If only there was a country where we could all live that was run properly by people who cared about what they were doing.

Oh wait, there is.

Its called New Zealand.

At first, I thought "Is this the place for politics?"

And then it occurred to me that if the world was run by developers, it would totally open-source, with the general aim of it making it more user friendly for everybody.

The problem is that the people who are attracted to positions of power are those who are hungry for power itself, and have no interest in the general good.

Douglas Adams hit the nail on the head when he had Zaphod Beeblebrox running around drawing all the attention pretending to be president, when in actual fact, behind the scenes the galaxy was being run by someone else. And the only qualification for that job was that you *didn't* want to do it.

You should check out the benchmarks between .Net Core and NodeJS.
You’ll find one is 200 times faster than the other.
Or to put it another way, one will require 200 times the number of servers for the same workload.

Can't go past Donald Knuth as was mentioned the other day, or Bjarn Stroustrup

@Parzi That's what I originally suggested.

My boss was a bit more cautious.

Govt dept. with 40,000 users..

The Turing Test has nothing to do with a Turing Machine, other than they were both invented by Alan Turing.

It depends how much you value your time.

If you don't ascribe a $ value to it, then hosting your own is likely to be cheaper than paying someone else in the cloud.

If you do decide to run your own, don't pay top dollar for new home computer kit, go on Ebay and pick up used Dell servers (or similar) for next to nothing, with a second hand 19" rack - oh, and don't forget a decent UPS.

However, when costing Azure - don't pay per CPU, select the option where you pay per cycle (haven't got it in front of me at the moment, so I don't recall the actual terminology). That way, you will be paying hardly anything to begin with, until you start getting a load of users.

I tried to fail it, and still got 68%

Nothing with lyrics. Has to be purely instrumental.
And only even then when I’m doing something simple/tedious.

I remember borrowing that from one of the "Programmer" gods when I was a lowly electronics engineer at British Aerospace back in 1978.

After I had read it, he kindly allowed me to punch in the bootstrap sequence for the paper tape reader on the Data General Eclipse to load the operating system each morning.

Favours are always the worst.

Because you did them a favour in doing the work, they think they will be doing you a favour to pay.

@N00bPancakes Or just for $$$$

@catholic-emacs I must admit I used to be an Emacs user.
On PDPs and Vaxes.
Just can’t take my hand off my mouse these days though. :-o

@M1sf3t Yeah, I have been half way there most of my working life.

Have tried three start-ups over the years, with varying degrees of unsuccess. Usually because I tried to grow too quickly and hired the wrong people, or maybe I am the wrong person to try managing people, more to the point.

The rest of the time I have been contracting anyway. Could never take a permanent position anywhere.

This time, I'm just going to keep it small and low key, just me doing what interests me.

@Root Funny, I had the opposite experience. I found when I tried using Linux as my day to day OS, I spent all my time fiddling with it, which was fun, but meant my productivity went out of the window.

With Windows, there is little to fiddle with, so I find I'm more productive.

Well, I was, until I found Devrant…

But I also have a full native Ubuntu shell running on my Windows desktop for when I get bored.

@M1sf3t Actually, my "cunning plan" is to downsize everything, get my cost of living down to the minimum, and do just that.

@Demolishun I was working for Mastercard (there, I named them) a couple of years ago. I had shaved my hair and beard off so no white was showing.

The scrum team loved me, they said I was the first architect they had who was prepared to get hands-on in the code with them. All great.

And then I relaxed, and let slip in front of the software development manager that it was my birthday. When he said, "Oh, how old are you?" I felt comfortable enough to say "63".

He just looked at me and said "If I had realised how old you were at the interview I would never have hired you".

A week later I was moved to a different team that were just working through the backlog of bugs in the legacy code...

@Demolishun Yes, I was getting to the point of putting a fake date when this other gig came along.

It's just as bad if you do keep up.

I'm right up to speed, full stack, everything.

I got laid off due to Covid in April. To begin with everything was going well, quite a few contracts out there, recruiters really keen, thought I had "fantastic" skills.

It is illegal to ask someone's age here in Australia, but they have started including DoB on their "Identity" forms that you have to fill in before they put you forward. The moment I fill one in, that's it, I get dropped, won't even return my calls.

I was lucky because a) I get a weekly "Job Keeper" handout from the government, and b) I found a charity that desperately needed some help building an app, but could only afford half my usual rate, and between them they pay the bills.

Well, VMS..

But then that morphed into Windows NT

Which became Windows, so I guess Windows.

But I do use Linux from time to time.

@p100sch I use . Net Core these days. Flies on Linux too.

@AleCx04 Only 64... :-)

Visual Studio every time.

@mr-user Yeah, we pretty much hoped if somebody fell out of bed, they would leave the sheets behind. :-)

@mr-user

Yes, we employed a bunch of actors and videoed them, as well as searching for as many useful images as we could find. What we were looking for was a change in detecting a person in the scene shortly followed by a prone person in the scene.