The advantage of self-hosted WoW is that you can cheat to your heart’s content.

So no more grinding if you don’t want to.

“No? Oh well, I didn’t want her anyway, she’ll just cause trouble along the way. But that way I can trick the boy into thinking I did everything I could.”

There are some companies as bad as Apple (John Deere comes to mind), but it’s certainly not the norm.

User-replacable standard m.2 SSDs are bog standard and non-standard formats are really rare. Apart from Apple I can not think of many companies that do that. IIRC Red Magic cameras, and Synology NAS but that’s the only ones I can think of.

Some of them were

GrapheneOS without any invasive apps is really bare-bones and limited, that’s what I wanted to say using hyperbole, but I guess figures of speech are too advanced for some people.

Why would anyone think about an empire every day?

Yeah. If you never install software that is.

A C64 doesn’t run invasive software either.

Did you not read what I wrote?

Inflation went up due to the knock-on effects of the sanctions. Specifically prices for oil and gas skyrocketed.

And since everything runs on oil and gas, all prices skyrocketed.

Covid stimulus packages had nothing to do with that, especially in 2023, 2024 and 2025, when there were no COVID stimulus packages, yet the inflation was much higher than at any time during COVID.

Surely it is not too much to ask that people remember what year stuff happened in, especially if we are talking about things that happened just 2 years ago.

You’re not wrong, and I feel like it was a developing problem even before AI - everybody wanted someone with experience, even if the technology was brand new.

True. It was a long-standing problem that entry-level jobs were mostly found in dodgy startups.

Tbh, I think the biggest issue right now isn’t even AI, but the economy. In the 2010s we had pretty much no intrest rate at all while having a pretty decent economy, at least for IT. The 2008 financial crisis hardly mattered for IT, and Covid was a massive boost for IT. There was nothing else to really spend money on.

IT always has more projects than manpower, so with enough money to spend, they just hired everyone.

But the sanctions against Russia in response to their invasion of Ukraine really hit the economy and rising intrest rates to combat inflation meant that suddenly nobody wanted to invest anymore.

With no investments, startups dried up and large corporations also want to downsize. It’s no coincidence that return-to-work mandates only started after the invasion and not in the two years prior of that where lockdowns were already revoked. Work from home worked totally fine for two years after covid lockdowns, and companies even praised how well it worked.

Same with AI. While it can improve productivity in some edge cases, I think it’s mostly a scapegoat to make mass-fireings sound like a great thing to investors.

That said, even if you and I will be fine, it’s still bad for the industry. And even if we weren’t the ones pulling up the ladder behind us, I’d still like to find a way to start throwing ropes back down for the newbies…

You are totally right with that, and any chance I get I will continue to push for hiring juniors.

But I am also over corporate tears. For decades they have been crying over a lack of skilled workers in the IT and pushing for more and more people to join IT, so that they can dump wages, and as soon as the economy is bad, they instantly u-turn and dump employees.

If corporations want to be short-sighted and make people suffer for it, they won’t get compassion from me when it fails.

Edit: Remember, we are not the ones pulling the ladder up.

None that you can make with ChatGPT in an afternoon, no.

• Install adb on your PC
• Enable developer options on your phone
• Enable USB Debugging inside the developer options
• Connect the phone to the PC using USB
• Open a console window of your choice
• Execute adb devices and allow USB debugging for this PC on your phone
• Execute adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.apps.gemini
• Done

You can do that with any app you like, they can all be disabled that way. Beware though: if you disable critical system components (like e.g. your last launcher, keyboard or systemui) you might not have a great time using your phone afterwards.

That’s happening right now. I have a few friends who are looking for entry-level jobs and they find none.

It really sucks.

That said, the future lack of developers is a corporate problem, not a problem for developers. For us it just means that we’ll earn a lot more in a few years.

Greenfielding webapps is the easiest, most basic kind of project around. that’s something you task a junior with and expect that they do it with no errors. And after that you instantly drop support, because webapps are shovelware.

I use a toilet for that.

I read it like that first and thought it was one of these illegal apps to track your partner without them knowing.

I made a physiotherapy game console for kids that logs physiotherapy executions to a .csv on a fat32 formatted sdcard ;)

The part that is growing is how many tools rely on apps and other connected features.

I have a blood pressure monitor, and it just outputs the result to a built-in screen. I can then log the values however I want, and it’s probably easier and quicker to manually enter the three numbers each consisting of 2-3 digits into an app than to wait for the bluetooth connection to be established.

This battery monitor will never be remotely shutdown, because there is no remote function. And if the blood pressure tracking app shuts down, I can just use any other.

I suspect people (not billionaires) are realising that they can get by with less. And that the planet needs that too. And that working 40+ hours a week isn’t giving people what they really want either.

Tbh, I don’t think that’s the case. If you look at any of the relevant metrics (CO², energy consumption, plastic waste, …) they only know one direction globally and that’s up.

I think the actual issues are

• Russian invasion of Ukraine and associated sanctions on one of the main energy providers of Europe
• Trump’s “trade wars” which make global supply lines unreliable and costs incalculable (global supply chains love nothing more than uncertainty)
• Uncertainty in regards to China/Taiwan
• Boomers retiring in western countries, which for the first time since pretty much ever means that the work force is shrinking instead of growing. Economical growth was mostly driven by population growth for the last half century with per-capita productivity staying very close to inflation.
• Disrupting changes in key industries like cars and energy. The west has been sleeping on may of these developments (e.g. electric cars, batteries, solar) and now China is curbstomping the rest of the world in regards to market share.
• High key interest rates (which are applied to reduce high inflation due to some of the reason above) reduce demand on financial investments into companies. The low interest rates of the 2010s and also before lead to more investments into companies. With interest going back up, investments dry up.

All these changes mean that companies, countries and people in the west have much less free cash available.

There’s also the value of money has never been lower either.

That’s been the case since every. Inflation has always been a thing and with that the value of money is monotonically decreasing. But that doesn’t really matter for the whole argument, since the absolute value of money doesn’t matter, only the relative value.

To put it differently: If you earn €100 and the thing you want to buy costs €10, that is equivalent to if you earn €1000 and the thing you want to buy costing €100. The value of money dropping is only relevant for savings, and if people are saving too much then the economy slows down and jobs are cut, thus some inflation is positive or even required.

What is an actual issue is that wages are not increasing at the same rate as the cost of things, but that’s not a “value of the money” issue.

You can totally host something on carrier-grade NAT using techniques like NAT hole punching.

Couldn’t this prove very troublesome in combination with carrier grade nat?