balsoft

Here is translation from HR speak to English:

"fast-paced" - requirements change multiple times during each sprint

"exciting" - your manager will be an idiot

Honestly it's fine. LSPs are nice but you don't need them per se. A combination of vim, tmux, entr, a fast incremental compiler, grep, and proper documentation can get you a long way there.

A lot of critically important code that's running the servers we're using to communicate was written this way. And, if capitalist decline continues long enough, we will all eventually be begging for vim while writing code with ed.

Personally I use helix with an LSP, because it helps speed up development quite a bit. I even have a local LLM for writing repetitive boilerplate bullshit. But I also understand that those are ultimately just tools that speed the process up, they do not fundamentally change what I'm doing.

It's nicer to develop anything on a beefy machine, I was rocking a 7950X until recently. The compile times are a huge boon, and for some modern bloated bullshit (looking at you, Android) you definitely need a beefy machine to build it in a realistic timeframe.

However, we can totally solve a lot of real-world problems with old cheap crappy hardware, we just never wanted to because it was "cheaper" for some poor soul in China to build a new PC every year than for a developer to spend an extra week thinking about efficiency. That appears to be changing now, especially if your code will be running on consumer hardware.

My dad used to "write" software for basic aerodynamic modelling on punchcards, on a mainframe that has about us much computing power as some modern microcontrollers. You wouldn't even consider it a potato by today's standards. I'm sure if we use our wit and combine it with arcane knowledge of efficient algorithms, we can optimize our stacks to compile code on a friggin 3.5GHz 10-core CPU (which are 10 year old now).

You can write code just fine on 20 or even 30 year old hardware. Basically if it runs Linux, chances are it can also run vim and compile code. If you spring for 10-15 year old hardware, you can even get an LSP + coc or helix, for error highlighting and goto definition and code actions. And you definitely don't need a beefy GPU for it (unless you're doing something GPU-specific of course).

Editing 720p videos (which, if you encode with a high enough bitrate, still looks alright) can be done on 10-15 year old hardware.

Research is where it gets complicated. It does indeed often require a lot of computing power to do modern computational research. But for some simpler stuff - especially outside STEM - you can sometimes get away with a LibreOffice spreadsheet on an old Dell or something.

From the looks of it we will have to get used to doing more with less when it comes to computers. And TBH I'm all for it. I just hope that either my job won't require compiling a lot more stuff, or they provide me with a modern machine at their expense.

It's funny you should say that, if you look at the living standards & human development before and after, it's pretty clear that the revolution was overall a really good thing.

an intercity bus is usually greener than a high-speed train, even discounting energy source - mainly because speed carries a major efficiency penalty

Are you sure? Where I live all high-speed trains are running on 100% renewable electricity, while intercity buses run on diesel. Also multiple carriages at the same time, traveling on rails, should be significantly more efficient than a single bus traveling on asphalt. I agree that there will be an increase in energy expenditure depending on speed, but it shouldn't be as significant as the combination of the other two.

air travel is an unmitigated disaster on the level of personal carbon footprints - there’s basically no way to make it sustainable

We would have to make it sustainable eventually, since it's the only practical way for passengers to travel between americas/australia/afroeurasia. I guess something hydrogen-based is the most likely candidate for reducing the carbon impact.

European feudalism absolutely fucked up the environment tho. Europe used to be covered in beautiful lush forests, now it's mostly a patchwork of fields.

#3 has way more ratings and way higher ones too:

I guess it could be lower because it's a series or something, but #10 is a movie, has a higher rating, and has more ratings too:

My only other idea of what "popularity" could mean is the page view count, but then it should probably be called something other than "top 10 on IMDb" IMHO.

UK is clearly "shoes on" on the map though, it's marked is green.

Well, yeah, the dev environment was compromised but the author restored everything and checked that it all works.

Personally I use Pipepipe and Outertube on my android phone, and just watch through a browser with adblock on my Linux phone. Although I don't watch youtube too often, especially on my phone (maybe twice a month or so), I didn't notice any issues with either of those methods, and never got any ads either.

BTW you can/should install an alternative YT frontend on smart TVs, if you want to watch YT and are forced to use a smart TV. Even something semi-suitable like Pipepipe will do, but there are also frontends more suited for TV use, e.g. SmartTube

There are jurisdictions where a price tag in the store is almost always assumed to be an offer (a.k.a "public offer") and the company is legally required to honor it. In some circumstances the employees who screwed up and put the incorrect price tag will bear most the financial responsibility which sucks. That's why you shouldn't do it if you get the chance - it's not a legal loophole to stick it to a corpo, you're just ruining the life of some poor overworked retail employee who misplaced the price tag.

And yeah, the good faith part is also really important. If the person has asked a couple of questions to a chatbot, got recommended some products, asked if there's a discount available and then got an 80% discount out of the blue, got excited and made the deposit, it would probably be enforceable. If the customer knowingly "tricked" an LLM into giving out a bogus discount code, it would be very dubious at best.