Yeah, it seemed to jump the shark a bit here. Professional bodies, certified engineers, taking on liability for Open Source code... there's a LOT going on here...
Here's what'll really happen; no one cares or wants yo be a certified professional. Companies don't care about it. We carry on as is...
This is a classic over-engineered solution that nobody wants to a problem that barely exists. Just add burocracy, what could possibly go wrong...??
Currently being certified has no value, not to Open Source, not to Closed Source, since companies are clearly doing fine without it. So it's hard to see them paying extra for it.
We've had professional certifications for years. Novell, Citrix, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, they all make money selling certification to naive users. Anyone who's bothered knows they don't really mean much.
But hey, if you think there's demand, set up a body and give it a go. Personally I think it's a waste of time, but if you can get enough companies to care, and enough developers to pay, you'll have a nice business.
So, historically the creation of bureaucracy in the US government included industry professionals to guide the requirements and a public comment period before finalization. This is done because most people in government recognize they are not up to date on the latest industry knowledge.
Destroying everything and creating a new bureaucracy is in absolutely no way better than fixing the original one on updated information.
It seems you may have fallen victim to the very well thought out "government bad!" argument.
Like what exactly? I mean the guy ran on cutting the budget by 2 trillion. In his last term he gave tax breaks yo the rich. Where did they think the cuts were coming from?
He ran very hard on raising tarrifs. Which demonstrably raise prices (thats literally their goal.) But now people claim "I didn't vote for this."
In truth they voted for him because he was the Republican on offer and they're die-hard Republican. The Republican party has made no secret of its agenda for decades.
I get it, people are good at cognitive dissonance. But this is the place for blunt truth. They voted for this. I'm not letting Republicans got off the hook here. They voted for this.
Just like to my Republican friends who are upset that CVE is cut. You voted for this. The general public benefit from CVE even though they dont know it exists. Just like you benefitted from dozens of other programs you didn't know existed, but have also been cut.
That's the problem with cuts. They ultimately end up hurting everyone.
Now clearly there's some fat that could be trimmed. Companies do it all the time. Done well its good. Swinging a hatchet in a crowded elevator does not seem like "Done well".
> In truth they voted for him because he was the Republican on offer and they're die-hard Republican. The Republican party has made no secret of its agenda for decades.
This is actually simply not true. The Republican party before the Tea Party looked nothing at all like this. Trump won the presidency last year riding a wave of distinctly not-your-typical-Republican lower class voters. As he rose the old guard Republican establishment formed the anti-Trump wing of the party until they were forced out one by one.
To put some numbers to this: Bush won the upper income brackets by 5+ points in 2000, with a lead that widened as you went up the income ladder. Trump lost the equivalent brackets in 2024 by 5+ points, a 10 point swing away from what Bush won them by. The lower brackets are even more stark, with a whopping 18-point swing towards Trump in the $30k-$50k bracket (inflation adjusted to $15k-$30k).
These numbers show that Trump is not a Republican in the George W Bush sense and he's certainly not a Republican in the Ronald Reagan sense. He's a populist and won on a populist agenda by putting together a coalition of rabid social conservatives (who probably really did go Bush in 2000) and poor people (who largely did not).
You are ignoring that trump rode to power explicitly by enabling the shittest of Republicans that already exist. To try and let republicans off the hook for supporting him, especially a 2nd time? Is hilarious
There are extremely superficial similarities here, but they're just that: extremely superficial. Along the same axis but in totally different orders of magnitude, and orders of magnitude make a difference.
Obamacare and communism are along the same axis too, but the Republicans who claimed they were the same thing were obviously wrong.
I'm upvoting you because you make a coherent argument, and votes here should be for that, not whether I agree with you or not.
I would agree he's not George Bush, much less Ronald Reagan. Nevertheless those who voted for Bush and Reagan also voted for Trump.
This has been "decades" in the making in the sense that since Obama was elected (in 2008), Republicans have embraced racism at the heart of their populist message. That swing rightward was made palatable to center republicans with a woman democratic candidate in 2016 (one not terribly well liked in democratic circles) and a black woman candidate in 2024.
While racism, and misogyny gather a bunch of votes, long-term distrust of institutions is sown, and fostered. Republican policy becomes protecting white guys, and especially old, rich, white guys.
Reagan was popular and competent, and worked for the good of America. Today's president is nothing like him, but wins because a bunch of people "vote Republican".
> Today's president is nothing like him, but wins because a bunch of people "vote Republican".
There's a component of that, but it's not the primary cause. A lot of former Republicans stopped voting Republican with Trump, including a lot of old rich white guys, and a lot of the current Republican voters didn't vote for Bush. He wins because of the new wave of voters that counterbalanced the flight of the educated core of the Republican establishment.
Populism is not an agenda it's a style. Also the majority of poor people voted Democrat, the majority of people with low education levels voted for Trump (which is not the same thing as dumb, although voting for Trump is dumb regardless of PhD or lack of HS diploma). There's overlap between low levels of education and income but if you define class by income then low income people mostly voted Dem
When someone hands you a pencil, you don't wonder what variety of tree the wood came from, or what paint chemistry was used for the coating. It's a pencil. You might have broad opinions on whether the one in your hand is comfortable to use, and sharp - but you leave the details to the pencil makers.
About 70% of the population engage with politics the same way: Leave the details to the people who do this stuff for a living.
Do they expect to be disappointed? Sure, but everyone who engages with politics expects to be disappointed.
This pencil was proudly advertised as being comprised of the remains of all that was decent in humanity. The fact that it wrote in blood was gleefully touted and cheered.
You are a pencil company director. A CEO candidate promised to cut expenses by 30% by eliminating waste. People who do this stuff for a living countered wood and graphite exceed 70% of your expenses. The CEO candidate proposed to increase graphite spending. Do you wonder what the CEO would do if hired?
This is exactly the attitude Putin tries to encourage in his population. If enough people don't pay attention or don't think what they do matters, it's easier to subjugate a population.
If people in the US aren't starting to notice what Musk/Trump are doing it will bode very poorly for the future of the US.
Frankly there's not much gleaned from stock prices over a short term. The market can be very reactive to events, but then quickly recover once the "new normal" is established.
There are certainly indications that the economy will contract (but by low single digits at worst.) 30% swings in stocks represent either highly inflated valuations before, or radically different outlooks after. That may be true for a stock here or there, but not the market as a whole.
The US bond market is a more interesting signal. That will affect future-debt cost, and that significantly moves the needle.
Frankly there's not much gleaned from stock prices over a short term
It's easy to disprove that. If it were to hold true, a "buy if the price is below the 100-day-mean, sell if above" would be profitable. And that approach would be exploited to the extent that this pattern goes away.
You're talking about an individual stock price. I'm talking about the market.
Put another way, your strategy completely works because stocks (as a market) trend upward. You'd want to better define "above" and "below" (because, transaction costs) and you'd also want to consider the period (100 days).
Its interesting to see how developers get into a mindset, based on their life experience.
What we're seeing here is 40 year old code compile and run with minimal effort. Largely because the C language has respected backwards compatibility.
Yes, there were breaking changes along the way, but they were trivial to resolve in hours. And (more interesting) the author believed that to be true and so persevered.
I saw this recently as well. I run a lot of programs on Windows. Many are 32 bit, written in the 90s for Windows 95, or 98. They all still run. Microsoft bends over backwards to keep things compatible.
I also get to write a lot of web API clients. I tell customers that it won't work forever. Web APIs are constantly changing. The service (especially Google) will change something soon to break it.
The people building those APIs are expecting only currently-maintained apps to run. They have no concept (or experience) of 40 or 30 year old code "just running". Crumbs, if you get 5 years out an API client you're doing well.
Yeah, the "porting" part was pretty trivial, all things considered. Any difficulty was really only as a consequence of certain patterns being unfamiliar or evolved. Once those patterns were identified, it was only "roll up your sleeves and do the work" to get it going again.
Working on this kind of got me re-thinking my approach to my personal projects again. What can I do today to best ensure my own code will be this easy to run in 30 years? As a corollary to that, what can I build today that will be interesting enough to want to run again in 30 years?
I think part of that is because those old Windows apps were distributed and forgotten about. There was no update procedure for many of them, and if there was it was just "buy a new disk" or at most "check the website and download a new EXE". Now that people have always-on internet connections, they expect to be able to get things instantly, and companies then expect to be able to push their updates instantly, and other companies expect that they can push their own update if someone else breaks their API, and so on and so forth until everyone expects everyone to have "the latest version" of everything.
It's the era of constant updates. I find it pretty annoying.
... all presuposing of course that the authors of that code are still around, and still want to make the effort of updating it.
In the enterprise world lots of software is more than a decade old, and no one is prepared to "update" it. The mindset in that space is for things to have longevity.
It's more of a mindset I think. Microsoft is clearly very focused on keeping things running. Apple (as a contrast example) is happy to change architecture, remove 32 bit support, and so on.
I agree it's a mindset, I just mean that that mindset has kind of coevolved with a bunch of other stuff.
Even Microsoft seems to be slipping. It seems like these days the (unstoppable!) Windows updates may actually change functionality and UI, which was much less common in the past. And of course the new versions of Windows are more aggressive about updating. They still maintain backwards compatibility for running third-party programs, but I feel like their mindset used to include more stability in their own software as well.
NTVDM is still out there from or based on NT source and still works too - 16 bit apps generally run as well. Microsoft chooses to not support them. last week I ran down the rabbit hole of how this works and how someone ported it to x64.
It's hard to monetize it without doing a bunch more work.
I monetize my code for a living. I'd say about 25% of my time is the fun part of writing the code (that just works for me.)
The rest is in debugging the code for all the edge cases, writing docs, examples, training, support etc. In other words the "work" part.
Minimally you need to do enough so that someone can use the code. The code itself has minimal value, the value is in the using.
Then you need to figure out how to reach an audience.
Then you need to decide if the user will pay, or maybe it's ad supported. Or maybe donations.
Hint: unless you have a large audience this will result in very minimal income. Is all this extra work worth it?
You can Open Source it, but frankly its unlikely anyone will find it or use it. It might be an interesting line on your CV, bit again probably of marginal value there.
My advice is that if it has little to no value to others, just move on.
I'm not downvoting you, because I think you make an argument that many would make.
"Tariffs apply to imports, so produce locally instead".
The argument unfortunately has 2 flaws;
A) local production is expensive (which is why manufacturers fled decades ago.) If it is reintroduced here those goods remain expensive.
B) most things are not made in one place. Steel comes from here, electronics from there, energy from somewhere else, and so on. Even farmers use imported fertilizer, machinery and so on. Since the Tariffs are on "everything" (not just finished goods) they drive up the cost of local manufacturing even more.
A long-term strategy to increase local production makes sense. But it has to be done in a targeted way so as not to harm everything else. Typically it starts with finished goods, then slowly working down the food chain to improve the supply of parts making up those goods.
Exemptions on finished goods (like electronics) kills any gain. He might have, for example, exempted electronic parts. Which would then incentivize assembly to be local. Once you have local assembly you could look at say packaging, and so on.
The approach taken though doesn't lead to the outcomes being touted. Tariffs at country level are dumb. Excempting finished goods is dumb. Tariffs on things that can't be made locally (like coffee) is dumb.
That's before we talk about stability and certainty. For Tariffs to work you need both, and neither are in play here.
Apple can agree to invest 500B to build a factory, but they don't have to actually do it.
Building a factory takes years, and a big chunk of that happens long before you actually start work on site.
You gotta find a site, work with local govt to negotiate servicing, environmental report (there's a couple years, and potentially a couple go-arounds right there.)
So there can be lots of activity, lots of progress reports, lots of optimism, for a decade or more before any real money has to be spent.
Ultimately Apple et al can "agree" to anything, the president can have his "big win" and things can carry on just as before.
I agree, at this point. There is of course voter agency in 2 years.
Of course lots of voters (specifically the ones that voted for this) are pretty happy with the way things are going. So any kind of blowback is uncertain at best.
If the population were genuinely interested in removing Trump, they could elect 60 democrats to the senate and a house majority, then impeach. But again, a healthy chunk are happy, and a lot if the rest can't vote Democrat for social / tribal reasons.
But make no mistake, he operates above the law because the people think it's OK. They alone have the power to remove him.
Not necessarily. First for soft reasons: media and tech companies spreading disinformation. Second for hard reasons: elections can be postponed for <reasons>.
Your monitors, those of a well-off power user, may have become larger. Most regular users I've seen are on 15" laptops with screens at 1366×768, or (if they're lucky) 1920×1080 with scaling at 1.25× or so. 17" desktop monitors used to be commonplace about 20 years ago.
The slightly larger screen real estate (if any) is more than wasted by very inefficient "modern UIs" where you won't find paddings smaller than 16px, with three buttons where there used to be enough space for 9.
Here's what'll really happen; no one cares or wants yo be a certified professional. Companies don't care about it. We carry on as is...
This is a classic over-engineered solution that nobody wants to a problem that barely exists. Just add burocracy, what could possibly go wrong...??
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