I worked in a big German car maker's EV division.
The waste of resources put in to not actually developing a good electric vehicle was staggering.
I was part of a 100 person team who was responsible for one cog of a data ingestion pipeline which read in analytics data from each EV car. It was already about 2 years' in when I joined and it was a total failure. Why the fuck they were spending so much money on something so inconsequential to making a car was initially frustrating; now I think it's just sad.
The reality is that the leadership didn't really care.
The brands are so strong that they can afford to move slowly on this.
There is also a gravy train going on where money is being pumped into these projects and middle leadership are happy to sit back, do nothing, and still earn free $$$ rather than develop good tech.
For me, that feeling of needing to learn new things I think comes not from new tech or tooling,
but from needing to solve different problems all the time.
I would say there is definitely a fast-moving, hype-driven churn in web development
(particularly frontend development!).
This really does wear me down.
But outside of this, in IT you're almost always interacting with stuff that has been the same for decades.
Off the top of my head...
Networking.
From ethernet and wifi, up to TCP/IP, packet switching, and protocols like HTTP.
Operating systems.
Vastly dominated by Windows and Linux. UNIX dates back to the 70s, and Windows on the NT kernel is no spring chicken either.
Hardware.
There have been amazing developments over the years.
But incredibly this has been mostly transparent to IT workers.
User interfaces.
Desktop GUI principles are unchanged.
iOS and Android are almost 15 years old now.
Dealing with public cloud infrastructure, for example,
you're still dealing with datacentres and servers.
Instead of connecting to stuff over serial console,
you're getting the same data to you over VNC over HTTP.
When you ask for 50 database servers,
you make some HTTP request to some service.
You wait, and you get a cluster of MySQL or Postgresql (written in C!) running on UNIX-like OS (written in C!) and we interact with it with SQL (almost 50 years old now?) over TCP/IP.
As I spend more time in the industry I am constantly learning.
But this comes more from me wanting to, or needing to, dig deeper.
The article argues for a reworked IT education industry in the hopes
of a more skilled workforce:
The result would solve the industry's most pressing need, for good
people doing good work, and through expansion into other areas benefit
us more than AI will ever manage.
Most IT today exists as a means to support business and commerce.
Corporations post absurd profits year over year.
They don't need more knowledgeable IT staff.
What is "good" for the IT industry employers may be more staff willing to say "yes, sir" and kick the can down the road.
Business doesn't care about efficient systems if their systems are profitable.
So why is IT bad at getting brains?
Because it is against most leadership's interests.
Progress, change, automation all introduce risk which can hurt profitability.
My old workplace had a person exactly like this. We all had enough of the bullshit, but our boss didn't care. In the end, I moved on.
Later I realised it wasn't just that one person, it was actually a bad culture overall which wasn't being moderated well. The managers were just really bad at their job. So I'm really happy I moved on.
There are lots of cool Linux and OSS communities out there. Even if they are not exactly about the particular distro you are interested in, there will be ways to learn and share about it.
Does ActivityPub even share the user's IP address with other nodes in the network?
No this is not in the specification.
A malicious instance could in theory distribute this information but it would be non-standard. Of the 2 systems I've studied - Mastodon and Lemmy - neither do this.
Are they talking about your IP address or the service's?
In this scenario they would be talking about the IP address(es) of the services.
I remember installing XFCE on an old Pentium 3 tower some office had stored under the stairs.
It was like magic - the system just... worked again?! It was the first time I successfully installed Linux and it felt so fast.
With Windows the thing barely worked.
That became my younger sister's first computer.
The tower and monitor etc. all just stayed on the ground and we played games on it together.
Eventually I found an ethernet card and learned how to plug it in.
I ran an ethernet cable from our modem through the house along the floor. Then we could go on Myspace and send email to each other.
Can't believe my parents were ok with tripping over all that stuff, ha!
Probably not. XFCE provides more than just a window manager;
it's a whole desktop environment.
That said, it would be interesting to see quantitatively what the difference in system resource usage actually is.
Haha yeah actually I wonder whether people actually did ask this when Linux started making the rounds. If I read the history right BSD was already almost 15 years old at the time!
Given such an essential service, I personally don't think it's important they are turning a profit. But is it run efficiently? I have no idea and this article doesn't really go into it.
Had a quick search and found
Australia Post's Efficiency of Delivering Reserved Letter Services. Haven't read it in full yet but first glance looks interesting.
And from some quick digging,
I found that every year their revenue increases:
“And I think the temperature is being created for political reasons often – not because it’s inherent in the discussion.”
Spot on. I'm so out of the loop with non-binary gender things.
However even I can see it is sad to see people's identity be thrown around in political folly.
The objective of the Sports Foundation is to raise money for the
development of sport in Australia.
So it's an unsurprising conclusion.
If there was a similar foundation,
also pulling in $47 million per annum,
for a similar activity people do out of passion rather than necessity such as...
I dunno... "Australian Spoon Tapping Foundation"?
That foundation's CEO would probably be more than happy to give a soundbite for the media.
But elite spoon tappers don't have a foundation nor do they really identify as spoon tappers.
There is an interesting story here, though.
I think some people assume that elite athletes equals mega dollars.
But that is not the case.
An interesting article that actually informs and entertains the public could:
report on the average income of elite athletes
give an insight on what most elite athlete's lives are really like;
how they survive earning less than $23K/year.
explain why their income is low
Instead what we've got here is a headline implicitly stirring up feelings of injustice,
some comments from some CEO,
some nothing numbers with no context,
and finally an actual comment from an actual athlete (right at the bottom of the article?!).
Yes I've personally argued against automation, too.
Particularly when something is clearer to just be written down in a checklist-like format, to be followed by someone with domain expertise.
Absolutely - and there's way more of them now than 10 years ago!
Shit quality, disposable, cheap stuff. Popular for clothes, homewares, small furniture, bits and pieces for around the house.
I worked in a big German car maker's EV division. The waste of resources put in to not actually developing a good electric vehicle was staggering.
I was part of a 100 person team who was responsible for one cog of a data ingestion pipeline which read in analytics data from each EV car. It was already about 2 years' in when I joined and it was a total failure. Why the fuck they were spending so much money on something so inconsequential to making a car was initially frustrating; now I think it's just sad.
The reality is that the leadership didn't really care. The brands are so strong that they can afford to move slowly on this. There is also a gravy train going on where money is being pumped into these projects and middle leadership are happy to sit back, do nothing, and still earn free $$$ rather than develop good tech.
Here's one of the stories from my experience (software development perspective): https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/08/sbt/