And a whole lot of content that I frankly would have preferred not to have seen.

When you’re 12 and your parents have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll end up in very dark corners.

And who does that?

I think you don’t really get my point. I’m not arguing that there are no ways to archive data. I’m arguing that there are no technologies available for average Joe.

It is hardly a good strategy to basically set up half a datacenter at home.

Thin concrete slabs are extremely brittle.

Is it? It’s rather expensive and would you really know, if the data is gone or corrupted?

You’d have to download every single file in certain intervals and check it. That’s not really low complexity.

But what actually is “archival”?

Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?

Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.

But they are not getting worse. People just don’t understand economics. They just see a number or headline that happens to align with their beliefs and then barf their ignorance into comments.

And that’s factually not true, because - again - no understanding of economics.

What counts are the real wages. If inflation is 2% and wages rise by 2%, nothing changed.

Real wages dropped due to the high inflation over the last years, but that also turned into higher raises. And over the longer run, 10-20 years, it’s not that bad.

So you’re saying, things getting less bad is not good news?

Cancer in remission is actually bad news, because it’s just shrinking, and not gone yet?

Inflation is supposed to be at about 2%. That’s the goal of the ecb. And if you look at a longer scale, that was met, because the decade preceding covid had hardly any inflation.

You just want to be pessimistic about everything.

You don’t understand inflation, do you?

What’s really baffling to me is how completely irrelevant most ads are to me.

And I’m not saying “ads don’t work for me”, I get ads for products that I will never buy. I’m a man and YouTube recommends me tampons, lipstick and perfume. I also won’t buy a car anytime soon, yet I get tons of ads for cars.

Even in the mindset of an ad person, that can’t make sense. Sure, there is the off chance that I’ll buy lipstick for my girlfriend, but how likely is that and how much revenue will materialize from bombarding thousands of men with ads? That cannot be economically viable.

The actually infuriating part is, that we’re still paying for it. And the vendors as well. Only Google profits. If a company spends more on ads than necessary, their products will get more expensive, and those who buy their products will have to pay for it. So essentially I’m paying money for being advertised to, so Google can rake in billions.

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

And there are some truly magic tools.

XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

Why is every single piece of open source code some form of a bad pun?

Does the GPL require that somewhere?

And DBAs. I’m currently working on a project where I said from the very start, I can set up this DB in k8s and I can get it to work decently, but I have neither the knowledge nor the time to get it right. Please give me someone who knows how this works.

No, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, we don’t need that, this kuverneles thing I keep hearing about handles that!!!

Six months of hard contact with the enemy on production later:

Well, we’re currently looking for someone who actually knows how DBs work, because we have one of those issues that would cost a proper DBA 5min and me 5 months.

To be fair, a lot of roles simply disappeared over the years.

Developers today are much more productive than 30 years ago, mostly because someone automated the boring parts away.

A modern developer can spin up a simple crud app including infrastructure in a day or so. That’s much much more productive than 1995. We just cram a lot more of the world into software, so we need 20x the amount of developers we needed back then.

It’s really weird, though, that nobody really created a language/tool to bridge these two world. It’s always just generating one representation from the other, mostly in a bad way.

I’d argue, that for many problems, a graphical view of the system can help reasoning. But there simply is nothing in that regard.

and I could make a death ray out of my home wifi box and a wok.

I mean, you could. Do you happen to have a small nuclear reactor and about 400l of liquid helium?

It’s absolutely not inherently wrong or implausible to assume that the constant and rather direct exposure over decades causes cancer.

Old timey radio operators definitely died earlier. They had much higher cancer rates. Granted, completely different levels of radiation, but radiation damage is stochastic. If there is an effect at all, it will cause thousands of new cases even low doses simply because we have like 7 billion phone users.

Doing proper studies on that is hard, but absolutely necessary.

Well, obviously, you just have to put a sticker with a geometric pattern on it to turn the bad radiation into good radiation!

(I wish that was a joke, but you can actually buy those)

One of our customers does that. It happened multiple times already that one dev fixed an issue in production, and the next regular deployment overwrote everything.

But fortunately, it’s just critical infrastructure and nothing important.