The biggest change that happened was that hardware kept getting better and it became feasible to use garbage-collected languages everywhere including really inefficient implementations like CPython.

That being said, 30 years later Python is still slow as shit even compared to other dynamic languages and runs into all kinds of scaling issues when used for anything serious. And everywhere that performance matters, software continues to be written in typed, compiled languages including C (but also C++, Rust, Go, etc.). Even in ML, Python chiefly acts as a thin wrapper and glue language for high performance CUDA libraries (aka C and C++).

So your historical analogy is mostly anachronistic.

I disagree. I think in big tech and the corporate world, it boils down to the organization fundamentally not valuing security and punishing developers if they "move slow", which is often the outcome when you maintain a highly security-oriented process while developing software and infrastructure.

When big leaks happen, the worst that occurs is that some trivial financial penalty is applied to the company so the incentive to ignore security problems until you're forced to acknowledge them is high.

The country is already in a slow burning crisis due to the political and economic results of its demography, and a war coming to its own soil will send the walls tumbling down.

The thing is that when you have a huge non-citizen percentage of the population that is actively drawing taxpayer money out of the state to the point where the social welfare system is beginning to break down, and you have the working citizens of the country being taxed at 50% or more to support that during an escalating global cost of living crisis, you have effectively destroyed the social contract around citizenship that permits this system to function. For the massive aged population that's drawing retiree benefits, there's at least the justification that they paid into the system during their lifetime, even if the equation that makes the retirement system work increasingly doesn't work anymore.

Now the young people are being told to go die to keep that system alive. I wouldn't be surprised if most don't.

But young men maybe dying after being forced to fight against their will? Completely fine.

It's honestly just very telling how in modern Western egalitarianism, gender essentialism is factually wrong and evil unless we're explaining why men need to die for their country.

I know a lot of people liked it and maybe I'm just cynical, but to me it seems like every "serious" streaming show eventually falls victim to the "stretch a 2 hour movie's plot across a 12 - 16 hour season" strategy. They know it works because enough people binge watch or feel compelled to finish a series they've started.

At this point, if I'm watching a show then it's something where the episodes are sufficiently satisfying self-contained stories (e.g. something like Star Trek, X-Files, sitcoms). If I want something with a more involved plot, then I'll watch a movie. These formats are better because the limited runtime requires the creators to be intentional about what they dedicate screen time to. Meanwhile in a modern "story-driven" streamslop show it's painfully obvious when they're just padding out the runtime with fluff to make it to 8 episodes.

Of course there are exceptions to this, and there are stories for which a miniseries or a long-form series is the ideal video medium to convey them. But what happens so often is that you get 1-2 seasons of compelling storytelling followed by N more mediocre seasons that keep getting made because enough people keep watching. And the latter are just not worth the time investment.

In all likelihood his upbringing is what made him this way.

I was late to the party and only read “The Soul of a New Machine” in 2024. It's a great book I think anyone involved in engineering of any kind should give it a read.

It's an especially impressive feat of writing given that it remains accessible and interesting even to people outside of the field. It's a testament to the amount of time he spent essentially embedded with the people at Data General learning about their work and about who they were.

The city manager of a small city in Texas gets paid around that much and that's taxpayer money.

Now what collegiate football coaches are paid, that's pretty crazy.

This is a fairly normal practice and is supported by the major compilers.

I don't see why C++ should stop seeing development.

The Switch has been out since 2017 and has probably reached market saturation at this point. Keep in mind that consoles are pretty durable and lots of people buy used. The Switch 2 isn't selling well yet since it has the PS3 disease (no games).

Anyways, the economy is probably bad but I don't think Nintendo Switch sales are much of an indicator for that.

Though I guess disbarment is a thing, but requires very specific infractions to be triggered.