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@graydon @dresstokilt Yep: it is glaringly obvious today that "the menace of the communist international conspiracy!!!" was 100% right-wing projection (of what they wished they could get away with, or what—once the Heritage Foundation got going—of what they were actively trying to achieve).

@qhstone @jzillw

Back in 1990 in the middle of a recession and with no job I once WALKED OUT of a job interview when I asked my interviewers about their plans going forward and the answer ended with, "… but we upgrade to COBOL next year".

In 1990.

@negative12dollarbill @blogdiva Yes, but first I have to *earn* the money. (I'm still in a rough patch financially following a year of downtime due to COVID then finishing a series of novels that had dwindling sales before spinning up a new series, because: COVID and age-related decline in energy.)

@Gnuxie Businesses figure on replacing the PCs on their staff desktops every 2 years. Long habit from the 80s/90s and an expectation that company kit will be hammered hard.

@joXn @charette Boeing *today* is run by McDonnell-Douglas management, which is why they can't build another 777. McD-D lost the market war but won by a management reverse takeover. This is how industries die. (Airbus are eating their lunch despite the giant miss-step that was the A380.)

@blogdiva I rely on these machines for earning my living. Still, with prices soaring I'm going into "make do and mend" mode for the foreseeable future. And turning old kit over to Linux or BSD …

@graydon @furicle This goes back a long way, though. I remember being appalled in 1991 when the windscreen wiper on my car packed up and discovering it needed a sealed assembly with motor, gearing, and two arms to fix it—it wasn't designed to be repairable. (I shared a house with a car kitbasher, though, so he got it working again: opened it up and replaced the stripped plastic gear.)

@markdennehy @blogdiva Actually most of that storage is redundant backup drives :)

@Kierkegaanks It probably *will* kill the industry. A lot of smaller VARs will go out of business, bigger ones will see sales stagnate and be forced to put up prices b/c the data center futures bids are ramping prices, then the bubble will burst and we're in Great Depression 2.0. Not much will come through that intact.

I just noticed I have 18Tb of storage plugged into my desktop (a laptop with its own 2Tb of built-in SSD) and WTF am I doing with it all?!?

@blogdiva

RE: https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116127740444038853

The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*. The only way for hardware sales to go in future is *down* because your next PC or Mac will work just fine until it breaks or dies of old age. So by ramping prices artificially via this RAM/SSD futures bullshit, they're keeping profits high for as long as possible.

@FrankEndrullat @charette Yet it was only a non-event *because the remediation work got done properly ahead of time*. It's led to an infuriating denialism: like anti-vaxxers, they're ignoring the huge amount of hard work that went into making sure nothing happened, and assume it means nothing *can* happen.

Next time we won't be so lucky.

@ThePolishDispatch I think a chunk of what's wrong with US banking is that there are far too many tiny regional institutions and inter-bank commerce is ridiculously high friction.

@ThePolishDispatch Western European banks got computers around the same time as American banks. However, they're structured differently: eg. the UK has no state banks (unless you count Scotland and Northern Ireland, and their banks *issue banknotes*) but half a dozen *very large* high street banks who deal with the public, and a larger number of smaller investment banks, plus building societies (shareholder owned lenders for real estate mortgages). And Visa/MC are franchises run by the banks!

@MarfyMazie @skolima

The only app/no in-person in banking is a cost-control thing: app-mediated service is *vastly* cheaper than putting trained staff behind a counter in prime high street real estate (with banking security on top).

Law firms deal with processes that have time scales measured in decades to (occasionally) centuries. Banks don't usually have to worry about anything older than the term of a just-now-maturing mortgage. Trusts, however …

#ScribesAndMakers Feb 25—Would you stream your creative process/the creation of your work? Why or why not?

Nobody sane would want to watch me staring at a screen for hours, occasionally typing something then deleting it. "Paint drying" BEGINS to approach how dull the experience would be. (Also, I probably pick my nose without realizing.)

The most entertainment would be @Menhit jumping on the desk to pick a dominance fight, and she'd be out of the field of view of the webcam most of the time.

@8r3n7 My experience was of '96-2000.

In 2008/09, half the main banks in the UK were nationalized to stop them going bust and taking half the populations' mortgages and savings with them. They ended up back in private hands again a decade later.

@quinn @jzillw I spent a few years doing back end dev in a payment service provider that hooked into all the big British high street banks. About 10% of their managers were brilliant, 70% were a waste of oxygen, and 20% were clearly undercover anarchists seeking the downfall of capitalism by weaponizing Svejk-like cheerful ineptitude.

@Uilebheist If I wasn't expecting a global financial crisis in the next few months, now would be a good time to pick up some IBM shares.

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905

Absolutely true.

(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)