More work location flexibility is certainly something I would appreciate. The company I work for is hybrid and with the looming economy mess I’ve been putting off job hunting. I would much rather be somewhere with a network should things go sideways.

Noise cancelling headphones and background music helps a ton when I’m in the office. Stupid open office…

White collar professionals who spend their days developing and deploying software or working on compute infrastructure? Sure, some of them have been on Linux for decades. Although many big corpos love Windows and Microsoft products, so at best you’re going to have a foot in both worlds if you work at one of these companies.

Some admin jobs that don’t require bespoke software (ie very little beyond say an office suite) have started making the jump recently to save $$.

Basically every other white professional that needs to work on a computer with industry specific software like people in medical, engineers, business? Odds are they use windows since the software they use for their job is probably only built for Windows and maybe Mac if they’re lucky. Very few employers are going to mass deploy Linux to run applications via Wine. These employers have support contracts for the major software products their employees use and they won’t get support if they’re not running software on its native OS.

Straight up vibe coding is a horrible idea, but I’ll happily take tools to reduce mundane tasks.

The project I’m currently working on leans on Temporal for durable execution. We define the activities and workflows in protobufs and utilize codegen for all the boring boiler plate stuff. The project hasa number of http endpoints that are again defined in protos, along with their inputs and outputs. Again, lots of code gen. Is code gen making me less creative or degrading my skills? I don’t think so. It sure makes the output more consistent and reduces the opportunity for errors.

If I engage gen AI during development, which isn’t very often, my prompts are very targeted and the scope is narrow. However, I’ve found that gen AI is great for writing and modifying tests and with a little prompting you can get pretty solid unit test coverage for a verity of different scenarios. In the case of the software I write at work the creativity is in the actual code and the unit tests are often pretty repetitive (happy path, bad input 1…n, no result, mock an error at this step, etc). Once you know how to do that there’s no reason not to offload it IMO.

This whole reply was top shelf!

I am not sure that I completely understand your premise. Products are generally available during a depression. The best financial course of action today is to save money… unless the dollar becomes devalued too, which will make imports more expensive.

In terms of finances, doing things to lowering your fixed monthly bills is always a good idea - looming depression or otherwise. Since you’re in Texas and you’re all engineers, perhaps look into solar and/or battery storage for electricity? Do the math first obviously. A small(er) garden can help save some $$ but you have to be careful how much you spend on it.

If you’re coming from the perspective of wanting to provide value to your family, simply helping out around the house (cooking, cleaning, etc) and taking on projects you’ve all been putting off will probably go a long way. Your labor might not be cheaper than a builder’s now, but… Doing home repair/improvements, landscaping, building an out-building, building some outdoor shade, etc could be really appreciated.

If you’re looking to earn some $$, farming seems fairly depression proof, but should a depression hit people won’t be buying cash crops. Relative to labor input farming will likely not be very lucrative. Starting a side hustle/business might be a better option. It seems like the demand for repairing basically everything would go up. People will also be looking for cheap local distractions.

The YOLO option is to buy a ton of imports from a country you expect will have their currency strengthen relative to the dollar and then sell those items once the cost of them goes up, but this sounds super risky.

It’s good to hear that you have equipment already. If the wooded areas of your property have been that way for a while, odds are the soil in that area is pretty good. Granted, clearing the trees could take some work.

Before buying anything I suggest focusing on your goals and planning. If you’re more on the hobby vs commercial side of the spectrum I suggest starting small. Our garden is only 175 square feet of beds and pots, but it greatly reduces the amount of produce we buy during the summer and fall (yay zone 6).

I have another idea, but am going to break it out as a top level comment.

If you’re thinking about growing anything start considering:

• Your goals. Are you looking to sell some/all of your crop? Is this meant for sustince? A supplement to groceries?
• Land management. Do you want to let fields go fallow? Rotate crops? Grow cover and/or summer/winter crops? Till or no till?
• Equipment. Do you need to buy anything to help with maintenance, plowing, planting, harvestint, or processing the harvest?
• What you intend to grow. Do you want a few main crops? A ton of verity? Do you care about how easy it is to store? How do you want to balance calory density, nutrition, and flavor? Are you looking for single year or multi-year crops?
• What grows in your zone?
• Layout. How are you going to layout the planting area(s)? Do you need to worry about fencing? How about irrigation? Do you care about containing crops and/or weeds?
• Required inputs. Things like water, fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, etc. You will want pest and fungicides even if you’re going organic

Note that all of the above are strongly interrelated.

We have a decent size fruit/veg garden that’s mostly annuals. Despite having done this for 10 years, the last thing on my mind for the next season is whether or not I should buy fertilizer now.

A final suggestion: go in open eyed to the amount of effort this will take. The amount of labor required by our garden follows a boom and bust cycle. On some weeks I’m out there once for an hour. On other weeks I’m out there multiple times a week. If you’re not able to devote continual time to the garden then your crops, and yeilds, will suffer. Harvesting and processing is time consuming and is greatly influenced by what you grow. Doing something with perishable crops before they go bad can also be a challenge. Even with 40 sq ft of raspberries our family of four can’t keep up so we have to jam/can/freeze them or turn them into compost. The same is true of tomatoes and a bunch of other produce - especially if you plant crops that actually taste good and you pick them when ripe.

For passive, and even now some active loudspeakers, very much so.

Links for passives: https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/diy https://www.zaphaudio.com/ https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/speaker-kits/ (etc)

Active speakers are usually things like this and use commercially available parts with commercial software. But if you want you can build a DIY DSP and DAC and DIY amplifier. Note that there are tons of other designs for both available.

The DIY audio community is very vibrant. [There](https://www.diyaudio.com/community/] are tons and tons of forums collaboratively iterating. You can build [DIY headpy](https://github.com/ploopyco/headphones] and DIY headphone amplifiers. Hell, you can even build [DIY speaker drivers].

Anything I missed was not an intentional omission, lol.

I’m not an Apple fanboy, but arm based processors seem to be working out fairly well for them.

I own an Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, which was one of the OG snapdragon x laptops released a (two?) and a half ago. It took a while for folks to get Linux to run on them and there’s enough of a barrier to entry that it’s still not very common. Most of the initial hurdles were due to Qualcomm bootloader shenanigans.

A reminder of more sane times, but also some level of presence

2x27" 1440 monitors with zero zoom is bliss. There’s literally so much space for activities, things are nice and readable, you still have actual screens if you screen share, etc.

It sounds like we have basically the same setup.

You’re 100% correct at a sane company. At my employer the hardware team is incentivised to cut costs and impacts to productivity are someon else’s problem. Corporate metrics lead to some pretty hilarious situations.

Same

“His” DLC for borderlands 3 was one of the high points of that game. I’m currently replaying 1 and while it’s fun 2 is just so much more engaging with Jack.

Assembly is relatively straightforward, but sourcing all the components locally is likely getting harder and harder. Granted, for DoD contract reasons there’s likely a cottage industry that relies on government rules to keep things onshore. That’s part of the reason why we still have some made in the USA clothing.

This is worth a listen or a watch if you’re interested.

Speaking and talking are colloquially used to describe people communicating in sign language. “I speak ASL”, “I talk ASL”, etc.

Definitions of the words speak and talk cover non-verbal communication.

Speak: to express feelings by other than verbal means

Talk: to express or exchange ideas by means of spoken words or sign language

That said, I agree that OP was likely asking about spoken word.

Maintaining a changelog for very large app development organizations is also a pretty damn hard task, trying to coordinate whatever all teams are releasing in a particular build.

I feel this in my bones. Our biggest device contains hundreds of apps and firmware. We generally update the apps and firmware together. It’s nearly impossible to summarize the changes in a meaningful way. What issues were fixed? Likely a few hundred. What new features were added or improved? Another big list. Management thought AI would magically solve this problem, but it turns out that it has no idea which things are worth mentioning vs which should be glossed over.

It sucks both internally and externally.

I was able to find a post of this image daring back to 2023.

Doesn’t mean it’s not AI, just means it’s a lot less likely.

OnePlus still offers this one on some of their phones.