The plummet began around '08 or '09, to my recollection. It was as if, over a period of a few months, they just completely gave up trying to fight webspam shit. Simply surrendered.
I've done tough physical labor, and repetitive physical labor. They may wear out the body (or may invigorate it, depending on the load), but the mind is fresh even after 8+ hours, in my experience. And it feels good.
After six hours of typey-typey in front of a screen I feel used up. Worthless. Dead. And that's a very good day—four is more typical for "how long can I do computer work before I just want to curl up and do nothing until I fall asleep?". I mean four hours of actually working, mind you, not screwing around, but still.
I know for a fact I don't have a general work ethic problem that prevents me from going past 4-6 hours of computer work in a day—I have a "this particular shit—computer shit—sucks the life out of me like nothing else" problem. Always been that way, even when I was young. Work? I'll do it 'till I drop and feel good about it. Computer work? Uuuuugh, if I have to, I guess, but I'll hate it the whole time and feel like shit when I'm done, which, BTW, won't take long.
But, anything I could do that wouldn't involve sitting in front of a computer much of the day would mean a 60+% pay cut, so... here I am.
This is sometimes true. On a project long-term, will you keep velocity up by writing quality code? Yes. In certain, narrow areas (very "mathy" code, perhaps, that doesn't interact much with he world) might you go faster by writing quality code from the beginning? Maybe.
However, can one also go much faster by: not writing tests one ought to have written; ignoring security issues; ignoring input edge-cases; ignoring output edge-cases; treating a variety of variables as constant, or as having bounds that they actually do not; not writing enough documentation; et c.? Oh my god, yes. Of course.
Anyone who's ever seen a "we're really happy with the output of our outsourced team on this Rails 'app', they've gotten this MVP ready so fast!" codebase knows that's definitely also a way to be fast, and that a team writing actual quality code and not putting in a ton more hours couldn't have matched that team's "productivity", because they'd have been doing way more work.
It's already at the point where you have to spend lots of time to manually make them rare (pare them down to no more than a hundred or two per year, max) or rely on ML to generate highlights for you, for things like photos of kids.
One thing I noticed when looking through my parents' (pre-digital) home videos and photos from my childhood is that 90% of the subjects are me, and 10% anyone else, while what I want to see is the inverse of that. I want to see everyone else, mostly.
I try to keep that in mind when snapping photos or taking videos of my kids, and pan over to the oldsters in the room from time to time, even if all I want is to record the kids.
> What I really want are pictures of the halls in high school, street racing, parties with giant bonfires and beer.
Can confirm that a couple really, really long shots with the camera rolling for no particular purpose and capturing normal stuff happening (mostly just the audio) were among the best parts of the home videos, IMO.
I bet a bunch of them did some naïve calculation that said "because digital performs better, we can reduce broadcast power by X, for a savings of $Y, without loss of range", but real-world conditions meant this actually did reduce their broadcast range a little (though mostly in low-population areas they barely cared about anyway).
This may have coincided with lower investment in broadcast, anyway. Replacing the transmitting equipment, don't care about providing as much range as the much older, analog equipment did, because the per-viewer value has dropped enough that it's not worth it to reach rural areas, so you cheap out on both equipment & broadcast strength.
The only thing that works for me, at all, is putting things directly in my way so they're practically unavoidable, and physically removing distractions in advance. Modifying my environment to make the things I want to do extremely easy to do, and the things I don't want to impossible or difficult, is the only thing that works.
Ubiquitous spyware in everything we interact with, in order to make ads, on average, 5% more efficient—juuuuust enough more efficient that having a stream of massive-scale spyware data is necessary to compete in the ad sales market. Totally a good trade-off, making all the world's computing adversarial so ads work slightly better.