I don't think politicians across the board are corrupt. I think they're just surrounded by syncophants and special interest. Also the old absolute power corrupts, absolutely sort of thing.
I can't be convinced people go into politics twiddling their mustaches like a cartoon villain. I think that they go into it either to genuinely help, or because they like the attention. Then the system surrounds then with people who either take small bites of their ethics, or agree with anything for the chance to be powerful as well.
I’m tired of the U.S. nanny state with its pilgrim-religious historical backdrop of prudishness, infecting everyone outside its own borders.
Their ideas are deeply unhealthy for children and worst of all, lazily shift the responsibility of parenting from the parents to the state.
Many European countries have long had a culture of slowly increasingly responsibilities and freedoms to their children gradually, letting them slowly and safely test their boundaries. At least the proposed EU solution (for identity) tries to prevent overreach. The wholesale EU spying to “save the children”, which seems to be funded by the U.S. is a different topic and we need to continue to fight it tooth and nail.
The insidiousness lies with major tech companies and their pursuit of eyeballs on screens. The Internet was supposed to be something we used to learn, gain knowledge and connect. They took the internet over, bastardized it and made deeply addictive apps and games to keep you watching ads regardless of age.
These age checks are just for data collection and spying to sell the data to the highest bidder, which is likely governments in order to control and herd their populations.
The reason for this is easy to understand in the context of AI. In the future the only valuable asset will be a data and the access to that data.
In the future, any app will be built, replicated, deployed and maintained by AI. Apps, websites, especially B2B apps - their days are numbered.
If my business needs a billing system tailored to my business in the future, I’ll describe it and have an AI built and maintain it. That is not that far away in relative terms.
Our goal collectively (as technology advocates) is to make sure that this consolidation of personal data doesn’t happen. If personal AI is to be built, then the user should have full ownership and away from the spying eyes of groups like Palantir and the NSA. They cannot be trusted. The Jews learnt that catastrophically in Germany in the 1940’s putting their trust in a government that became authoritarian and evil.
What is digital will never die and what is digitally given cannot be taken back.
You should look into what's actually happening in other countries before blaming it on "the U.S. nanny state". The rest of the Anglosphere makes the United States look like a Libertarian utopia. I live in the United Kingdom, and brother - this is who they are. I assume Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are similar. There are real problems re: "think of the children" in the United States, but if you think "the U.S. nanny state" is bad then you have no fucking clue how bad things could be.
You literally blamed these moves on US religious prudishness, and then said that they were only about surveillance. Which is it? Just kidding. We all know it's nothing more than surveillance and control, and you just have an anti-religious axe to grind.
If the US actually gave a flying FUCK about "protecting the children," the current administration would be making good on Trump's promise to release the Epstein files -- as now ordered by a federal law passed by a overwhelming majority of both houses of Congress -- and prosecuting everyone involved.
We see what's really going on. We can't do anything about it, apparently, but we see.
Painfully I’ve learnt that you want to work in an industry that is largely recession proof.
Focus on industries that sell things that people need and will try to keep buying right down to their last buck.
Food, utilities, insurance. People don’t like sitting in the dark. People need water. People need to eat. People really don’t like living without insurance cover or to let cover lapse.
They don’t need Netflix, Disney+ or Prime. They don’t need Spotify. They don’t need training or e-learning. They don’t need luxury goods. They don’t need new motor vehicles. They don’t need holidays. They don’t need new iPhones or new computers.
Try and move now to an industry that has some security.
Investment wise diversification is key. Just pray that it doesn’t get so bad that banks start to fail.
2008/2009 I was working in healthcare and just got to sit back and watch the drama. People get sick and need their medicine no matter how bad the economy is collapsing.
Broadly agree, but I'd bet on Spotify being safe (unless overtaken by a competitor.) The workers in all the robust industries you mentioned are all listening to Spotify to get through their workdays. This is one of the last things they'll give up, normies need music like they need alcohol (and/or weed.)
At a guess CosmosDb NoSql was a good choice for dumping user contexts sharded rather than use Postgres schema or JSONB. Citus is the obvious choice for this with Postgres but Azure had poor support until recently 2024 they have preview Azure Database for Postgres with Elastic Clusters, which is basically Azure Database for Postgres Flexible Server with Citus extension installed. In the end they aren’t paying Microsoft what usual customer are, so even though CosmosDb NoSql is expensive (RU based) and the SDK is horrible, it probably served as a good stopgap until elastic clusters is fully out of preview. That’s my guess anyway.
Microsoft originally bought CitusData and rebadged it as Azure CosmosDb for Postgres Cluster. Microsoft have been recommending partners to now avoid that product. It does not and will not support Entra federated workload identities (passwordless).
The replacement will be Azure Database for Postgres with Elastic Clusters. I think it is still in preview.
Again it’s Citus based, but without the CosmosDb badge and it will support federated workload identities.
Agreed but not just NuGet. David also was a key driver for SignalR and now Aspire (which is genuinely the most awesome tool I’ve seen for a while). He’s also extremely humble and doesn’t need to try to impress anyone.
I think it’s clear that he’s just doing this tool for fun and chose to share it. People shouldn’t mix up their anti-Microsoft autoeroticism and a person that happens to work for them.
I joined Stackoverflow early on since it had a prevalence towards .NET and I’ve been working with Microsoft web technologies since the mid 90’s.
My SO account is coming up to 17 years old and I have nearly 15,000 points, 15 gold badges, including 11 famous questions and similar famous answer badges, also 100 silver and 150 bronze. I spent far much time on that site in the early days, but through it, I also thoroughly enjoyed helping others. I also started to publish articles on CodeProject and it kicked off my long tech blogging “career”, and I still enjoy writing and sharing knowledge with others.
I have visited the site maybe once a year since 2017. It got to the point that trying to post questions was intolerable, since they always got closed. At this point I have given up on it as a resource, even though it helped me tremendously to both learn (to answer questions) and solve challenging problems, and get help for edge cases, especially on niche topics. For me it is a part of my legacy as a developer for over 30 years.
I find it deeply saddening to see what it has become. However I think Joel and his team can be proud of what they built and what they gave to the developer community for so many years.
As a side note it used to state that was in the top 2% of users on SO, but this metric seems to have been removed. Maybe it’s just because I’m on mobile that I can’t see it any more.
LLM’s can easily solve those easy problems that have high commonality across many codebases, but I am dubious that they will be able to solve the niche challenging problems that have not been solved before nor written about. I do wonder how those problems get solved in the future.
Apparently it was removed to reduce the load on the database see [0], [1].
The top voted response points out that SO are [2]:
> destroying a valuable feature for users.
Kinda wild they allowed it. As that answer also suggests, perhaps rather than remove it entirely, they could just compute those stats at a lesser frequency to reduce load.
i've been using SO for 17 years as well but ultimately gave up out of frustration, and a lot of comments here are correctly pointing at the toxicity but the real-time chats were on a next level, it was absolutely maddening how toxic and aggressive these moderators were.
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