In IT, people are pretty chill. We share open source, we create new things all the time, we get to solve interesting problems. It's fun! The rest of the world is full of people with a... different outlook on how to interact with the world around them, to put it mildly.

Now I'm back on 4 days a week, and I absolutely love it! Two afternoons off per week. It's not too much of a strain on the budget, yet gives me a lot of free time. It's really the best.

Find a good team, stick with it. Do your job during office hours, and then do your other stuff on your side. We're lucky to have a stable, high paying and relatively ok for your (physical) health job.

If you're really set on leaving, I'd highly encourage you to switch to 3 days a week and start a side business in anything. You can sponsor it with your IT salary, and then figure out what you want to do when you're ready.

Example: for my (personal) projects, I only use whatever is available in the debian repositories. If it's not in there, it's not on my dependency list.

Then enable unattended upgrades, and forget about all that mess.

You're right on the sudden change! I remember our 386 was sitting flat on the desk, and the (huuuge) 486 tower was upright below the desk.

Maybe something to do with the noise? Must have been quieter to hide the monster below a wood plank on a carpet to dampen the vibration, rather than on a resonating wood plank right in front of your face.

My favorite part about these old computers is that they didn't have an auto shutdown yet. You had to flip a big mechanical switch on the back, and that was very satisfying!

It's absolutely terrible.

On the highway it picks up the 50km/h panel intended for the bus lanes.

Close to where I live it hallucinates a 5km/h limit.

In random places it will miss limitations.

Right now it simply decreases engine power. On a highway that's already dangerous enough. Can't wait till they use the same visual/audio warnings as they do for the pre-collision assistant...

By the way, that's bullshit too. Triggering for no good reason and scary enough to take my eyes off the road. Love it.

It's mostly fine, until one of you devices gets compromised. Then it's not fine at all anymore.

If you never played it, I highly recommend you give it a try!

As for the database, yes, we could do blue/green I guess, but it's a big database and it's more cost effective to rely on the queue.

To be honest, I'm not even sure blue/green would be an option given our constraints.

It's awesome!

It absorbs the peaks, smoothes them out, acts as a buffer for when the database is down for upgrades, and I think over all these years we only had one small issue with it.

10/10 would recommend.

However I'm wondering why we are still at that stage of the game. Animals seem like a "duh, of course" answer to me. They have a brain, a nervous system, they're so close to us that the answer should be obvious.

Now an amoeba yes, that's (to me, at least) an open discussion. LLMs and AGIs too, they're too new and unknown.

But animals? Come on, we had thousands of years to figure that out.

By that time I was working on a competing product at another company, and was admittedly a little young for a tech lead position. They didn't hire me.

Years later, in another company, we replied to a call for offers for yet another Winamp project, from the same company. We were 4 mobile app engineers, all super enthousiastic about the prospect and would have been able to deliver.

We didn't get the contract for money reasons.

I still believe Radionomy should have hired me, the first time or the second time, Winamp would be alive and kicking. Dammit!

EDIT: actually I just noticed it was cheaper through the "unlimited" option. Maybe a simpler/clearer pricing would do :)