I live in the valleys of south Wales. Walk through old coal mining areas and you’ll occasionally find lumps of it on the ground.

Depends on the “they”…

But generally, back in the day data storage, memory and processing power were expensive. Multiple factors more expensive than they are now. Storing a year with two digits instead of four was a saving worth making. Over time, some people just kept doing what they had been doing. Some people just learned from mentors to do it that way, and kept doing it.

It was somewhat expected that systems would improve and over time that saving wouldn’t be needed. Which was true. By the year 2000 “modern” systems didn’t need to make that saving. But there was a lot of old code and systems that were still running just fine, that hadn’t been updated to modern code/hardware. it became a bit of a rush job at the end to make the same upgrade.

There is a similar issue coming up in the year 2038. A lot of computing platforms store dates as the number of seconds since the beginning of 1970-01-01 UTC. As I type this comment there have been 1,710,757,161 seconds since that date. It’s a simple way to store time/date in a way that can be converted back to a human readable format quite easily. I’ve written a lot of code which does exactly this. I’ve also written lot of code and data storage systems that store this number as a 32bit integer. Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296. That means at 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC, some of my old code will break, because it wont be able to properly store the dates.

I no longer work for that employer, I no longer maintain that code. Back when I wrote that code, a 32bit integer made sense. If I wrote new code now, I would use a different data type that would last longer. If my old code is still in use then someone is going to have to update it. Because of the way business, software and humans work. I don’t expect anyone will patch that code until sometime around the year 2037.

Lots of people are talking about this in terms of money… And we do live in a strongly capitalist society.

UBI or similar could be useful.

But… Money was created to find a way to compare one workers “value” to real world goods. When the worker doesn’t need goods (no AI needs 4 chickens and a bushel of grain a week) the workers value doesn’t need to be compared. There is less foundational value in money.

We could move away from net worth measured in hoarding money, and start taking about attending currencies such as social worth. Someones worth could be earned in being useful/helpful to society and we as a society could choose to give more resource to that person. Just an example, but a line of thought to go down

A totally separate area for discussion. I believe (most) people have a general need for purpose. Without “work” as we know it, lots of people could find themselves devoid of purpose. I have a feeling some of the ills of today’s world are because people are not finding social purpose in the work we do. Who really deeply cares about being the middle manager of a packaging company? I believe some of today’s mental health plagues are linked to this.

Remove even more “work” and do people find purpose in other things? Does that help or hinder?

Lots of people think with UBI we’ll all turn to art and culture. But frankly there’s only so much art each one of us can look at in a lifetime. What happens when too many people are sitting making boobs in clay? Do sculptures loose their artistic and cultural value? Is art and culture alone, enough to provide the whole of society with purpose?

Which is the greater of two evils? People being required to slog through monotonous work, or people having nothing to do at all?

So much chocolate weighed through the scales as “fresh veg potatoes”

we did have a meeting each Friday afternoon to go over what we did well that week

In my experience that highlights a difference in each of your “scales”; how long you can concentrate and focus; how often your interruptions are and how aligned your whole team is.

It sounds like you get less interruptions, more focus on items and your team is more aligned. Which means a lower cadence meeting works well, because you can spend more focus time.

For @GlitchyDigiBun@lemmy.dbzer0.com I suspect they are the opposite. More disruptions and less focus means you need a higher cadence and more chances to keep teammates up to date on who is doing what.

Personally, using teams/slack/whatever to keep up to date on this doesn’t work. As you can read on message, think someone is on one thing and miss the next message where they’ve changed tack. The DSU gives everyone a “reset” point. If you can get away with that weekly, absolutely great.

Where I currently work, SRE (but I’m much more tooling and product focussed and less on-call). My on-call teammates need a daily, I can comfortably join them 2 or 3 times a week on their DSU and not miss things.

These are hookers… just expensive ones

Blast freezer. It’s about as close as we’ll get any time soon. Not an affiliate or anything, just googled and found this bugger (about microwave sized).

https://www.nisbets.co.uk/polar-countertop-blast-chiller/ck640

That’s just how the world works.

And that’s kind of the discussion here.

Some people are annoyed at the Linux Devs because “fuck it, everyone breaks the law and it doesn’t matter”. Some people are annoyed at Nvidia because they’d like to uphold or social contracts.

In don’t think it’s naive to want to live in a world and support a society that supports the law. I do think we have bigger issues that people are happy with this behaviour and are actively defending it.

If your livelihood depends on a company breaking the law, you’ve got other issues.

Nvidia could choose to follow the law, their customers could choose to support them in that.

Part of the reason you can’t replace Nvidia, is because they get ahead by breaking the law. This makes it harder to compete with them.

Now you’re stuck with only Nvidia, and welcome to monopoly hell. A bit exaggerated I know, but it’s his it happens.

Nvidia could choose to improve performance using non-illegal tactics.

They haven’t.

I’m happy to live in a society wherev we support those upholding the law.

don’t expect that it will make them popular with anyone who actually uses Nvidia drivers on Linux

The group to be annoyed at are Nvidia. Plain and simple.

Microsoft did this with browsers.

HTML was a thing, that was implemented by other browsers at the time. Netscape Navigator (the precursor to Firefox) was a thing that already did HTML well. It could access the world wide web, and was the defacto standard.

Microsoft introduced internet explorer, bundled with Windows. At first, internet explorer was not as good/complete/compatible as Netscape Navigator. Over time, it got better almost to parity. But it also added new features, features not in the HTML specification. They were not added to the specification, and how IE would use those features was not made public. So Netscape could not implement them.

Users started to expect those features.

Over time, more webpages would break on Netscape than on IE. Web designers wanted the fancy new features of ie. So users moved away from Netscape.

If only a number of technical users care about something, that the “mainstream” (for want of a better word) doesn’t care about. Then things work less and less for the techies.

Meta could do the same with the Fediverse. As they already have market domination in other markets, they can introduce a lot of users to our “safe space”. But be real if posts stop working and you as a techie knows it’s because Meta have done something funky, Grandbob Jim isn’t likely to care. Grandbob Jim will continue to use what “works”. And some of the less techie of us will be forced to move to the MetaFediVerse to talk to our Grandbobs.