Oh, interesting. I also initially read it as a thinly-veiled threat but I think you’re right it was more of a “will i be assaulted”. Still a weird thing to say.

Certainly I’m not suggesting that IT-related majors should be removed from universities or anything like that. Just that the main path into the industry shouldn’t cost dozens of thousands of dollars and take several years of an adult’s life.

We’ve already got all of these other, cheaper, faster paths into the industry. What if they were better? What if they were more popular? More available? How would that change the industry? Change society?

You seem to suggest it would be a bad thing (or maybe I’m misunderstanding), can you expand upon on that? I’m not sure I’m following.

Are you saying entry level positions will be monopolized by recent high school grads and no one else will be able to get jobs? If so, are they currently monopolized by recent boot camp grads? Recent college grads? Is one necessarily better than the other? Or necessarily worse?

Does a kid graduating from a trade school and scoring a job on a help desk, studying on the job for a CCNA, and moving onto the network engineering team take any food out of the mouth of the slightly older kid graduating with a CS degree and starting a job at the same company they did their internship? What about the 35 year old tired of working at the mailroom of a law firm who signs up for a bootcamp where a contracting company will pay them for the duration of the training and place them in a job with one of their clients for one year?

I agree that an apprentice working with a single “master” probably wouldn’t work very well. But I’m also not sure how frequently other apprenticeships still operate on that model. Perhaps it’s more common for other trades due to a preponderance of independent contractors, but there’s no saying that the apprentice needs to be beholden to one individual “master.”

You’re right, you’re probably not gonna go from rando 18 year old who has only ever used an iPhone for their computing needs to even someone who can do even the “college intern” grunt work of a software dev team.

The typical on-ramp in our industry for someone like that is to come up through the help desk or data center where you do get to pull wires, carry supplies, rack and stack, manage inventory, etc. And probably this is where many apprenticeships would begin, too, if the person had literally no prerequisite knowledge.

But the bootcamp system to create devs directly is also fine. I’d just love to see more worker-oriented structure around it so we don’t have cheapass bootcamps flooding the job market with people that perhaps have the bare minimum skills and only on paper. Or predatory bootcamps locking people into jobs at shitty companies that teach them awful ways of working that their next company has to undo.

It really, really, really doesn’t take a 4 year Computer Science degree from a university to work a typical software engineer job. I’ve worked with folks with no college education, history degrees, electrical engineering degrees, etc. Folks that have come up through the help desk, through the data center, through bootcamps, etc.

Let’s make that even easier to do.

Well maybe you couldn’t, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to set up appropriate technical instruction infrastructure as part of a union or guild through which this apprenticeship would go. Or even that one doesn’t already exist.

Often, a plumbing or electrical apprentice will come up through a technical high school. Either a technical high school or a technicial continuing education program at a community college, say.

Heck my local technical high school offers an “Information Technology” vocational program that sounds an awful lot like that program I went through in college. Wouldn’t it have been great to save 4 years and countless dollars?

For programming jobs, this gap is currently mostly filled with “bootcamps.” Increasingly you’ll find bootcamp programs that are free but garnish your salary for some time after you’ve been placed in a job, or the bootcamp is run by a company directly and you get paid to go through the bootcamp after signing a contract saying you’ll work for them for a year or two afterward or else need to pay back the price of the program.

These can vary from “pretty good, actually” to “predatory” to “a little bit like indentured servitude.” Wouldn’t it be great if there were a union or guild around these practices? Or to encourage more kids to enter trade schools that offer vocational programs they’re interested in?

I guess I don’t see what the incentive would be for this, or even what it realistically means in this case.

Do you mean like relicensing the backend and frontend with a closed source license? I don’t see what the incentive would be for that unless they wanted lemmyml to be the only instance in existence (which runs counter to it’s raison d’etre) and to make secret/proprietary/commercial extensions to it that are difficult to develop in the open.

Or I guess unless they wanted to start charging instance admins for the honor and pleasure of running their software, which at least right now would be the quickest way to ensure nobody runs their software.

I tend to agree here. But it has been interesting watching the proliferation of streaming services and trying to figure out what’s gonna happen next.

Like Netflix was a big first-mover, then everyone realized they could keep more money if they built their own streaming service, then everyone realized that building and running a streaming service is expensive and complicated, then everyone had to get onto the Original Content treadmill to try to keep folks subscribed which has led to somehow even more commodification of art, and now that running at a loss and pouring cash into original content to bump up numbers has gotten too expensive some services are pricing themselves out of the market.

I’m fascinated to see what the next big move is for these businesses. With more and more people starting to choose month to month which one or two services to subscribe to rather than keeping them all, I wonder if we’re gonna continue seeing the return of ad-supported plans or some services only offering yearly contracts or what the next move will be in pursuit of endless growth.

Okay. If the article is misleading or wrong, it shouldn’t be posted. If it is found to be incorrect after posting, is it better to fix the title and let the comments sort it out or to fully delete the post?

The title of this post is at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. From the source that OP linked in a couple other comments here (emphasis mine throughout):

Since the start of July, the app’s downloads have fallen by almost 30% compared to the preceding two months, according to data from app performance tracker Apptopia. … Twitter has gained usually 15 million to 30 million users a month since 2011, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It gained just 10 million users between August and September of this year. … Visits to the web version of X, which still operates as twitter.com, fell since the start of the year, with global web traffic down 10% in August and US traffic down 15%, compared to a year ago, according to an analysis by Similarweb. … So far in September, daily users are down to 249 million, a roughly 2% decrease… Monthly users are down by about the same percentage, now at 393 million users from 398 million in July.

That is emphatically not “loses over 30% of users in two months.” That is, though, “signs of slowing growth” and “signs of the most recent round of dramatic announcements wearing off and folks moving on with their lives” which is why Musk is doing his best to get back into the news cycle.

Maybe OP should go ahead and update the post with a more accurate title to avoid spreading misinformation.

Different folks have different definitions of retro - the most common I’ve heard have been 15 years, 20 years and two console generations. So 2000 handily fits into all of those definitions and also you are correct on the Deus Ex front.

My parents had a C64 back when I was too young to remember. I’ve seen a picture of myself sitting at it, aged maybe 2 or 3, but I don’t have any actual memories of it. I have been loving getting to know some C64 games via Evercade, though - including Pitstop II in fact.

My first gaming memory is Legend of Zelda on NES. And it’s still one of my favorite games and I play through it every few years. Though I haven’t had it on original hardware since 2019.

It is absolutely blowing my mind how many people are looking at this and thinking that is trying to show, like, primary land use per block on the map or something?

Like it’s well-known that maple syrup comes exclusively from northwest PA, plus all the logging that happens in downtown San Francisco and LA.