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Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

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Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#11

Post by lmm »

Lammy wrote: post #9

> think of how many Americans buy giant cars who don't need giant cars. I hesitate to comment since I’m nitpicking a parenthetical, but this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? We’re the industry making giant…

> this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life?

A giant car is probably the most harmful-to-others luxury indulgence you could pick (and a significant factor in why people can't afford housing). I'm all for having a hobby and spending money on your hobby, but maybe pick one that doesn't kill other people's kids so much. And I'm baffled that you're calling this classism and then talking about middle class.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#12

Post by chrismarlow9 »

thoughtFrame wrote: post #5

I've only learned of the Good Ol' Days of the 90s from second hand sources, and I was in middle school throughout the aughts, so for me these periods are just a mirage of a better time. In high school I pursued reverse engineering and other stuff, so I could blissfully ignore the newer direction the industry was taking all the way until 2019. But now I'm close to graduating university. Is there any kind of job where…

For php you're probably best off learning a framework or two (zend, symfony, cake, laravel) which is drastically different than writing regular old php. WordPress devs are always in demand for contract type of work, but it's a grind for minimum pay unless you dominate a niche with a plugin.

Unfortunately sites like square and social media have taken over the small time web dev companies where you used to be able to get your hands dirty at all levels.

I'd probably look around at digital marketing companies. Your tech skills won't be "praised", because they favor creative over technical abilities. But they'll probably throw a wide range of technical problems at you and expect you to be "fullstack".

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#13

Post by DanielVZ »

Lammy wrote: post #9

> think of how many Americans buy giant cars who don't need giant cars. I hesitate to comment since I’m nitpicking a parenthetical, but this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? We’re the industry making giant…

As an owner of a normal sized car, oversized cars are unnecessarily aggressive towards other people. Both because of the drivers attitude and the design.

Some examples: Lights always blind me, they block almost all vision, and have very poor vision themselves.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#14

Post by willcipriano »

lmm wrote: post #11
Lammy wrote: post #9

> think of how many Americans buy giant cars who don't need giant cars. I hesitate to comment since I’m nitpicking a parenthetical, but this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? We’re the industry making giant…

> this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? A giant car is probably the most harmful-to-others luxury indulgence you could pick (and a significant factor in why people can't afford housing). I'm all for having…

> A giant car is probably the most harmful-to-others luxury indulgence you could pick

International travel. People need to get to work, nobody needs to backpack through Europe to "find themselves" (besides perhaps Europeans).

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#16

Post by ryukafalz »

Lammy wrote: post #9

> think of how many Americans buy giant cars who don't need giant cars. I hesitate to comment since I’m nitpicking a parenthetical, but this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? We’re the industry making giant…

Those giant cars are pretty expensive themselves though, both to buy and to fuel. If you have a huge truck or SUV but can't afford housing... well, you probably could afford more housing without the huge car. This isn't "avocado toast" style criticism, cars are a significant expense - typically your second largest expense after housing.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#17

Post by lmm »

willcipriano wrote: post #14
lmm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? A giant car is probably the most harmful-to-others luxury indulgence you could pick (and a significant factor in why people can't afford housing). I'm all for having…

> A giant car is probably the most harmful-to-others luxury indulgence you could pick International travel. People need to get to work, nobody needs to backpack through Europe to "find themselves" (besides perhaps Europeans).

> International travel.

Probably less harmful; the per-year CO2 emissions are similar (depending how long your commute is and how much travel you do), and travel has fewer of the other negative externalities (taking up road space and city space, killing people directly).

> People need to get to work, nobody needs to backpack through Europe

Perhaps, but I don't see how putting out an extra n tonnes of CO2 by driving an unnecessary giant car to work is any better than putting out an extra n tonnes of CO2 on things that are more directly self-indulgent. (If anything I'm more sympathetic to wasteful consumption if the consumer is at least enjoying themselves)

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#18

Post by agentultra »

stiglitz wrote: post #10

"12 years ago everyone was wondering how we'd program on multicore CPUs" is either laughable or enlightening to read as an OS developer.

Even in user space. Electron became de jeur for web developers to build desktop apps. Single threaded memory hogs.

Thankfully many DAWs, video editing, CAD, servers and other useful software saw the value in multi-core workloads.

It’s a thing… just not for web folks most of the time.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#19

Post by rstuart4133 »

stiglitz wrote: post #10

"12 years ago everyone was wondering how we'd program on multicore CPUs" is either laughable or enlightening to read as an OS developer.

12 years ago it might have been laughable. But the Core2 Duo was released in 2006, some 7 years before, so the problem was well in hand by then.

But go back 20 years, and you predate Linux RCU. The OS Developers weren't laughing at the problem then.

Arguably the Linux Real Time patches are solving a similar problem, which could be said to be extracting maximum parallelism out of the code. For Real Time this isn't so they can run in parallel, but rather so a higher priority task can interrupt a lower priority one with impunity. Real Time Linux still isn't done yet, although it's getting close.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#20

Post by ryandrake »

thoughtFrame wrote: post #5

I've only learned of the Good Ol' Days of the 90s from second hand sources, and I was in middle school throughout the aughts, so for me these periods are just a mirage of a better time. In high school I pursued reverse engineering and other stuff, so I could blissfully ignore the newer direction the industry was taking all the way until 2019. But now I'm close to graduating university. Is there any kind of job where…

My experience of programming as a Junior Software Engineer in the '90s was replacing inner loops with inline assembly, avoiding cache misses (keep your code in the L1 cache) and making sure your memory accesses stayed on one page. Nobody seems to care even in the slightest about this stuff anymore, and the abysmal performance of modern software shows it.

During the last 30 years, everyone's focus has drifted up the stack, to higher and higher levels of abstraction and higher and higher level languages, to the point where we are totally divorced from the electrons and realities of the underlying hardware.

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