IT guy here, not a programmer per se, but I have given up and am re-training into fraud detection. I want to take down some of the fuckers that ruined the industry before I die
Hmm, you could work on an open-source project for detecting and/or mitigating corporate and government influence campaigns in the fediverse. I think, right now, the fediverse is still too small for it to make sense for those actors to deploy expensive, sophisticated attacks against it, but if the community grows that threat is going to grow with it, probably at least as long as we’re alive. I assume you’re talking about financial fraud; I don’t know how similar detecting “fraud” accounts would be but I imagine there’s some overlap.
I think it would be fun to work on a bot / influencer detector. And if it works, it would hopefully make the fediverse more resilient to coordinated influence campaigns designed to destroy or capture it. Which would help to ruin the corporate media hellscape that has been wreaking havoc on the world ever since the inception of feed manipulation.
I was in IT 20+ years.
I quit 4 years ago and opened an arcade. My only regret is I should have bailed out 10 years ago.
> the end of software engineering
> looks inside
> overhyped slop generator
To be fair having been in software for awhile, plenty of people were slinging slop before AI as well.
The difference is back then, we could block the PR, now management demands velocity at all costs.
It will catch up eventually.
Didn’t management always demand velocity at all costs? This is really not new.
I’m going to be a baker! just putting it off as long as possible because I don’t want to wake up at 2am.
Every other baker gets up at 2am. Be the only 2pm baker out there for fresh evening breads!
Yes, I’m sick of morning people getting all the good stuff. I want to come home from work and sit in a cafe/bakery and eat nice things.
We need a night owls society.
Not a bad idea, would be nice with fresh sandwiches instead of shitty burgers or sausages when going home from some event at night.
Computer, I need software please!
Why won’t it work? I asked for software!
You asked wrong! You forgot “no mistakes”
Did you try turning it off and on and then ask for software again?
Brb, restarting all data centers.
Hey maybe we need to keep them off until the coin battery dies so the bios resets?
getting licensed as an electrician has been on my mind recently. i’m so tired of the whole industry
I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I’m 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I’ll do after I’m replaced with AI I don’t know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I’m more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.
In before the AI shills show up, nice
We’ve been predicting the demise of the coding career since the dawn of the coding career, but even if it’s not dying, being proficient in coding and becoming proficient in one other trade is a good way to find opportunities to make software that makes that trade easier. The bar for quality in trade-specific software is shockingly low and money can be made in those niches.
This is basically me.
I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.
My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).
In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.
I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.
That rules. I hope you use your powers for good.
Yep, the real money you make when being able to combine 2 different skills, because the amount of people having studied exactly this combination will always be a very small group. Coding and a learned trade is one of the rarer combinations - most coders (in my experience) acquire management or business skills to climb the corporate ladder.
Or more computing skills. In grad school there were a number of Masters students from the local region in our cs program. The employers would pay for it for them.
I’ve spent my entire career as a professor advocating that students should pick a minor, certificate, or double major if they’re capable.
My rationale is remarkably similar I think. Literally ever field, hobby, and area of study involve some form of technology. Many of those disciplines lack the sophistication of the tooling and that we have in more programming related fields, which makes people with an additional specialized skill set extremely valuable.
Hell, look around at fintech, bioinformatics, computational arts, etc. We have emerging Fields all the time that are essentially computer science combined with another field.
OK this really got me.
you’ll either be needed to extract dead systems after this all falls apart, or to build new systems for people that don’t want slop service in dead space.
Oops, requirements were written by ai too
For real.
I recently lost half a morning having to go through a slop requirements document and making a list of questions like “are you sure you want this? why do you want this? what does this even mean?”, to which the answers were all “I don’t know, ChatGPT wrote it”.
Like why did you even bother sending me this, you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead and saved me 2 hours of my life
AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read)
My new favorite abbreviation
you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead
AI discovers compression algorithms.
People do stupid things when they don’t know any better but want to look like they know what they are doing. Enter LLMs now people think they look even smarter in an area they don’t know things.
yeah it’s not a great idea, I’ve been seeing a crap ton of AI ads for relatively bland services online, like insurance and weight loss, some known brands mixed in, and I keep thinking, what does this benifit the company other than not paying someone more than the AI to make an ad, and I feel it mostly just let’s less legitimate business look more sleek, but the bounce back from that is going to be people associating AI ads with garbage and scam businesses, which is plush the bigger corporations away from it. Anyway, yeah it’s all to try and get the user of the AI service to look more polished in intent.
Call me a Karen, but that gets an angry email to their boss.
I wish. Sadly it was from the boss.
I’ve gotten fired for going over heads before and will do it again!
I’m staying here, but my son who wanted to become a programmer has now decided to study for maritime officer. I don’t know when AI will take over ships.
I’m a few weeks from graduating in software engineering, I think I’m going back to my old plan of finding a strong rope and a sturdy tree.
~(But to be straight: There are a lot of better options for a career, please try them first)~Don’t let it get you down. You need to remember that this whole AI hype / AI will replace everyone is coming from people who invested a lot of money into it and really need it to succeed now.
Many also have an oversimplified view of what the discipline of software engineering includes in addition to little understanding how different types of AI work.
Besides, skillsets you learned in SE can easily applied to other ‘non-virtual’ fields. Many people suck at providing clear and specific instructions or requirements; businesses also have many real world processes that need to be optimized; identifying problems in a system (you first need to see there is an issue, if you want to ask an AI to fix it for you in the next step); being able to break down and tackle large, complex topics; … I could probably come up with many more points.
In my career as a programmer mostly writing custom software for smaller companies, 90% of the job was understanding the clients’ businesses and working out what they needed the software to do. Designing, writing and supporting the software was relatively trivial. My bosses never understood my lack of enthusiasm when they would hire newly-graduated Computer Science students and stick them on my team. Never mind that they knew almost nothing about the actual process of producing complete working software – they were completely useless for the main task of gathering requirements.
Yea those things you really only learn being in the industry for a couple of years, however fewer entry level hires now, because of AI and overall degradation of communication skills, means a derth of competent employees in the industry later. Tragedy of the commons…
Nothing wrong with being an arborist.
I work in software but I have a side job working for an arborist, and you might have been joking but it’s legit a great industry to have a backup plan in.
Most arborists near me have more work than they can keep up with. You see, the thing about trees is, you trim them, wait a year, and the bastards grow back! It’s like a giant scam and the trees are all in on it!
It’s a pretty fun job too, if you’re relatively fit. You get to climb trees, throw logs into giant scary chippers, and you get first dibs on all the best gun and sword shaped sticks.
I was half joking. 😅 Of all the tradesfolk I’ve hired to do work on my house, my arborist is the only one who’s job I could see myself actually liking. He gets paid to be a nerd about something (trees, tree health, tree care), the work itself seems a lot more pleasant than dealing with plumbing or electrical repairs, and at least my guy is a one man band who just shows up and does his thing, which is certainly appealing after a career of various EMs, PMs, TPMs, and other people who need to be appeased when doing work. Also the fun tools.
Ah so you’re a black man in a predominately racist white county with a strong police force?
For real though. If life sucks, try something else. Teach English abroad, move to another state or country. Not much to lose if you’re struggling.
You could learn farsi and arabic and join the military. They are always hiring lately and they have lowered their standards a lot I hear. Medical, maximum enlistment age, drug history, criminal background, fitness, intellgence, all lowered. You can start your first enlistment at 42 now. As long as you get in before your 43rd birthday you’re gold.
(I’m just kidding, dont join the military)
I’m no an american, and i would rather die than support the people who put pinochet in power and are currently gutting south america once again
Gross!
I sent this to my plumber to congratulate him on his career choice.
Turns out now he’s an electrician and his company got hired to help build an AI data center. 💀Sixty electricians from his company alone on one job. Drones surveilling the repetitive work overhead.
So much for escaping the impacts of AI.
I know an electrician who moved beyond doing it day to day, he was telling me he knows of data center job sites that are paying regular electrician wages + $250/day. I think the data center boom might be bigger and crazier than we even realize somehow.
lol, you’re joking
No.
managers have been into “remote work” long before workers have.
Don’t do plumbing, join us in HVAC-R. There is way less training and fewer certs required. The bar is so low it’s derailing subways.
Refrigeration?
Edit: Wait, refrigeration is just full stack where HVAC isn’t.
Yep. When it comes to HVAC and refrigeration, refrigeration techs tend to have far more variried work and be the more expensive to hire. More expensive doesn’t mean better though, refrigeration is just more generalized. HVAC tends to be pretty standardized as far as operating conditions and equipment goes so HVAC techs can get pretty specialized as far as tools and training goes. But with refrigeration you do all the standard HVAC work while also working on basically everything else that gets hot or cold.
The best comparison I can make is probably to automotive mechanics. A HVAC tech is like a dealership mechanic, where a refrigeration tech is closer to a diesel truck mechanic. That diesel truck mechanic could probably work on your Honda Civic, but they’d be way more expensive, they aren’t going to have the special factory tools, and that really isn’t what they’re there for. Similarly a refrigeration tech can do HVAC work and we often do, but we tend to be more expensive and less specifically tooled for HVAC than a dedicated HVAC tech. The less specifically tooled part can be kind of funny at points because some of the guys I know who work in dedicated HVAC will go so far as to have different manifolds that they use for different refrigerants, meanwhile I’ve seen a refrigeration tech patch a 100 ton industrial chiller barrel with basically nothing but the tools in their pockets, a tube of quick set JB weld, and a vacuum pump. If it’s stupid and it works then it’ll just have to keep working until the right parts come in.
I’d rather be an electrician than a plumber. It’s like a simpler, deadlier Ethernet.
And electricians don’t have to interact with human feces nearly as often.
Three phase PoE anyone?
Powerline networking is a thing and a great choice for bringing hardline connections to remote parts of a house.
I had a shed that had electric but my WiFi couldn’t reach and a cheap powerline kit and a spare OpenWRT worked a treat.
I think all power lines should have a communications protocol. Not every device has to use them, and they’d be lower bandwidth than data-only lines, but I think the era of data-communicating appliances is here to stay, and it’d be better they go over the wires we have rather than clogging up the wireless spectrum.
Within a single building for sure, but even neighborhood lines could carry some data I bet. I wonder if and how that would work. Gonna have to learn some more about electricity and grid infrastructure.
The cybersecurity specialist in me really doesn’t like the idea of having enough wire in public spaces that it’s essentially impossible to monitor, sending infrastructure related data.
But then again, a weekend playing around with a flipper zero and a walk through town is enough to realize that it probably doesn’t matter.
Think some intelligent opsec is needed when acquiring a flipper?
In these grand United States, that is
I don’t think so. Ultimately, it’s a low power computer with a software defined radio in it. Nothing inherently nefarious.
I am Canadian however, so jury’s out about the US
Yeah I imagine for lines outside the home, or in public places, it would be best to assume that the channel is untrustworthy and the data is public. Essential comms would need to have redundancy of course. But for an oven reporting its at temp, or a thermostat reporting its room’s temperature to a central HVAC controller, I think it would be nicer than running everything over wifi.
You could even have a signal smoother at the main so nothing inside the house can get out. The way I’m imagining it, all the household power would come from the home battery, which would be fed by a combination of solar panels and grid power. If the battery’s full and the sun is shining, power feeds back into the main. If the battery’s low, power is drawn from the panels, and if that doesn’t meet demand, power is drawn from the grid. But the whole house is buffered (electrically and informationally) by the battery.
We have several good standards for power-line networking.
All of them fail for the usual problems, like all companies making sure every connector you can buy is proprietary and incompatible with each other’s.
Yeah. I know it’s possible to have a backward-compatible network over regular residential wiring, I have a pair of those ethernet ports that plug into standard outlets, but there would need to be a broadly accepted networking standard for devices that have that feature built in.
Maybe a starting point would be an open hardware, open software server device that connects to the electrical grid and the regular ethernet (via cable or wireless) that manages all the active devices on the power network. If a device implements a protocol the hub recognizes, it registers the device and makes it available for management via a web interface. I think I’d want some kind of manual confirmation before new devices start communicating with the ethernet anyway, as well as a way to grant and revoke internet privileges for devices on the fly, e.g. I might want to upgrade the firmware on one appliance to fix a bug, then close it off again until the next update. There could be switches / dimmers etc. that implement the standard and act as passthroughs for legacy devices to give them a bit of centralized control too.
If it gets good enough for hobbyist / diy electronics makers to start baking the standard into their devices, it could become a defacto open standard. I think it would be cool to have networked devices that won’t brick once the manufacturer goes bust / decides to shut down the servers that make the hardware work. I think that should be the bare minimum we demand from hardware manufacturers: that they don’t build implicit or explicit killswitches into the devices the sell. But that’s a separate ramble and I feel I’ve gone on long enough here 🙃
They already do. There’s ripple signaling for electrical infrastructure and power company disconnect boxes. If you’ve ever seen those power company boxes hooked up to HVAC equipment that’s what those are for. They let the power company use ripple control to selectively disable high power draw equipment during peak load times.
Also if you become an electrician then you have an excuse to run Ethernet poorly. Gotta love when the electrician runs unshielded cat6 cable through 100ft of conduit containing 480V wires. Talk about POE, you could probably run a toaster off that Ethernet cable.
👴 my first PC in the mid-90s had a 10mbit coaxial network card that my brother and I used for a 2 PC LAN connection, and let me tell ya - you wouldn’t want to handle that while the PC was turned on.
Although the zap was less hurtful than an electrical fence.Looking it up, it was most likely 10BASE5.
I’m thinking cake decorator. Or florist. Maybe grave digger.
florist
This sounds nice. Working with something green and alive. Arborist too.
Granny worked as a florist, not her own shop though. She had incredible strong hands.
As a pupil I did a work experience day in the shop. It was really chilly (Germany usually has not Air Con), we consistently had to clean the floor in the back room to not slip on the leaves, it was tiny in there and we were four people. I got to wash a fake flower decor and rearrange it for a doctors office. That was nice.
She had incredible strong hands.
Maybe you should be a writer. Well placed, evocative, Hemminginway-esque sentence. You’re in the wrong neighborhood.
I never really understood the appeal of arranging severed plant genitals. Sure, it looks nice. But boobs also look nice, and I don’t cut them off and put them in a pretty bowl on my living room table.
You make a good point, but maybe no one had thought of severed boobs as decoration yet. AI will think of it for us, soon. What are the real dollar value of peasant boobs anyway-- I hear people arent generally worth very much if you do the math. And the rich + AI are doing the math.
We have diggers.
I think manual labor that needs creativity (e.g. pattiserie or florist) has the best post-AI future.Snatch anvil thief.
I used to think I could give hand jobs in alleyways if things got bad, but I hear AI is being trained to give those. Because of course it is.
Wood carver! Oh they have mostly automated that with CNC machines…
There are also coffee art robots that can print something on the milk foam.
But it still requires the creativity.
And for sentimental stuff (e.g. pattiserie and florist) I would like to believe that humans value hand made stuff more than machine produced.For a special occasion perhaps, but on a regular basis is it valued enough to pay someone a living wage? Most of this stuff I wouldn’t pay for, might make it myself though.
I don’t think you can really have a creative focused economy when landlords and banks are taking so much from us.