While the US is extrem, the “obesity epidemic” affects pretty much all countries as they become richer. I wonder if recent developments in obesity drugs like ozempic will have a significant impact there in the coming decades.
I'm only 41 but that's long enough to have also seen this happen a few times (got my first job as a professional developer at age 18). I've also dabbled in using copilot and chatgpt and I find at most they're a boost to an experienced developer- they're not enough to make a novice a replacement for a senior.
I got my first job in 2001, it was like that then as well (maybe even worse). It got better when the market picked up again. I’m confident there still won’t be “enough developers” when then happens just like there’s never “enough electricity” despite the fact the power grid keep getting expanded all the time - people fine a use for even more.
That "need" is not as a helper but a cheap way to train the next gen senior which by the time they are senior know the ins and outs of your company's tech so well that they will be hard to replace by an external hire.
If your approach to juniors is that they are just cheap labour monkeys designed to churn out braindead crap and boost the ego of your seniors then you have a management problem and I'm glad I'm working somewhere else.
In the early 90s (maybe '92 or '93) my elementary school had a program where we'd go to the computer room and email kids in another school. There was nothing else to do on those computers that involved the internet (no web browsers), these were (relatively) state of the art 386s running DOS.
Anyway I remember we used to write our weekly emails on paper first and then type them into the computer- your quote reminded me of that!
I don’t know where you were born and how old you are, but that situation was defiantly not usual when i was a child (born 1983 in Israel). If anything I think I’d need a startup-liquidity-event level windfall to be able to afford housing as spacious as my parents bought in the 80s (housing costs increased way more than wages).
It may have been when my parents were born though (mid 1940s, one in what is now Israel and the other in what was then the Soviet Union).
But your parents didn't live in Israel 2019. Israel 1983 was more like today's Venezuela or Argentina. If you move today to a place comparable to Israel in 1983, you'll be able to afford even more space than your parents.
Not sure why 2019 specifically, it's 2024. I think you also underestimate 1980s Israel - although there was a stock-market crash in 1983, it was not otherwise that poor- maybe more like today's Portugal or Greece than Venezuela.
But anyway my parents were 1983 Israelis, they didn't come with future-Israel purchasing power - so they were able to afford their housing on the income of the time :) Other kids in my class had ± similar housing. Some were poor and had worse housing, but not 5 people in a 62m flat level of poverty- for that to be common you had to go back another couple decades (e.g. my mother's childhood experience in the 40s-50s was more like that, might have been common up to the 60s).
On the demand side - but how would automation/AI/robotics impact the supply/production side (i.e. will we replace the unborn would-be new workers with new robots)?
The basic problem with those old home computer operating systems was the lack of memory protection. Any program could overwrite the memory of any other program, or even vital components of the operating system.
While memory protection was touted as a huge improvement for end users, its actual benefit was to developers. Just try to debugging memory issues in the application's own address space. Now try to imagine doing the same, where your only hints of a problem is someone else's code crashing because of memory you inadvertently overwrote.
Yes. It had an ugly UI and preemptive multitasking, but it didn't have memory protection and -- unlike MultiFinder -- didn't clean up after apps for certain resources, so you'd eventually need to reboot to get those resources back even if your system remained stable.
I remember there being "recoverable" errors in later versions of the OS. But if you got a "Guru Meditation" you were almost always done. With newer machines (68020+ w/MMU) you could protect the first page of memory which helped ("Enforcer" was the name of the program, I think.)
It been a couple years since I was testing, but as a game developer I can tell you the performance difference is significant (altho I wonder if it’s due to driver quality or middleware being less optimised for android hardware).
I believe it was around 2021-22 when I was thoroughly testing but at the time even a 5 year old iPhone was faster than a brand new mid-range android (one of the Chinese brands that had good specs on paper).
And by faster I mean an integer multiple higher FPS, not just a little faster.
My guess would be that popular software like Unity and Unreal is much better optimised for iOS GPUs.
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