Yes but the mechanisms behind your electoral process are still there, and it isn’t one party rule for optimistically the next four years. USA might not be having anymore elections. The German situation is serious but it’s more of a fender bender than the all out full head on collision without seat belts that is the USA.

Which of those projects will be ready by the time China invades Taiwan in early 2025? And how will those factories absorb all the global orders for chips when they’re not ready?

You are agreeing with me. Fabs are hard. Our people are stupid. Their people are smart. If their people are tied up in a war and dying, and their fabs are destroyed, and our fabs are half built and the Trump admin never holds them accountable and they take the money and run or fuck it up since there’s no oversight because DeReGuLaTiOn, how exactly does that make a difference as to whether the government is trying to build fabs? If they’re functionally not prepared to absorb the global demand created by WW3, then where will America get its chips? Electing Trump is literally a national security concern at this point.

I feel like the Germans are the only ones who understand this. Very few of the Americans in my life understand they just lost their “democracy”. I’m a dual German/US national, so it’s been hard to watch the US backslide. I’ll come to Germany next year, but I swear to god if you fuckers elect AfD I’m gonna lose my shit.

Remember when the US government gave the telecoms billions to build gigabit internet infrastructure nationwide and they fuckin just didn’t do it?

Pepperidge Farm remembers. Show me a working fab as a result of that act after Trump and Co manage to not fuck it up and then your comment might have some merit. Note: the coming brain drain will not be kind to the USA.

They’ve been trying to move chip fabricators to the US for decades. The education system is shit here and we don’t have the talent. Also it’s really difficult to get the fabricators right and built for a reasonable cost. So yeah. Your non-iphone is gonna be pricey.

Digital Ocean basically lets you run something called a droplet in the cloud. It’s a general purpose server more or less. Put nginx on it, start the server process, configure the DNS rules, and congrats you have a site that says hello world.

A droplet is similar to an EC2 on Amazon Web Services. I found DOCN to be cheaper than AWS when I hosted my site there. I was going to also suggest proton and DOCN might work for your use case. You get the redundancy and uptime without needing to use your own hardware, electricity, or bandwidth.

Similar trajectory for me, but I’m now being micromanaged on the daily. We got a new CIO recently who is micromanaging his direct reports and our culture has evaporated overnight. The shit is indeed rolling down hill and the writing is on the wall to leave. I know it’s not just me either. There will be an exodus when rates get cut and hiring picks up again. This place is fucked.

But that’s the key. If you can find something and lay low with minimal annoyance, hang onto that for as long as you can.

For me it’s the “Stop responding” button. Sometimes I’ll neglect something in my prompt, such as the fact that I’m stuck on ES5 javascript in my job (ServiceNow). It’ll spit out ES6+ with let declarations or something like that, and I have to go back and qualify my limitations. So I click stop responding. What used to happen was that it would stop and allow for additional prompting. Now it’s just like a client side trick. It hides the output but the server is still returning shit in the background, so if I try to re-prompt or add context it finishes what it was originally saying first, then tacks the new answer onto the old one without pause, separation, or human readable formatting that would indicate that there is a new output. It’s an awful experience.

I’ve been using perplexity.ai but my company thinks its agreements will stop Microsoft from training their AIs on our proprietary data, so I have to be more careful with perplexity than Copilot.

Chuck Palahniuk leaking into my writing like the carrot out of the protagonist’s ass in Guts.

Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use…fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company’s success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.

Additionally, this is a training issue. Don’t offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn’t want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We’re stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I’m gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.

A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don’t care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.

“Why is my organization falling apart!?” Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don’t actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It’s literally always wealth inequality.

I’m white and I don’t feel comfortable saying it/typing it. It’s antiquated and weird.

We order a lot of baby stuff on there. They’ve accepted returns on everything that didn’t work or wasn’t what we anticipated. We can walk to a UPS store from our house and drop it off. Anecdotally, they also have the best deals about 50% of the time on PCPartPicker.

It does take longer to fulfill some orders for us. But others show up a day or three early even though we don’t pay for Prime. I used to work for the post office before they switched to their own delivery, and they would drop off their pallets to us in the mornings to be taken out for the last mile by our carriers. It seemed like that was a better experience. It has definitely enshittified somewhat since their golden days.

Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).

There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.

I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.

I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.

Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.

And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.

Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.

My school had nothing about react, node, angular, angularJS, SaaS, etc. back in 2015.

We learned Perl, PHP, LAMP stack, SOAP based APIs and other “antiquated” things. Provided a solid foundation of fundamentals that I’ve built a nice career on.

It might have been by design to get a feel for the fundamentals. Or maybe it’s just because the people teaching it have probably left the industry and are teaching how they did it.

My department head was in his 70s and my professors all trended on the older side.

Fuck reddit.

Feeding user data to an LLM. Jacking up API costs. Being generally unusable on mobile. Usurping old.reddit.com to try and force me to the official app on “unmoderated” and NSFW threads.

Now with their IPO and a need to deliver ever increasing subscriber numbers and improved metrics for shareholders every quarter, the writing is on the wall.

I hope it goes to zero. The only sad thing is all the knowledge that will be lost due to the sky high API pricing when the site eventually does sunset. I’m guilty myself of trying to de-enshittify google somewhat by adding reddit to just about every search. Hopefully people smarter than me have ways to archive that info.