again and instead focus on actual policy that benefits people. I am very worried that Congress will go even lower and devolve into permanent investigations and impeachments while the country has actual serious problems that aren’t worked on.
I wouldn’t worry, that’s a sure thing. Next on Trump’s list is Cuba. He has to do these things now because after the midterms it’s just going to be investigations and impeachment for two years. Then the Democrats lose again because who cares about more pointless impeachments?
> It’s a bizarre situation in that US elections have such a huge impact on a world that has no say
No say (or at least, no influence) might be a bit strong given foreign election interference.
I'm sure if Britain or France or whoever wanted to, they could have their intelligence services release dirt on candidates or engage in some dirty tricks.
He's been impeached by the _house_ not by the Senate. The US Senate is extremely complicit with the administration. Something the founders did not intend
Upthread is discussing whether the Dems could flip the necessary seats to impeach and convict.
(And no, there is no way they will. It would take winning 20 out of the 22 seats, and losing none, assuming a party-line vote w/ independents siding with Dems. That won't happen. Also, the required vote in the Senate is two-thirds, not "60".)
This would be the case if many people get the quantum “crack” at the same time. Since it would enable a pre-image attack, one actor could selectively mine blocks for a considerable time until others catch up. This could be going on now.
Yeah, sway better strategy than dowing the world bitcoin is bust while holding it short would be to just mine blocks here and there, to steal from inactive wallets, etc.
I'd drain as much wealth from the network without being detected instead of going guns blazing.
I'd say up to a couple of hundred is much more than 40. Not a full decimal order of magnitude, but even without compression the 170KB on one side is up to 4½×.
You can access nearly 64kb of RAM on the C64, if you don't need the BASIC or Kernal (sic) ROMs. They can be software toggled in or out. Agreed that even the tape had more game data than that, but not much more.
However, very few tapeloader games ever tried to load more assets from tape. Generally it would just load a memory image and that would be that for the entire game.
But that's also kind of what makes it impressive in a different way. Even if the game was larger on disk/tape, they still had to stream it in tiny chunks and make it run within those constraints
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