Technology is a false god. Speaking of which, I spent about 15 years of my life being an atheist. I went to Mexico last Christmas and came back a changed man. I answered the calling of my conscience. I think over time the current political situation in the US is going to push people back to traditional values as well. Living life for yourself is always going to be ultimately unfulfilling. Men need to sacrifice and be responsible for others. And submitting our own will to the will of our creator is very liberating.
And if anyone from Mexico sees this, God bless Mexico. I’m thankful for Catholic nations. The level of devotion and permeance is awe inspiring. I have a new admiration and understanding now of the Catholic world. It almost feels like home in a way.
I’m probably guilty of idolizing tech at times too. Others here have echoed the importance of using tech as a means to an end, not as an end unto itself. Thanks for sharing your journey.
We don't even have a name for it now, that's how bad it is IMO. All those mere vessels relaying what "the average user" or "the industry" requires, which we should most humbly submit to. The way "disrupt" was thrown around, or the kool-aid required to believe that continuing down the route consolidation and inequality will somehow result in universal basic income. People who fly to 15 conferences a year rolling their eyes at anyone refusing to understand nuclear energy is the way to solve climate change.
Everyone knows that. I’m not sure why you would even bother pointing it out when it’s common knowledge. Unless it’s news for you because you were very young. But the fact that one person says there’s no turnaround coming, and the next person, me, says there will be because of a degenerate society in decline means nothing. Believe in salvation is a personal choice that everyone gets to make. We are compelled to confess our belief, but ultimately everyone has free will for their own choice. I’m basing my view off of historical trends during periods of societal decline. There will be a point in time when there will be no Christian revival. That’s the prophecy of Revelation. People are, and will start looking for better answers. There is one answer that has not only served us well, but it’s also true. Unless someone is strictly materialistic and doesn’t believe there is any supernatural realm whatsoever, the question has to be asked. Is Jesus who He says He is. If people seek the answers, I believe they will come to the same one that so many have before us. That Jesus absolutely is who He says He is, our creator, God.
Title is misleading. Not getting excited about a new Next.js version doesn't mean you don't care about new technology. Maybe it just means that you don't feel like reorganizing your code or something. Relatively speaking it's still an incremental upgrade to your approach overall.
I am 45 and stopped caring much about new web frameworks many years ago. It's not that I don't find them interesting or even advantageous in some ways, I just don't feel compelled to bother learning in detail about most of them. Although I usually do look into them enough to get the gist.
You just can't pick up every single new thing. If you try then you won't ever get any real work done.
But some things you really have to take notice of. And this is subjective and usually not one right answer. For me, image and text generation was something I felt compelled to jump into.
A big part of this calculation is also social. If you are looking to pick up contracts or jobs, your choice of technology is important. And often picking up the latest trend will make that easier.
It really depends on the technology and what it offers you. I would say that getting familiar with the OpenAI API provides much more bang for your buck (depending on what you are trying to do) versus upgrading Next.js versions. That's much easier to get excited about.
To be fair, some of those frameworks were compensating for JavaScript which had real issues as a quickly-becoming-popular language.
SPAs were an answer to cross platform and device issues, given the web browser was the best cross platform piece of software used by the largest population. It made sense to try that vs making native apps on all the different platforms.
The fundamental problem in the web space spawning all of these tools has always been JavaScript’s weaknesses though.
Genuine question, as someone who got exhausted and is out of the industry for the foreseeable future. How do you stay competitive or job hop when every post is looking for the latest web framework?
I'm honestly thinking about just picking up c++ or something and turning my attention to embedded systems. I'm sure there's a wealth of old tech sitting around that needs to be maintained.
I'm in embedded, there's also cutting edge stuff to work on. The nice thing is you can be mostly detached from annoying web apis and frameworks and databases. The not so nice stuff is dealing with crappy vendors, using crappy tool chains, and spending a ton of time setting up automated builds. Sometimes I think about switching to true embedded (I do embedded Linux) but that tends to pay less
Don't choose hamster-wheel career tracks in the first place. Try to find Lindy paths [1], [2]. For example, SQL experts and DBAs. The rise and (mostly) demise of NoSQL actually cemented SQL's reputation as an irreplaceable technology. The latest Web framework is by definition non-Lindy: it's the new kid in town who think they know it all. grep is lindy, Unix is lindy, the qwerty keyboard is lindy, C++ is lindy, Computer Science is lindy, algorithms and data structures are lindy. Knowledge of the real world, whether it be finance or shipping, is lindy. Sorry, verbose reply, but I hope it helps.
Interestingly, I've been thinking it would be a good idea to brush up on my C skills, because while there are serious contestants to its throne, a gig based on Rust today often means being at the cutting edge of tech, and will probably come with a lot of buzzwords like GraphQL, React, Typescript, monorepo, AWS Lambda, daily standups — things giving me symptoms of burnout just writing down.
Whereas a C gig today probably means embedded, or subsystem far away from the frontend churn. If I'm lucky they have unit tests. The Lindy path you were talking about.
My team was asked how we should store data that is variable in structure and depth. When I suggested using mongo and not trying stuff it into a SQL db, I was looked at like I had suggested blending my firstborn for margaritas. People seem to think that NoSQL is dead and was always a bad idea.
The NoSQL movement was absolutely acrid towards SQL. The blowback is justified, IMHO. "blending my firstborn for margaritas" is very colorful language, woah :-)
Plenty of IT jobs out there that have job security to last your entire career and don't shift to the new shiny every few years. Utilities are a good example. Lots of older tech and some newer stuff, but nothing experimental.
Ex: Maintain some SQL queries, upgrade to a new database version without bricking everything, write some scripts that get fired off at a scheduled time, knowledge of the industry you're serving, update some configuration files for the company website which won't change for another decade, read some log files, create some visualization displays for operations staff, install software on certain machines, manage the company's VPN stuff, configure Linux, do the paperwork...etc
All this stuff is more generic IT and less rockstar developer. It reliably pays the bills and isn't very flashy.
There are plenty of people in IT that write code every day, some that rarely write code, and some that basically never write code, but just manage the business side of it all (there is a lot of beauracracy in large organizations).
Map territory distinction -- what they are looking for (strong engineers regardless of stack) and what the role is (a description of what you'll be doing) are two different things. Find your way to doing and articulating impactful projects that use technology to measurably create leverage and value for the business, and you will be fine. Of course, that can be easier said than done.
Yea, either you pick the tool that is most suited to the job or pick the tool that you are most productive is.
I agree about your sentiment about learning this that are important . I made a natural language network scanner and I got to speak about it at defcon. I never intended for people to find it interesting I just wanted to learn to apply LLMs . The source code is at https://github.com/zitterbewegung/saturday and you can interact with it at +1 (825) 251-9142
How do you know the tool which is most suited to the job if you never spend time learning new tools? And the tool that you are most productive in suffers from the Innovator's Dilemma - a new tool might make you more productive in the long term but will be a drop in your productivity in the short term; if you switch you'll lose what makes you competitive today, if you don't switch you'll lose out to people who are more competitive than you.
Once you've seen 3 frameworks, you've seen them all. The novelty wears off, rather quickly. That's the difference between your first encounter and the 10th.
I don't care about new tech per se, I care about solving problems for me and my customers. When new versions of libraries/frameworks/whatever do that. That's exciting.
I'm just exhausted by it. I've been writing front-end code since 2009 so I've been here from the early jQuery days, and I don't have the energy to keep rummaging through docs to figure out how this new special thing (next13/astro/alpine/blah/blah/blah) deviates from standard web technology.
I'd much rather conserve my limited energy for things that are inherent to the platform and actually exciting, like WASM or WebGPU.
Maybe offtopic but jQuery still kinda rocks for small proejcts. It's not the fastest nor does it do fancy compile steps to avoid the DOM but instead just provides an easy-to-use API for most common tasks. And as a bonus the documentation is awesome compared to mpst other new-ish JS frameworks.
There’s really no reason to use jQuery at this point. It made sense when the native APIs were lacking and inconsistent between browsers. That’s not the case anymore. Just use vanilla JavaScript.
The big reason to use it now is that there are useful libraries built of top of it, and you already know it.
The value proposition has changed though and there isn't a compelling reason to start using jQuery now, but if you are somebody who just stuck with it this entire time it still works and you are still as productive as you ever were.
And as a bonus you didn't waste any time chasing failed fads along the way...
I have this weird split. I really like to follow CPU and GPU tech, and I enjoy reading about nerdy stuff like consensus algorithms and esoteric programming languages whatnot even though I'll probably never use them.
But "smart" phones and apps? Meh, as long as they work I couldn't care less. Never have.
Correlary: Technology that existed when you were a child is considered normal. Technology introduced when you are a teen or 20 something is exciting. New technology after 40 is scary.
New tech after 40 is boring. 40 is young. New tech after 60 can be scary, it doesn't have to be but you are going to have to relearn a lot of stuff and that gets harder with age.
The most annoying is the tech that is forced upon you.
That’s an interesting way to look at it. For a certain generation like me though, I’m over 40 but under 50, all the new technology coming out is trivial. Appliances. The desktop PC era from the Commodore to DOS and Linux and even Windows with a complex set up, is far more challenging than anything coming out today.
I think there is a generation of technologists that are the prime era. Not too old to have lived the simple life. And not too young to be living the simple life of the iPad. At least in regards to technology.
The modern life is very challenging if you’re doing it right. There is a lot to research and be responsible for unless you just run around signing your life away on paperwork without properly educating yourself about mortgages, real estate, housing. That on top of learning a trade is pretty tough. For the average person at least. And it takes a lot of effort out of everyone. Most people just sluff off though and settle for less. Or blame the system for their condition, since no one is making $50 an hour out of high school anymore, like how it was for decades. One of those two.
As I get older, I realize that learning new stuff all the time is a mugs game. 90% of shiny new things will be irrelevant in a few years.
So I'm fairly cautious about what I bother to learn. I'll grudgingly learn new stuff if my work requires it, but mostly I coast on my decision to learn python 15 years ago.
Right but even staying within Python there is plenty to learn and lots of evolution and new stuff coming up over time.
I think that you just realize eventually that you have to be more selective with your attention. And it's often not hard to use up plenty of time keeping up with whatever domain you are already in.
Having grown up in 80s/90s, I also start getting older.
While I don't care for technology like "do X with an app" where I know X can also be done without an app, I do get excited for actual real new tech with substance. LLM's, self driving cars once they truly work, much higher video resolutions than the past, etc...
This is the best way to look at it. I feel similarly, and I’ve been thinking for a while now that the one technology that is actually worth embracing or paying for that I have used is adaptive cruise control. It’s close enough to self driving for me that I consider it self driving.
As I have gotten older I stopped developing for the web entirely. There's a certain simplicity the UNIX philosophy gave us that is sorely missed. I've started to take the Suckless philosophy more seriously when more than a decade ago I used to mock them for being curmudgeons. There's no glamor in sucking less. No youtube videos or made-for-conference code. But, there's a beauty about it that is hard to describe.
More or less. It's the "Worse is Better" philosophy. Instead of adding features to make user experience better make software instead that is good at one thing. It emphasizes minimalism and frugality. You may know the Suckless group from `dwm`.
The truth is, producing new stuff follows the law of diminishing returns in every category. After the point where the diminishing returns is really noticeable, new inventions and research actually becomes harmful and pathological. That includes many academic research fields and most technology today.
In fact, if you add up all the breakthroughs we've accomplished, most of it is just helping us use resources more efficiently so that we use more of them, eating them all up like a virus.
We should have stopped most research and technological invention long ago, and instead focused on sustainability and trying to reach an equilibrium with our natural environment.
You've put into words perfectly my thoughts on it all too. Sustainability, self awareness, equilibrium - these are foundations of strength and resiliency over the long term.
As I get older technology seems to be getting worse. Sure my phone charges faster but it's also too tall and not wide enough and it keep using more screen area to show fewer settings and seems to be able to do less every time I get a new one.
The constant drive for 'more'. When the field was young and smartphones exploded you could easily make money, as well as provide something of big new or unique value - even if it was just entertainment.
Now that we're long past the peak of low hanging fruit of productivity and value, we arrive at the inevitable results of late stage capitalism - extracting the most value possible out of the end user through manipulation and coercion.
It's bloat, it's enshittification, entrapment into rampant rent seeking and it's the low key subversion that has been happening for years.
Feel this, as someone running a modest solo side business.
FPGAjobs.com runs on a single Django app, with some Bootstrap-flavored templates on the frontend. Very little JS, ideally none at all.
It was a learning curve to implement Django at first (I’m not a SWE by training), but now that I know it, it’s fast and easy to add new features. You don’t get that kind of iterative speed when you’re constantly in the early stages of a technology learning curve. I’ll never give up Django. I’d rather sell the business to someone who knows how to scale it than switch tech stacks. That’s just not what I want to do.
It’s easier to get that dopamine hit of “ship thing, watch it get used” when you know your tools well enough to be able to ship and iterate quickly.
Thanks very much. Please don’t hesitate to shoot us an email at fpga.RTL.jobs@gmail.com if you have any suggestions for improvement, or success stories from your job hunt, or anything we can do to help you find a new gig.
There's fundamental learning and there's superficial learning.
After a while you know the fundamentals. Data structures and algorithms, common architectures, known solutions to old problems.
But job adverts tend to go for superficial things. The js framework du jour, some language that anyone adjacent can learn in a month, some new face on the same data structures.
I'm quite excited about technology. I'm not too excited about the sloppy seconds in technology. We seem to substitute performance for convience. For example the whole need for FSR in rendering to just to get playable performance shouldn't be the desired output. It seems like we keep settling for the half ass solution.
AAA Games coming onto desktops needing 4090 with DLSS just to be playable at 4k just feels wrong.
Desktop PC gaming may have spelled its own doom with these GPU prices. I have a 11900K, 4070 and 990 Pro but my next system may be one of those handhelds. I tried to get a fair price on a GPU for a very long time. I won’t be doing that again.
On needing a 4090, I think the problem is 4K. These games are getting pretty advanced, and 4K is a very large number of pixels. I like it for the additional horizontal real estate. But I don’t like it for gaming. I would stick to 1080 or 1440. 1440 on a 27 inch screen at the average desktop view in distance is a great all around solution. That said, my next monitor is probably going to be 4K. I will just be playing a lot of games in 1080P on it.
Because that perception is wrong. Based on poor judgement (often Youtube clickbait and low information Reddit), based on simply a lack of knowledge regarding CPU architecture.
I would not upgrade yet from this 11900K because it's the best homogeneous core design that Intel released for desktops. It includes AVX512, and is the only consumer CPU from Intel to have it. Intel engineers have stated that they are dedicated to furthering AVX512, and that it's removal is temporary. All of the errata from Skylake was finally fixed in Rocket Lake, which went on for generations until Rocket Lake.
Some people were so deadset against 11th gen that they recommended 10th gen because there were 10-core CPUs. Yet the ringbus design it inherited from Skylake was very strung out by that point with unresolvable issues like the well-known L0 parity error. There's many other reasons but I doubt you're interested in rehashing Rocket Lake as it sounds like you feel you have enough information to make up your mind.
And I certainly wouldn't use AMD due to even more bugs than Skylake and poor latency. They're improving, but it's not my choice.
I never built any AI stuff though and I feel a bit the same, I watch people in my group screw around with it, nothing really special has happened except it has been talked about and hyped up endlessly. The CTO even sent a mail around saying to expect a 75% productivity boost within the next few weeks, it never happened...
It's down to cost benefit. If life has taught me anything is to never be an early adopter, unless you absolutely have to. It applies to many things but specially in tech: never buy the first version of a device (in fact, you'd be spending more money for a worse experience), never use the .0 major version of something important enough, never use the beta version of something unless you must do (e.g. you're a dev and you're preparing your apps for the next version), never learn a language or framework that just came out because there's 100% guarantee things will change a lot and it may as well die within a year, etc. However, I do learn new stuff all the time but they're things that have been somewhat established and solve problems I have.
There's also the thing that one may be depressed for one reason or another and then feels like doing nothing new anymore and just want to play with the known - which is a quite natural reaction, but shouldn't be confused with getting old.
As I get older, I just care about boring technology.
I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware.
The only tool I still use with non-trivial config is my text editor, but that's going to be pared down over time.
Switching from zsh to fish a few years ago left me with a nearly identical shell with a 20 line config instead of hundreds. I'm trying to use this approach wherever possible.
>As I get older, I just care about boring technology.
I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware.
There's something intellectually alluring about new technology or new shiny in general that I think appeals to your general technologist, it's a trait the draws such people to various fields. I know when I was young I drank the Kool-aid every turn.
As I got a little older, and after I was burned several times adopting shiny things either wasting my time or never seeing them widely adopted to a point of reasonable usability, I came to the very realization that everything we create, including technology, exists to serve human needs. It's stupidly obvious, it shouldn't need to be stated but I think it does. Law exists for humans, medicine exists for humans (even medicine for animals, it exists to serve altruism or empathy in humans) and so on. Technology is absolutely no different.
There's a few ways technology can serve humans. It can appeal to the general intellectual interest but ultimately, few if any pay money for that. People in general don't care about it, it's neat for a few minutes then gone. So ultimately what functional need does technology really serve? What does it enable me to do that I otherwise couldn't? How does it make my life easier?
If it doesn't do these things, I frankly don't care about it anymore. I have plenty of places to tap into serving my intellectual interest, places where the things I learn aren't as vanishingly ephemeral in nature and entirely artificial, be it learning something about physics of the world, medicine, whatever. There's well over a lifetimes worth of other mature and well established things to learn about you won't waste your time in like NewWebFramework with NewSyntacticSprinklings.
To me, this is why I similarly only care about new well crafted tech. Your thing needs to either help me do something I otherwise couldn't or make my life easier. A huge amount of new tech does neither, it pedals novelty and the ambiguity of some type of miniscule improvemen in quality of life, all while trying to make a buck.
After working in AI for a big chunk of my career, I have switched gears in retirement and am having a great time learning to program small controllers like Arduinos. It's like going back in time - minimal OS, simple tools and direct access to the hardware. Just for the heck of it, I am building a simple robot from scratch right now and its been great getting back to the basics.
Interesting that the Reddit post is about web frameworks and stacks, as the title made me assume this was purely about devices/hardware.
Maybe I was projecting my own feelings onto the topic, which are mostly about hardware. As I’ve gotten older, I find it much harder to care about new PC components, cutting edge graphics for video games, and processor cores. I just value stability and consistency above all else
I'm honestly not sure it's as much you getting older as its games and hardware getting older and with that change is becoming more incremental.
When you got a new graphics card and game generation in 2005 the leaps were pretty wild, nowadays you can probably skip a generation or two of top hardware and you can still run things fine. After they put out the Dead Space remake I was interested to see how the old game from 2008 played, and even that still plays and looks modern. That's 15 years now, go back 15 years from 2008 and it's very different.
That’s very true as well, tech is more iterative now. I also think just having less time due to being a parent now also wipes out a lot of interest or motivation to check out new stuff
I am still excited about hardware but progress has slowed down to a crawl, especially on the GPU side.
Can't blame AMD and nvidia for trying to make a profit, though it sucks to be a consumer because what we do get right now is severely overpriced junk that couldn't be sold to the big enterprise bois. Literal scraps.
For another perspective, although I did buy an Apple Silicon MacBook, I do a lot of my computing on almost 10 year old Macs and mostly care in a theoretical sense about new CPUs and GPUs. Most gear that I have is plenty fast for anything I do.
I had the same feeling reading the title, I guess you are right about projecting. Just this morning I realized my old thinkpad is about to throw the towel, thinking about going to find a decent replacement in the current market depresses me.
At least in part, I don't have the time or energy to care anymore. In my 20s I loved reading long form articles on AnandTech about the latest chip or motherboard. Nowadays when the kids are in bed at 9:30 or later and I finally have a moment of downtime, I just want to watch a tv show with my wife and go to sleep.
I still think new hardware is neat but I don't have the mental bandwidth to follow it closely and in depth at this stage.
This. I love getting stuck into new-to-me technologies that are tried, tested, and still around. Is this a good idea from a career perspective? I'm not sure. While I knew some SQL before, I'm deep diving now and I'm sure that'll be useful in snagging future jobs in the data space. But learning Lisp? The principles and perspectives I pick up will no doubt be applicable elsewhere, but perhaps not the language. But then again, not everything is about career progression — I'm really doing it for fun and on that front it's certainly delivering!
One thing that I hear a lot in the tech field is how exciting it is to work in tech since "I'm always learning new things." This doesn't excite me very much since many of the new things I'm learning are not useful outside of a narrow slice of time within that specific tech job. They're not broadly applicable to anything, and are wholly specific to a software product as a service which will be fairly different, or may not even exist in a few years. (even if it does exist, my company will have moved on to some different product by then.) For example, learning regex could be useful because it might be used broadly in many different products. Learning how a specific product handles certain data fields is really not exciting at all. It's wasted space in my mind, except of course for the paycheck.
Nailed my problem with "learning new things". I especially feel this way about "cloud" - you aren't learning some new technology, you're learning some company's (cough... Amazon... cough...) proprietary offering which is designed to lock you in and wring every last penny out of you. Not that it isn't useful, obviously it is, but I just don't get the same joy out of learning about it that I do from playing with SBCs or other tech like I used to.
I suppose that is why something like Kubernetes is useful (I haven't touched it; I'm one of those weirdos who uses Swarm); it allows you to abstract away a lot of the underlying provider and create your own overlay environment which does bring back a sense of ownership for me at least.
I used to work 5 days a week, then I was very much in a “I just want my shit to work and do my job” mentality. I had no energy to learn and experiment outside of work. Now that I work 4 days a week, I have found my passion again. I’ve gone back to emacs, started a blog, learning rust, started self hosting and I am having tons of fun in doing it. I haven’t been this passionate since high school.
The post was about not wanting to spend time constantly upgrading.
Sometimes life is too short to upgrade all my apps to latest standard or framework, no matter how great the new things are.
I hope they could be more backward compatible.
Life is all about choices. Which tech to invest in is a hard question, for me the answer has always been 'as little as I can get away with' while at the same time studying the whole industry for opportunities and things that I believe will have long term staying power.
Corollary A: As I get older, it is seriously hard to stay interested in video games: more and more, it feels like playing with little toy cars. I have more and more a hard time accepting the "lore" which pretends to be "serious"... which is actually clearly made for teens/young adults, and often lack coherence even at following the "rules" of their universe or abuse in a cheap way the deus ex machina.
Basically, I need something beyond that, which gives me a strong emotional response and/or a feeling of social interaction. I found some very "art"-y games which give me such emotional response, and some online multiplayer games (for instance dota2... until they don't hide AI based bots... because sometimes...), or "strong community based" solo games (for instance celeste)
Corollary B: As I get older, I am aware that some nasty human beings are using technology to "take" over big critical parts of our every day life: that's why I am adamant on interop between Big Tech and Small Tech. Tech must stay in user control and not be used to control the user for "others". For instance, why most if not all administration services should be provided to noscript/basic (x)html browsers (as they were before Big Tech brain washed/corrupted administration tech executives with their grotesque and absurd web engines).
I feel the same way about games— especially AAA titles. I can’t be bothered. Some games that you might consider for giving you a unique feeling without any pretentious nonsense: Limbo, Inside, Journey, Planet of Lana.
Games just don't respect your time any more. Usually 80+ hours to experience an open world game with a handful of side quests.
While I don't share the same love of "emotional experience" games, at this point I'm thinking about only sticking to mission-based and "wide linear" games so that I leave plenty of time for other pursuits in life.
What I hate about new technology is that it's not really new.
When someone says X is the modern framework for doing this or that what he really means is that X is a cleaner re-implementation of W. But the only reason it's clean is because it doesn't support all the things W did.
If X is successful it will eventually add the features that will make it as messy as W was. At that point Y will come along which is the modern (trademark pending) way of doing it.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadAnd if anyone from Mexico sees this, God bless Mexico. I’m thankful for Catholic nations. The level of devotion and permeance is awe inspiring. I have a new admiration and understanding now of the Catholic world. It almost feels like home in a way.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
I am 45 and stopped caring much about new web frameworks many years ago. It's not that I don't find them interesting or even advantageous in some ways, I just don't feel compelled to bother learning in detail about most of them. Although I usually do look into them enough to get the gist.
You just can't pick up every single new thing. If you try then you won't ever get any real work done.
But some things you really have to take notice of. And this is subjective and usually not one right answer. For me, image and text generation was something I felt compelled to jump into.
A big part of this calculation is also social. If you are looking to pick up contracts or jobs, your choice of technology is important. And often picking up the latest trend will make that easier.
It really depends on the technology and what it offers you. I would say that getting familiar with the OpenAI API provides much more bang for your buck (depending on what you are trying to do) versus upgrading Next.js versions. That's much easier to get excited about.
SPAs were an answer to cross platform and device issues, given the web browser was the best cross platform piece of software used by the largest population. It made sense to try that vs making native apps on all the different platforms.
The fundamental problem in the web space spawning all of these tools has always been JavaScript’s weaknesses though.
1. https://luca-dellanna.com/lindy/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Whereas a C gig today probably means embedded, or subsystem far away from the frontend churn. If I'm lucky they have unit tests. The Lindy path you were talking about.
Many of us use it quietly, to do good work, and there is no need to crow to the world about what is happening under the hood.
Ex: Maintain some SQL queries, upgrade to a new database version without bricking everything, write some scripts that get fired off at a scheduled time, knowledge of the industry you're serving, update some configuration files for the company website which won't change for another decade, read some log files, create some visualization displays for operations staff, install software on certain machines, manage the company's VPN stuff, configure Linux, do the paperwork...etc
All this stuff is more generic IT and less rockstar developer. It reliably pays the bills and isn't very flashy.
There are plenty of people in IT that write code every day, some that rarely write code, and some that basically never write code, but just manage the business side of it all (there is a lot of beauracracy in large organizations).
Pretty sure you can get a job in frontend dev if you know React, which is 10 years old.
I agree about your sentiment about learning this that are important . I made a natural language network scanner and I got to speak about it at defcon. I never intended for people to find it interesting I just wanted to learn to apply LLMs . The source code is at https://github.com/zitterbewegung/saturday and you can interact with it at +1 (825) 251-9142
I'd much rather conserve my limited energy for things that are inherent to the platform and actually exciting, like WASM or WebGPU.
The value proposition has changed though and there isn't a compelling reason to start using jQuery now, but if you are somebody who just stuck with it this entire time it still works and you are still as productive as you ever were.
And as a bonus you didn't waste any time chasing failed fads along the way...
On the other hand the rise of AI is an interesting thing. And Mars rockets and ebikes are cool.
But "smart" phones and apps? Meh, as long as they work I couldn't care less. Never have.
When you're an adult, everything is set in stone and the world is out of touch.
When you're an elder, nothing is as it was anymore and what world is this?
The most annoying is the tech that is forced upon you.
I think there is a generation of technologists that are the prime era. Not too old to have lived the simple life. And not too young to be living the simple life of the iPad. At least in regards to technology.
The modern life is very challenging if you’re doing it right. There is a lot to research and be responsible for unless you just run around signing your life away on paperwork without properly educating yourself about mortgages, real estate, housing. That on top of learning a trade is pretty tough. For the average person at least. And it takes a lot of effort out of everyone. Most people just sluff off though and settle for less. Or blame the system for their condition, since no one is making $50 an hour out of high school anymore, like how it was for decades. One of those two.
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
So I'm fairly cautious about what I bother to learn. I'll grudgingly learn new stuff if my work requires it, but mostly I coast on my decision to learn python 15 years ago.
I think that you just realize eventually that you have to be more selective with your attention. And it's often not hard to use up plenty of time keeping up with whatever domain you are already in.
By the time that’s a problem, there’s a good chance OP will be managing people or in a different field.
Typing? Get off my lawn.
While I don't care for technology like "do X with an app" where I know X can also be done without an app, I do get excited for actual real new tech with substance. LLM's, self driving cars once they truly work, much higher video resolutions than the past, etc...
More or less. It's the "Worse is Better" philosophy. Instead of adding features to make user experience better make software instead that is good at one thing. It emphasizes minimalism and frugality. You may know the Suckless group from `dwm`.
In fact, if you add up all the breakthroughs we've accomplished, most of it is just helping us use resources more efficiently so that we use more of them, eating them all up like a virus.
We should have stopped most research and technological invention long ago, and instead focused on sustainability and trying to reach an equilibrium with our natural environment.
Technology went from empowerment to entrapment
Don't forget "toxic" too !
Now that we're long past the peak of low hanging fruit of productivity and value, we arrive at the inevitable results of late stage capitalism - extracting the most value possible out of the end user through manipulation and coercion.
It's bloat, it's enshittification, entrapment into rampant rent seeking and it's the low key subversion that has been happening for years.
FPGAjobs.com runs on a single Django app, with some Bootstrap-flavored templates on the frontend. Very little JS, ideally none at all.
It was a learning curve to implement Django at first (I’m not a SWE by training), but now that I know it, it’s fast and easy to add new features. You don’t get that kind of iterative speed when you’re constantly in the early stages of a technology learning curve. I’ll never give up Django. I’d rather sell the business to someone who knows how to scale it than switch tech stacks. That’s just not what I want to do.
It’s easier to get that dopamine hit of “ship thing, watch it get used” when you know your tools well enough to be able to ship and iterate quickly.
After a while you know the fundamentals. Data structures and algorithms, common architectures, known solutions to old problems.
But job adverts tend to go for superficial things. The js framework du jour, some language that anyone adjacent can learn in a month, some new face on the same data structures.
AAA Games coming onto desktops needing 4090 with DLSS just to be playable at 4k just feels wrong.
On needing a 4090, I think the problem is 4K. These games are getting pretty advanced, and 4K is a very large number of pixels. I like it for the additional horizontal real estate. But I don’t like it for gaming. I would stick to 1080 or 1440. 1440 on a 27 inch screen at the average desktop view in distance is a great all around solution. That said, my next monitor is probably going to be 4K. I will just be playing a lot of games in 1080P on it.
I would not upgrade yet from this 11900K because it's the best homogeneous core design that Intel released for desktops. It includes AVX512, and is the only consumer CPU from Intel to have it. Intel engineers have stated that they are dedicated to furthering AVX512, and that it's removal is temporary. All of the errata from Skylake was finally fixed in Rocket Lake, which went on for generations until Rocket Lake.
Some people were so deadset against 11th gen that they recommended 10th gen because there were 10-core CPUs. Yet the ringbus design it inherited from Skylake was very strung out by that point with unresolvable issues like the well-known L0 parity error. There's many other reasons but I doubt you're interested in rehashing Rocket Lake as it sounds like you feel you have enough information to make up your mind.
And I certainly wouldn't use AMD due to even more bugs than Skylake and poor latency. They're improving, but it's not my choice.
GPU / Disk / CPU + Memory so a build configuration rolls into another constantly maintained.
I went all in on AI back in 2017 trying to build a chatbot for ecommerce from scratch and it went nowhere. Maybe a bit sour grapes on my end.
There's also the thing that one may be depressed for one reason or another and then feels like doing nothing new anymore and just want to play with the known - which is a quite natural reaction, but shouldn't be confused with getting old.
I want things to work without me having to faff around or spend too long configuring them. This applies to both software and hardware.
The only tool I still use with non-trivial config is my text editor, but that's going to be pared down over time.
Switching from zsh to fish a few years ago left me with a nearly identical shell with a 20 line config instead of hundreds. I'm trying to use this approach wherever possible.
There's something intellectually alluring about new technology or new shiny in general that I think appeals to your general technologist, it's a trait the draws such people to various fields. I know when I was young I drank the Kool-aid every turn.
As I got a little older, and after I was burned several times adopting shiny things either wasting my time or never seeing them widely adopted to a point of reasonable usability, I came to the very realization that everything we create, including technology, exists to serve human needs. It's stupidly obvious, it shouldn't need to be stated but I think it does. Law exists for humans, medicine exists for humans (even medicine for animals, it exists to serve altruism or empathy in humans) and so on. Technology is absolutely no different.
There's a few ways technology can serve humans. It can appeal to the general intellectual interest but ultimately, few if any pay money for that. People in general don't care about it, it's neat for a few minutes then gone. So ultimately what functional need does technology really serve? What does it enable me to do that I otherwise couldn't? How does it make my life easier?
If it doesn't do these things, I frankly don't care about it anymore. I have plenty of places to tap into serving my intellectual interest, places where the things I learn aren't as vanishingly ephemeral in nature and entirely artificial, be it learning something about physics of the world, medicine, whatever. There's well over a lifetimes worth of other mature and well established things to learn about you won't waste your time in like NewWebFramework with NewSyntacticSprinklings.
To me, this is why I similarly only care about new well crafted tech. Your thing needs to either help me do something I otherwise couldn't or make my life easier. A huge amount of new tech does neither, it pedals novelty and the ambiguity of some type of miniscule improvemen in quality of life, all while trying to make a buck.
Maybe I was projecting my own feelings onto the topic, which are mostly about hardware. As I’ve gotten older, I find it much harder to care about new PC components, cutting edge graphics for video games, and processor cores. I just value stability and consistency above all else
When you got a new graphics card and game generation in 2005 the leaps were pretty wild, nowadays you can probably skip a generation or two of top hardware and you can still run things fine. After they put out the Dead Space remake I was interested to see how the old game from 2008 played, and even that still plays and looks modern. That's 15 years now, go back 15 years from 2008 and it's very different.
Can't blame AMD and nvidia for trying to make a profit, though it sucks to be a consumer because what we do get right now is severely overpriced junk that couldn't be sold to the big enterprise bois. Literal scraps.
I still think new hardware is neat but I don't have the mental bandwidth to follow it closely and in depth at this stage.
I suppose that is why something like Kubernetes is useful (I haven't touched it; I'm one of those weirdos who uses Swarm); it allows you to abstract away a lot of the underlying provider and create your own overlay environment which does bring back a sense of ownership for me at least.
Sometimes life is too short to upgrade all my apps to latest standard or framework, no matter how great the new things are. I hope they could be more backward compatible.
Basically, I need something beyond that, which gives me a strong emotional response and/or a feeling of social interaction. I found some very "art"-y games which give me such emotional response, and some online multiplayer games (for instance dota2... until they don't hide AI based bots... because sometimes...), or "strong community based" solo games (for instance celeste)
Corollary B: As I get older, I am aware that some nasty human beings are using technology to "take" over big critical parts of our every day life: that's why I am adamant on interop between Big Tech and Small Tech. Tech must stay in user control and not be used to control the user for "others". For instance, why most if not all administration services should be provided to noscript/basic (x)html browsers (as they were before Big Tech brain washed/corrupted administration tech executives with their grotesque and absurd web engines).
Heard about Inside, and lurking on Planet of Lana (but I need to validate it runs well in a lean wine+vkd3d build before #noproton).
(I am waiting for some of them since I played their demo, don't recall all the names)
While I don't share the same love of "emotional experience" games, at this point I'm thinking about only sticking to mission-based and "wide linear" games so that I leave plenty of time for other pursuits in life.
When someone says X is the modern framework for doing this or that what he really means is that X is a cleaner re-implementation of W. But the only reason it's clean is because it doesn't support all the things W did.
If X is successful it will eventually add the features that will make it as messy as W was. At that point Y will come along which is the modern (trademark pending) way of doing it.