Seems like many people here in Germany also don't want anything to do with the US any longer as well. I myself wouldn't go to the US, even before Trump, and recently also heard from someone else, who wants to travel around the world, that they will not be visiting the US, due to what is going on over there. Just 2 anecdotes, N=2 of course, but I can imagine many people sharing the worries or concerns about visiting the US.
Statistics Canada has over the last year shown that tourism to US from Canada is down by a lot and it's not getting better. Hell, as an anecdote, I keep seing ads on TV like: Come to Disneyland! We got rebates for canadians!
I go to Disneyland nearly every weekend and the increase in foreigners is insane. Clearly a lot of people visiting that would have been going to Florida decided on California instead.
As a Floridian who owns a unit in a condotel [1]. The property management company is outright saying that tourism is down affecting income. All of the other owners who were dumb enough to buy them as “investments” are complaining.
We don’t care because we are the only people who live there mostly year round and only leave during spring break and the summer when domestic tourism is high.
Fallen far, or maybe we are just more aware now, but anyway, I don't think that a lecture in ethics at university will fix things. That's:
(A) way too late, and
(B) without a strong character to begin with, this lecture will simply become a "necessary chore" for students, and basically go in one ear, and out the other ear. (Does that saying/phrase translate to English?)
By the time people start their undergrad, if they are not already at least trying to act ethically, that ship has sailed for most. Their upbringing and education did not manage to drill that into them before. I see it as more of an early childhood and parenting topic. If the parents are not leading by example and teaching their children ethics, then the children are often just going with the flow, not swimming against the current to uphold ideals. Why would they, if the other way is easier. I think it is rare, that people adopt ethics that they have not grown up with / raised according to.
So I would advocate ethics as a mandatory subject at school, if not primary school already.
It would not have hurt to make a version of wikipedia, that will work without JS for the most part, including all that is important. However, that requires a mindset for supporting static pages, which is mostly what W should consist of, and would require a skill set, that is not so common among web developers these days. Such a static version would be much easier to test as well, since all the testing framework would need to do is simple requests, instead of awaiting client-side JS execution resulting in mutation of content on the page.
The biggest damage is the souring of relations with other countries, who now no longer see the US as a reliable business partner. They have nudged countries in the EU to rather look to China. The longer Trump is in office, the bigger the damage gets. The long term course might already be set away from the US and towards China. The loss for the US cannot even be estimated yet.
Also the US is working hard on losing their military dominance. Engaging in unnecessary wars, offending its allies left and right, who are now starting to invest more into their own military, since they have learned, that they cannot rely on the US any longer, while China plays the catch-up game and is getting closer to US military capability every year.
Reputational damage is enormous of course and the US hands China easy PR wins after wins.
This seems to be the current trend. Projecting this into the future, it seems likely, that in 10, 20, 30 years from now, the most powerful global player might be China, instead of the US. Obviously, in decades a lot can happen. Future US administrations however have got a lot of repair work cut out for them. How can they convince international partners, that this does not repeat in the future, the next time a crazy administration is elected? Can they at all? Or can they fix the political landscape in their own country in that timespan? It kinda looks like their are stuck.
This has led to a completely overblown design of at least their website. All these cutesy pictures of bubble tea, way too big graphical wrappers, no simple page that is labeled "screenshots", no explanation what "bubbletea" actually is, ... One would think it to be a simple task to mention somewhere that this is a TUI library, where one can see it at the first glance. But apparently not. Instead I am seeing:
Your new coding bestie, now available in your favourite terminal. Your tools, your code, and your workflows, wired into your LLM of choice. This is artificial intelligence made glamourous.
Eh, so something about AI tools? And is "Crush" another tool than "bubbletea"? Why am I seeing something about "Crush" and not about "bubbletea"?
Maybe it's simply not my taste. For a TUI library, I expect serious listings of what it can do, what it supports, what it helps you with. Is it a layer on top of ncurses? Features and use-cases over meaningless authority arguments like "Look who uses this too!".
I also see:
We make the command line glamorous.
I don't want my command line to change! I configured it to be just how I like it. What they mean is, that they make command line applications using their library "glamorous" (whatever that means). I have a suggestion for a better slogan: "Your advanced command line widgets library" or "Library for advanced TUI applications".
In a world of boring corporate "rounded corners are less aggressive" websites and app designs, I really appreciate something that is more out there. Crush is their "opencode"-ish app and is my go to when not using CC or CopilotCLI directly. Sure, it everyone's cup of (bubble) tea but that is kind of the great part, it doesn't have to nor does try to be.
From my interactions with younger engineers, this is what "they're looking for". I think we're just used to a different format, so our expectations don't match the reality. Our instincts are different, maybe? Not sure.
I think it's both completely valid to feel this way, and also valid for them to have fun with their design and aesthetic. If you already know what charm does, it makes perfect sense and is cool to see.
Ok but who cares about your finance department, and more importantly, why would your finance department care for a technology choice of the engineering teams? The fucked up thing is your finance department in this scenario, not Charm
Sadly, many interviewers will be fine with someone who simply memorized without actually understanding much, and not fine with someone needing to think and slowly coming to a solution, being able to explain it, because oh that did take more time than the interviewer had allotted for the task. Sadly, many interviewers and the adjacent HR departments are utterly failing in the communications part too.
If only more engineers admitted, that something they wrote is not good code, but a product of its time, then I think we would get more realistic expectations.
It's OK to say that something you made is shit. It is OK to say that you were not given time to do xyz.
How you recognize something has been made fitting at least is, when you see it in use without much of a change for some 3 or 4 years and while you are the person maintaining it, you rarely ever need to touch it, because you built it in a way that is simple enough to not have tons of bugs yet flexible enough, to cover use-cases and anticipated use-cases.
Not the GP, but when I take strolls through some open source project hosted on GitHub, usually I am not impressed either. Unnecessary OOPism, way too long procedures, that instead could be pure functions, badly named variables, and way, way, waaay too many willy-nilly added dependencies. If that is what the LLMs mostly learn from, I am not surprised at all. But then again this stuff was also written by humans. I remember one especially bad case of a procedure in a very popular project (in its niche) that was basically a 1 man show. A procedure of 300+ lines doing all kinds of stuff, changing the global state of that service it is implementing. But that code was or is relied upon by tech giants and other businesses and no one improves it. They are happy with paying that one guy probably not so much money.
It is my experience, that Outlook is not a reliable e-mail service. Sometimes e-mails are not delivered, or only delivered hours later. When they are delivered, even as a paying customer, they are downloaded so slowly, that I had to wait 10 minutes to get all my e-mails, while my 1 EUR per month Posteo provider delivers in seconds.
My impression is, that the only reason one would want to have MS as a mail provider is, that they are entrenched in the e-mail provider reputation and delivery game. Other than that, it seems to be an all around bad service. Not even talking about the mail client itself.
The big reason is enterprises buy into O365 and running their email through Outlook instead of on-prem or at another provider is part of that. For the same reason they use Teams over Zoom or Slack or other alternatives.
Yup. It's really the cheapest not the best. And Microsoft sell directly to our C suite who have white glove IT support that do everything for them so they never see any issues.
The old saying of "Microsoft is better at talking to your boss than you are" is certainly true though. Unfortunately.
edit: The truth hurts apparently.
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