festus

@festus@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nooo my genderinos⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure if you’re joking or being sarcastic, but here are a few examples where the mere absence / presence of a Y can’t determine sex & gender.

  • Sometimes a person has XY chromosomes, but the body developed in a female manner because the fetal cells were resistant to testosterone. Such a person has good claim to being a woman (she developed that way) or a man (he has a Y chromosome; his brain could have been sensitive still to the testosterone to still develop male-coded)
  • Sometimes a person has XX chromosomes, but the body developed in a male manner. Usually (though not always) this is caused by part of a Y chromosome ending up on an X. Such a person has good claim to being a man (he developed that way) or a woman (maybe she lacked enough testosterone to male-encode the brain).
  • Other conditions such as XXY combinations, or chimeras (some cells XX, some cells XY), or other intersex conditions where some body parts develop male, some female.

  To me personally, I view trans people as a type of intersex person. It seems entirely possible that you might have a person whose brain cells were more or less resistant to testosterone and/or exposed to testosterone and truly is a man/woman in a woman’s/man’s body. You don’t need to bring choice or culture into it - I think biology alone provides good evidence to believe trans people about what gender they are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do what you love⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And people wonder why employers are hesitant to hire juniors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan is getting fined in the UK by the Office of Communications(Ofcom) under Online Safety Act; 4Chan Respond by appealing to Trump administration and intending to fight it in the U.S courts.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  they can be fined.

  Sounds like no? How are they going to make a company with no assets or staff in the UK pay the fine? American courts likely won’t enforce it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sounds like a plan⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s my pet theory as to why CS did so well for so long and why that probably won’t remain true moving forward.

  Programming / tech is a relatively new field that, as a proportion of how much time it takes as part of people’s waking hours (as a rough indicator of how much of the economy it can penetrate), has gone from essentially 0% to 99% in only a few decades. We went from only large corporations having one or two mainframes, to office computers, to home computers, to smartphones, etc. Add in social media, streaming, etc. and people have gone from spending virtually no time on programmable devices to all their time on programmable devices.

  As tech continued to have this (apparently) exponential growth, there was a chronic shortage of programmers, leading to massive salaries. As salaries exploded, programming developed a reputation for being a relatively easy, well-paying job, provided you were somewhat intelligent. As a result, hordes of students studied CS to help keep up with the growing demand, although always lagging. For seniors the lag for new hires to reach their level is quite a bit longer, so seniors have remained in high demand.

  Now as we catch up to the present though, it’s hard to see spaces where new jobs for programmers can be created without cannibalizing existing ones. VR? You’d take work away from game developers. Metaverse? From traditional social media sites. In short we’ve put computers on watches, sleep trackers, fridges, TVs, cars, light switches, etc. There’s no more room for the industry as a whole to grow. AI might be the exception for this - if it actually succeeds it could keep tech growing by eating into the jobs of other industries, but then I expect it would end up eating many tech jobs too, so for the purpose of my argument it’ll either hurt the programming job market or have minimal effect.

  So - we reach the present. Lured in by the high salaries of previous years, and the high salaries seniors currently have, we have an overabundance of juniors on the job market. If tech had continued its previous rate of growth, things would have been fine - but it can’t. As a result, there just aren’t enough jobs for all the current juniors and there likely won’t ever be - the industry can’t grow to accommodate them. Many of them will need to switch to other careers and for less students to study CS for balance to arrive. There’s still a shortage of seniors at the moment, but as the current juniors who are employed gain experience and move up the job ladder, this will change. Current seniors can’t count on older tech workers retiring quite yet, due to how young-skewed tech is (because of the job growth pattern we previously had), so they should expect growing job competition as juniors develop and for salaries to stagnate (already seeing this at my employer).

  This isn’t all bad news though - consumers will benefit. With a shortage of new industries to move into, the glut of workers who remain will best find work opportunities by selling products that outperform and/or are cheaper compared to the existing products. In other words, expect more alternatives to MS Office, social media, Photoshop, etc. People will be able to create work for themselves by undercutting the current incumbents - we should expect to see an explosion in competitors for existing products. In some ways we’re seeing this already - more and more great indie games that outperform the AAA giants, open source software that provide better experiences against the proprietary options (Lemmy vs Reddit, Mastadon vs Twitter, Forgejo/Gitea vs Github, etc.)

  I fully expect to see deviations to this - new hype cycles that temporarily create demand, boom / bust cycles depending on the present economic circumstances, an eventual (short-term) shortage of workers once today’s tech workers do start to retire, but long-term I expect ‘programmer’ to become just another generic white-collar job with similar pay.

  TL;DR - unless you’re already a senior in tech, you might want to look at professions that are actually in demand as the glory days for software developers won’t come back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VPN firm says it didn’t know customers had lifetime subscriptions, cancels them⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably legal (for the buying company) but customers should sue the original company and get paid out of the money used to buy it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tulsi Gabbard Reused the Same Weak Password on Multiple Accounts for Years⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ditto. I use unique passwords for services I care about / someone could exfiltrate sensitive data, and a cheap reused password for services I don’t care about and could easily regain access to with a password reset email.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I too use Kagi but it’s worth noting that Kagi gets most of its results by paying and using other search engines including Google and Bing, so it’s not 100% independent or immune from say Bing’s outage. Still the best option by far though.