I grew up near an abandoned WWII era airfield. I have fond memories of first learning to drive by going out and blasting along the runway, had to avoid a few spots where trees had grown up through cracks in the tarmac, but it didn't matter if I stalled out the truck and I could get it up to a good speed.
Yep, I worked at a small company that got bought by a bigger one. We had a solid if aging product to support which was one of the big players for the niche. Once there was a leadership change, 2/3 of the devs got put on building a replacement software. Then in a couple of years our subgroup got spun off and sold to PE and the v2 project was shelved for another brand new design to align with the new ownership. I left just before the spin-off, but witnessed how the original software slowly rotted away and all of the marketshare dominance we had for that area slipped away.
Devs love new tech and the product people love something new to put their stamp on, but chasing that high can be ruinous.
I've done similar at my job where management wants us to use all of our tokens before they expire. I usually set it to documentation tasks and other minor tasks just to eat up tokens.
Yes, this is story immediately came to mind to me. It also shows that the idea of poor people in the global south doing this for money isn't quite the entire story either. Most of the people exposed seem to be young Dutch people trying to make a quick buck attacking Canada.
There are still good niche and well moderated subreddits, but the big ones are pretty annoying. Lots of most extreme version of headline/summary to get the clicks. Tonnes of bot comments, especially with the rise of LLM. Repetitive joke responses.
Coursera used to be good, and I've found the occasional good course on Udemy, but neither are particularly great right now in my opinion. Well curated learning materials are such a unicorn.
I worked for a small company acquired by IBM in 2011. We had a good 5-6 year run where our product sales went up (largely because so many IBM people were selling it) and we were largely left alone. Once things slowed down a bit the IBM rot set in quick though. These days I think all that's left is a skeleton crew maintaining the obligatory long term contracts around the main product, every other part of the original company has been picked clean.
I'll wait for more information before ditching Google Cloud, but this will certainly speed up getting a fall-back/migration plan together for what we've got on the service.