flubba86

I've been in the tech industry for 20 years. I undertook an IT degree in 2004 (for microprocessor architecture) and another in 2014 (for software engineering).

Both times I observed three distinct styles of student. The first were those who heard they could make big money in IT. They didn't have any interest in the field, knew little to nothing about computers, and massively underestimated the difficulty of the course work. Very few of these made it past first year.

The second group were the "enthusiasts", the kind of people who ran their group's local LAN party every month and own an ethernet hub. The kind who reformat their PC every 6 weeks to keep it running fast. They built their own PC when they were 16. These kind think first year is a breeze, and don't even read the text book, but are quickly out of their depth in second year.

Finally are the autists. These are the ones who you can just tell they have a deep special interest in the field. You ask them a question about metaprogramming in Python, or database denormalization and they talk your ear off for an hour. These people read the whole textbook in the first week of class. They correct the professor when he gets something wrong (but politely, by email, after class).

My point is, in my experience, there are always some percentage of neurotypicals and those who are motivated by the money in every year, and has been for more than 20 years. I don't think it's getting more prevalent. Maybe now due to higher levels of diagnosis and increasing social awareness, it's easier to spot the autists, and perhaps due to the AI boom, the money chasers are easier to spot too.

2015: The cloud is just someone else's computer.

2025: That bird is the cloud. He's getting away, hey he's flying! Get back here you little runt! Give me back my ISOs!

Do you have any favourite PWAs you use for work or at home?

I generally prefer native local applications wherever possible, and for a long time I was against the movement to web based tools. That is until one thing changed. I moved to a different department at work. In this different department, I am issued with a Windows 11 laptop that is extremely locked down. It cannot run any executables aside from those whitelisted. I cannot run anything as administrator. If I need anything new whitelisted, I need to write a full page justification, get an endorsement from my manager, and then it can take over a year to get approved (but most likely will be immediately denied).

Obviously one thing it can run is MS Edge. All of the company tools and systems are webapps on the intranet, accessed via Edge. Now I'm grateful there are so many high quality browser based webapps around.

I know your Star Wars comparison was to reinforce your point, but that does sound like a plausible plot for a legit Star Wars movie that I'd watch.

I like FriendlyJordies, appreciate his humour and admire the work he is doing to expose corruption in Australian government. But man, I cannot stand his voice, and his affectation and his mannerisms. I can't watch his videos anymore, it's like nails on a chalkboard to me.

Do you mean hdf5? I extensively used COGs (cloud optimised geotiffs) and NetCDF4 (based on hdf5) at work over the last 10 years. Both have their pros and cons.

The main limitation with geotiff is its pretty much only usable for layered 2D raster data.

NetCDF4 (hdf5) can set up frames of any dimensionality, you can have datetime axes, time series data, 100d ensemble data, etc.

What's the compatibility like? If someone visits your site using IE 11 does it work? How about Firefox 4.0, or Safari 6.1?

The place I used to work had those compatibility requirements. But they were also still mandating the use of IE 11 for all their corporate software. If you're designing and developing for IE 11, you often get Firefox 4.0 and Safari 6.1 compatibility for free.

Still, it's nothing like when I was in uni we needed to design websites with IE 6 compatibility, that will make you question your career choice.

:cafe:babe: is another common one. Or :acdc:feed: .

Yeah, these days I just call them 3.5mm audio plug, or quarter inch audio plug.

Ah, you mean a Deutschkompoundenwordkopf.

I've used many calipers with a vernier scale, but for some reason I've never seen the use of slots like this to simplify and highlight the reading. It's actually a very obvious thing now I've seen it. Are there any commercial calipers that have it?