100% agreed. Weirdly, Starmer was very left-leaning during his time as a prosecutor, and a lot of people assumed that he’d be a rising force of the left when he moved into politics. Sadly, he seems closer to the right than even Blair did…

As someone from the UK, I absolutely do not think that 13% of the population can speak French to an acceptable level. I’d go as far as to say that 13% of the population can barely speak English to an understandable level…

Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.

*If you’re in the US.

Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…

I work at a FAANG company. I’ve also worked at startups and smaller national companies. They’re all morally bankrupt, just in many different ways.

Hell, I’ve worked for “tech for good” clients that have done reprehensible things that required legal intervention…

I’m almost positive that David Beckham isn’t a citizen of the US. That’s almost definitely by choice, given that he’d meet the criteria for investment several times over.

While I appreciate the offer, I think my wife would probably not be too happy with me taking another lover. 😂

That’s absolute nonsense. Most countries have similar paths to entry. They also have paths that support specific jobs that are required by the country - something the US does not. Finally, many of them have easy and clear paths to naturalisation - again something the US doesn’t have.

Just because unskilled nationals make it into your country, it doesn’t mean that immigration in your country is easier than other countries. Every right-winger moans about the same thing in every country you’ve listed…

Haha, what do you base that on?!

My experience is the exact opposite. I’m a software engineer at a big tech company, and in this climate even they are unable to sponsor a visa to the US from the UK. Literally anywhere else? Sure, no problem at all, whether it be Europe, Singapore, China, Japan, Egypt, Australia, anywhere we have an office - except America.

To be fair, outside of London you’ll find that the starting salary for many degree-level jobs is around that, including jobs like software developer. I’m in Bristol, and the pay disparity is hilariously bad - a senior designer will earn less than a manager at Burger King…

I think the “underpaid teacher” thing isn’t necessarily rooted in reality,. especially outside of the US. My wife is a teacher in the UK, and she’s a head of her subject. For many years her pay was similar to mine as a software engineer, but everyone often treated her as if she was poor and that I was rich.

When I was at school, Sunny D and Vodka was a recommended mix to make you ill enough to throw up and miss school the next day. I can’t believe people willingly drink this shit…

I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.

Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…

From a company perspective, it’s a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they’ve had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.

I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they’re in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we’ve seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.

My dream is an “internet archive” for all video games, modded to run offline. If the game becomes unavailable for purchase, the archive opens that game and makes it available for all.

The next step is for this kind of release to become law, and supported by manufacturers.

I liked Outer Worlds, but while I do see some “NV magic” there, it feels like both Bethesda AND Obsidian are no longer the same companies that they once were. Obsidian are still quietly putting out some solid games…but not to the same quality of two generations prior.

Tribalism is surprisingly rampant in gaming, especially when a developer picks a side/is acquired by the creator of “their” console.

Meal deals are a British staple. Many office workers will grab a sandwich, a snack, and a drink during a lunch break. That’s probably why this has made the news here, because if you wanted to poison the most people at the same time this is probably the best way.

Sadly, I don’t see Gimp ever competing with Photoshop. It’s not necessarily a feature parity thing, nor is it a mind share thing. It’s as you’ve said - it’s not built by creatives to be the best possible tool for many types of design.

It’s truly a shame, because for years Adobe slept on different aspects of digital design, and there was a true opportunity to build a Linux-first tool that made things like Web Design so much simpler. It’s an unpopular opinion, but Linux window managers have always lacked creative input. There has always either been a design-by-commitee, or a design-by-engineer feel - and this is reflected in how poor Gimp and design tools are in the Linux space.

In reality, Linux could have the best photo editing and design-specific tooling, but sadly the tooling either lacks a creative touch, or lacks features that are truly needed to be competitive.

Haha, what?

We literally predicted Trump before you voted for him, because of the right-wing populism that caused Brexit.

I use Windows. It does what it needs to do, and while I haven’t upgraded past 10, it’s not complained about much.

At home I switch between Fedora and Windows, but at work I use OSX because using Linux at work gets you a shitty laptop instead of a MBP. I work for a big tech company, with the Windows and Mac user communities being pretty much the same size. What I’ve noticed is that Windows is fairly tolerable, and often has few issues that don’t need IT intervention. The MacOS community, while often being more technical because it’s used by tech workers, has a lot more issues than any other. Major OS updates are events that take months of planning because it’s guaranteed that thousands of people will essentially brick their laptops trying to just do a standard upgrade. Everything seems to break all the time, which is mad when you consider that Apple is a trillion dollar company with one hardware line. Windows and Linux support many hardware lines.

Ultimately, you know what you’re getting with each choice. All I care about is that my OS does what it intends to do.