Explaining how Trump would win on election night, but over the next several weeks mail-in voting would change the result. Which is odd since typically old people use mail-in voting, and they tend to be Trump voters.
Basically even as a left leaning person the above terrifies me.
I've been watching Sir David Attenborough since I was a kid, and I am now middle aged.
And I've known about species extinction since I was a little kid. They've happened and keep happening. Little to nothing seems to have done to prevent them during my lifetime.
I feel powerless and have no idea what to do about it.
I mean things that will actually make a huge difference, not just telling myself I am making a difference by doing little things like not having a car, or re-using and recycling.
And pardon me for saying this, but part of me is ever so slightly disappointed Covid-19 is not a lot more deadly. I am a terrible person.
I wish we would subside biochar in agriculture the same way we did ethanol. Or include it in carbon trading. Or both. And fertilise the open ocean deserts with iron while we're at it.
Agism is illegal already, and yet we still deal with it.
As a young developer I watched great old developers, fantastic at their job and with super deep experience let go first.
My advice is make sure you save a lot. And be prepared to either retire early, switch careers, or start your own business/consult once you have over 10 years of experience. Connect with people, keep in touch, and make sure you stay current with new technologies.
A more interesting question is how far will we go.
Based on human history, I am fairly sure the end of humanity is approaching. 100 to 150 years I'd guess. I don't mean we'll be gone, just that what we'll become will not be recognized as human by our ancestors.
As an outsider to the industry, I have always wondered what the situation is like in smaller companies or for starting your own business to serve local clients.
Small companies, typically startups, are diverse. Some like hiring diamonds in the rough, which can include old developers. Other are obsessed with youth.
Starting your own business or consulting are standard and popular options for old developers.
As an industry insider, people complain as loudly as people from any industry. But just look at the actual unemployment and pay rates per industry. Few other industries are better.
Also, people which were set to that group or people which self-identify as that group?
Why not both. Self-identified groups and groups curated by someone else.
And on popularity, I just think of votes as one filter. For example, who and how decides what is the best info of your town? Latest? A filter. Most popular? Another filter. The exact link you sent. Also a filter. Liked by a selected group of people. Yet another filter.
innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling.
Obviously we already have English, nearly universally spoken as a second or third language in the EU. So I assume you mean English, or some other language as the first language.
Which I think means all other languages would after a few generations become nearly extinct. Like Latin these days.
But despite how much I wish we had more innovation, I don't think losing all languages is worth it.
Sadly I can't recall the name of the book I read as a kid, but it was all about dangerous animals. The kind of stuff pre-teen boys are super into.
Well, I was hoping for adventure stories, but the book ended up being a dry and technical description of incidents. Yet, still interesting. One horror story I recall was of Orcas harassing an Inuit family in their canoe. And them having to throw one of their kids overboard to get away.
No idea idea if the stories in the book were real or made up. But just based on the dry and technical descriptions, part of me has always suspected they might have been real.
I am shocked this first version of an online encyclopedia has lasted so long.
Typically first versions of software reproduce real world limitations, which don't apply to the software. Second and third iterations tend to drop them.
Wikipedia has lots of those real world limitations. Notoriety and style of writing were determined by the limitations of shelf space and paper.
The selected editor team is something wikipedia specifically wanted to get rid of but has bumbled back into over time.
I keep expecting someone else to crate wikipedia 2.0, but so far nothing. Here's my suggestion for a better virtual encyclopedia.
- Articles are cryptographically signed by authors.
- Articles are not editable after publication. Edits result in new articles.
- Articles have a unique and unchanging url.
- Registered users can vote on articles.
- Registered users can create collections of existing articles. And those collections can be tread as an article.
- Articles can be filtered on popularity, and on popularity among select groups of authors, and on popularity among select groups of up-voters.
I think based on the above you end up with human repository of knowledge. Where articles and links to articles are reliably unchanged, and you never have to worry about them changing "under your feet" so to speak.
The same group of people running wikipedia now, can reproduce their own view of the world in the above setup, and their fans can use it.
Any other group can also create their view of things. There is going to be one most popular view of things. But there could also be a one armed economists' view of modern dance filter of the knowledge pool.
How to deal with spammer or trolls? In addition to voting and filtering, top notch text compression and time based moving of the least often visited articles to slower and cheaper storage.
The slowest and cheapest storage we have, combined with how well we can compress text, in my opinion, results in almost unlimited capacity to store text. And thus notoriety should not be a concern. Leave that to paper encyclopedias.
With over 20 years experience in the industry, and some products I have worked on visible in SuperBowl advertisements, I can honestly say during interviews I can count to potato.
Most recently during a live coding challenge I forgot to you, you know, occasionally run and test the code I was working on, and had one hour to complete.
I can also anecdotally report code challenges seems to have become a lot more common in interviews recently.
And yet, we are still lucky to be in an industry with so many opportunities which pay so well. After several months of interviewing, and failing pretty much every code challenge, while being a programmer over 40, I finally got hired. And can happily report things are going well once again.
My advice is train interviewing. Train not just solving programming puzzles, but also doing it under the gun. That's not easy to train for real, but try to get as close as possible.
And there is no harm in keeping your options open regarding a career change. If not the interview process, but the work itself ever starts to really make you unhappy, it might be time to switch careers.
Don't have just one most important/critical thing your life, like your professional life for example.
Very serious advice, go outside and exercise.
Find a friendly real life community to be part of. Fans of movies, fans of some sport, fans of science, anything, just any group of real people that you share sami-regular or regular friendly time with.
Human beings are not made to be alone, regardless of how introverted they are. They are not made to be isolated. They are not made to have little to no physical exercise. We are however made to become easly obsessed to get the job done, so make sure you have more than one fun challenge to become obsessed with.
Because the young workers are already cheaper. Hard to out-cheap them. (Obviously not their fault.)