patrick.net

i can tell you that most people don’t know how to find clients. thats not industry specific.

FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden says

i can tell you that most people don’t know how to find clients. thats not industry specific.

What's your vocation?

I've only been able to create this business by hiring overseas developers. UNBELIEVABLE cost difference.

Does anyone think that salaries will, at some point, take a nasty hit?

GNL says

There are endless businesses and industries, imo, that offer amazing opportunities to skilled developers. Why don't you do it?

I've run a couple of businesses. There is an old saying; "When you run your own business you get to make your own hours, any twelve hours seven days a week you want". Most people don't have the motivation, and patience, to create a successful business.

GNL says

Does anyone think that salaries will, at some point, take a nasty hit?

They already are. For the first time we seem to have more developers than jobs, and it's making it harder to get hired, harder to get raises, and noticed many companies are asking a LOT more for less pay.

NuttBoxer says

GNL says

Does anyone think that salaries will, at some point, take a nasty hit?

They already are. For the first time we seem to have more developers than jobs, and it's making it harder to get hired, harder to get raises, and noticed many companies are asking a LOT more for less pay.

Depends on the business. If it's too complex you can't outsource, it will burn you. If it's a relatively simple, straightforward website, then sure. I don't get the impression that there was a shortage of jobs or reduction in pay. But recent layoffs in big tech probably made the job market a bit tighter. The thing is if you hire one competent hands-on principal engineer/architect, he will do the work of 3 outsourced contractor workers easily, if not 4.

NuttBoxer says

many companies are asking a LOT more for less pay.

This trend has been going on for a while and is decoupled from the job market saturation. Companies in every sector have been using all sorts of excuses, covid being the latest, to shutter customer service and do more work with far less people. But the need to perform.that work didn't necessarily go away, the service just turned to shit. Developers these days are supposed to be infrastructure/ops engineers, db admins, and full stack devs. SV prinicpal/senior eng salaries seem to have topped out around 200k base for most companies. They will likely take a breather, but certainly not go down with inflation going up. Also many devs have started to work more than one position from home to male up for inflation, which of course tightens the market further for mediocre engineers.

Development and the Software Design Life Cycle has been so dumbed down over the last 10 to 15 years. New raw fresh talent has been replaced with frameworks and CRM end users. They have hijacked the process and dumbed it down to the point, I don't care to work in that environment anymore. Working with a team used to be a creative process with developers challenging each other to make the most efficient and usable design. Now you bring a great design to the table and less capable members of the team has decided that out of the box frameworks, and third party APIs or cloud micro services. In the end I got to toxic to work with. All of the sensible designs and models I presented was passed over for convoluted out of the box solutions. So I left, three years on, they still haven't gone live with the software, I originally wrote in 3 months, over to a Salesforce implementation.

Which is another thing about development. You pour all your being into a project with a hard deadline. Working late nights, all weekend, forgoing holiday festivities as you work on deadlines for requirement versions. Then no matter how good or successful the software is. When upper management is shaken up, the new CEO, CIO or other executives. Always want to scrap what ever software they are running as "Legacy" and commit that company to a multimillion dollar cloud ERP. Their reason is more shellfish than they don't have faith in the existing architecture and software. They want the implementation of a big tech name brand Cloud system on their resume. And they don't seem to care if the bankrupt the company while doing it.

It has become a thankless job.

Just look at all of the amazing software that has come and gone, even though those companies and the software is still around. Those earlier versions were far superior.

Corel 5 through 7 was the best Corel Draw and Photo Paint, Adobe 3 was the prime of that. Even the .net platform has been dumbed down with .Core. Windows even it seems Linux is the only software that improved their GUI and not managed to dumb it down. But depending on who you ask that's a travesty. But at least it's more accessible than it has ever been.

I'm jaded and burnt out. I would love for challenging smarties to return to the field, I would return in a second. But unfortunately the HR folks hiring wokester everyone gets a prize cry babies. That wont happen anytime soon.

GNL says

I've only been able to create this business by hiring overseas developers. UNBELIEVABLE cost difference.

Does anyone think that salaries will, at some point, take a nasty hit?

Yes, because of AI. If you could fire your overseas employees and let GPT-4 or whatever do their work for a subscription fee, wouldn’t you? You’re still the software architect who writes the base and sets the parameters.
AI is coming for Dev jobs. Might be another five years, but it might also be way sooner. AI is evolving rapidly.

Shaman says

GNL says

I've only been able to create this business by hiring overseas developers. UNBELIEVABLE cost difference.

Does anyone think that salaries will, at some point, take a nasty hit?

Yes, because of AI. If you could fire your overseas employees and let GPT-4 or whatever do their work for a subscription fee, wouldn’t you? You’re still the software architect who writes the base and sets the parameters.
AI is coming for Dev jobs. Might be another five years, but it might also be way sooner. AI is evolving rapidly.

I'm skeptical. ChatGPT will be a glorified search engine and Client/interface creator for open specs. Not more. Companies with valuable IP will never publish stuff that could be stolen by ChatGPT. It will replace some entry level jobs though. I see better value for AI in marketing/trends/Customer service/sales than SW development. Maybe even trading, however once everyone trades via ChatGPT, how do you differentiate your firm to successfully front run others? Big pitfalls await those relying on AI. Also competitors will engage in generating false information/trends to feed those using AI, similar to the AF model. It will certainly be fun but I'd be careful about potentially huge dislocations in the market caused by "faulty" AI. The current HFTs already produced many flash crashes and squeezes, the real game will be to front run them.

You have a right to be skeptical. So many things with promise never made it off the launch pad. I really do think AI is inevitable tho. I thought it was a decade or more from impacting my life, but it’s already beginning to now.

Shaman says

You have a right to be skeptical. So many things with promise never made it off the launch pad. I really do think AI is inevitable tho. I thought it was a decade or more from impacting my life, but it’s already beginning to now.

It's perfect for creating a web clients for an open api spec. It will burn some companies currently providing such services. If the spec or input/output is fuzzy, who knows. My worry is all customer service replaced by ChatGPT making the current automated telephone/chat nightmare even worse lol

Tenpoundbass says

But unfortunately the HR folks hiring wokester everyone gets a prize cry babies. That wont happen anytime soon.

Find a problem in an industry, solve it and start your own company.

How can I implement ChatGPT into my customer service duties?

GNL says

How can I implement ChatGPT into my customer service duties?

Please don't ;) there are cheap assistants overseas. I think people prefer the human voice / touch

GNL says

Find a problem in an industry, solve it and start your own company.

I will after a certain point, there's no point in solving problems for business owners. That are forced or willingly, hire people who will sabotage, the effectiveness of my efforts, through their gross negligence, due to wokism. Everything is cyclic, these idiots just have to cycle through.

mell says

GNL says

How can I implement ChatGPT into my customer service duties?

Please don't ;) there are cheap assistants overseas. I think people prefer the human voice / touch

Yeah I don't get that it takes AI to do what they used to do very easily with this.




"for sales press 1"
"for customer service press 2"
https://www.telcom-data.com/merlin-phone-system

mell says

GNL says

How can I implement ChatGPT into my customer service duties?

Please don't ;) there are cheap assistants overseas. I think people prefer the human voice / touch

If my competitors do it, I'll probably have to as well. I never wanted to send photos overseas for touch up/editing but, my competitors did and I had to follow suit. Profit is a must.

mell says

My worry is all customer service replaced by ChatGPT making the current automated telephone/chat nightmare even worse lol

In my case, I would only need it to answer Frequently Asked Questions. And walk customers through a set on instructions.

So, what is the difference of having a chat box on my website vs. ChatGPT? Can't a chat box pull from a database of responses/questions?

GNL says

There are endless businesses and industries, imo, that offer amazing opportunities to skilled developers. Why don't you do it?

I'm a developer. I'm disgusted with the corporations I've previously worked for. I worked for a company that made DC Fast charging, but I have no faith or belief in electric cars, and (surprise), most people that run these companies don't either, but it's a way to make money.

The difficulty in starting your own company is finding out what people want.

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk? I can build that. I'm working on NAT traversal to do it - normally you need to futz around with your modem to "poke holes" in your NAT - i.e. when somebody connects to your IP address, you tell the modem "when it's on port X forward those packets to machine Y". My solution would require that you run software on your phone / tablet / laptop / whatever to handle the NAT traversal. You'd have to download a problem, but you wouldn't need to do any setup.

You can then send and receive files of any arbitrary size. For example, I can send my sister a 4 GB file at 2:00 - 6:00 am and the file will be available in the morning.

I'm expanding this to incorporate email, although THAT email system won't work with what you consider "regular" email. SMTP is a mess (that's the protocol for mail), and it was made before we had even settled on using TCP/IP for communication. There's all sorts of outdated weirdness with it and really, nobody uses email anymore, simply because of the SPAM problem. I can eliminate this by allowing your "email address" to ONLY be given out, if the person giving out your email address identifies that they did. In other words, is my friend gives you my email address, he HAS to identify he did it, otherwise you cannot contact me, and if he gives out my email address to a spam marketer, I can identify that it was HE that did it.

I would like to get a USEnet server running on it as well, and perhaps using a FUSE file system to link boxes up to share files automatically across machines.

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk? I can build that.

Then the next management shakeup, the new guy will say an out of box cloud solution is better.

Between 1997 to 2010, there wasn't anything better than the Microsoft architecture and DNA. The problem with that, you really really REALLY had to know your shit.
Whether it was a Windows Form solution or ASP.net solution. The MVC killed it. The MS developers missed the whole point of the Microsoft MVC framework. It was to showcase what you could do with a custom generic http handler, which that was all MVC really was. It removed the page lifecycle and separated the model from the view. I used Generic Handlers to go way beyond that that most people didn't even try. And if you had other MVC apps, you can call those controllers from anywhere. People got too Nazi with the whole MVC thing. It over complicated things to the point, that the upper management was ready to give kids fooling around with open source nonsense a whack at the enterprise. After that software development started being a democracy, and the enterprise lost all respect for a well capable developer's skills and prowess. In their minds anything you could do, Kubernetes and Panda could do better. Only they never got past the hello world sample.

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk?

Tell me the benefits I would experience by having a web server on my desk. Explain it by what problem it solves for ME.

Tenpoundbass says

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk? I can build that.

Then the next management shakeup, the new guy will say an out of box cloud solution is better.

Between 1997 to 2010, there wasn't anything better than the Microsoft architecture and DNA. The problem with that, you really really REALLY had to know your shit.
Whether it was a Windows Form solution or ASP.net solution. The MVC killed it. The MS developers missed the whole point of the Microsoft MVC framework. It was to showcase what you could do with a custom generic http handler, which that was all MVC really was. It removed the page lifecycle and separated the model from the view. I used Generic Handlers to go way beyond that that most people didn't even try. And if you had other MVC apps, you can call those controllers from anywhere. People got too Nazi wit...

Frankly, that all went over my head.

My thinking is that because of censorship, people will be forced to move decentralization. Another thing is that with an internet connection, you really don't need a phone or a television or any of that other nonsense. You just need a data connection, and through that, you can get anything.

I really don't like HTTP either. The protocols built around it are SO COMPLICATED that nobody can be certain that a browser is secure. There's all these OLD OLD tools for Unix that are forgotten but were awesome. Ever use "ytalk"? It's a cross between an instant messenger and a phone call. As you type, the character shows up immediately on the other side, and I know you're thinking "what good is that"? Well, when you use it, you can talk over one another without stomping on what the other person is saying, and you can complete thoughts before they complete them. This may sound frustrating and annoying at first, but it's actually more intimate than a phone call in expressing ideas, and quicker than using an Instant Messenger, since frequently you don't have to entirely complete a thought.

GNL says

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk?

Tell me the benefits I would experience by having a web server on my desk.

Privacy for one, ease of setup for two.

Instead of having a page on Facebook for your family to talk, you just have your box, and you talk about anything you like, with no possibility of even being monitored or censored. It doesn't have to be entirely public either, you can set it up so ONLY your family can use it, so you can openly discuss Mom's heart condition, or that Uncle Frank has gotten senile - private stuff you don't want to air outside of the family.

There's no reason to limit the box to just one purpose either. You can have multiple groups - say a group for work, and another group for your private business venture with 10 friends, your train hobby, and charity group you work with.

The idea is that its both impossible to censor, and can be public or private within a group, but any data you create or post, belongs to you, and cannot be removed by the government, or facebook, or the social justice nutcase whining that you've offended them.

mell says

Depends on the business. If it's too complex you can't outsource, it will burn you.

I've worked at companies in a lot of different industries, all sizes. Outsourcing or heavy reliance on contractors always leads to lower quality, and creation of massive tech debt. If you need shit on the wall to launch an idea, maybe. But as soon as you've got any traction, get some real engineers in there.

richwicks says

GNL says

richwicks says

Think people would want a box that basically is a web server on their desk?

Tell me the benefits I would experience by having a web server on my desk.

Privacy for one, ease of setup for two.

Instead of having a page on Facebook for your family to talk, you just have your box, and you talk about anything you like, with no possibility of even being monitored or censored. It doesn't have to be entirely public either, you can set it up so ONLY your family can use it, so you can openly discuss Mom's heart condition, or that Uncle Frank has gotten senile - private stuff you don't want to air outside of the family.

There's no reason to limit the box to just one purpose either. You can have multiple groups - say a group for work, and another group ...

So, you're selling a 100% privacy solution? Well, as long as the other person on the other end is not recording your conversation or communicating with you while unknow persons are present?

Shaman says

Yes, because of AI.

Ahh, that was good for laugh. Thanks, needed that.

Tenpoundbass says

I will after a certain point, there's no point in solving problems for business owners. That are forced or willingly, hire people who will sabotage, the effectiveness of my efforts, through their gross negligence, due to wokism. Everything is cyclic, these idiots just have to cycle through.

There are still good companies out there. Interviewing with a family run, Midwest lumber SAAS company this week. You look at their site, all you see is focus on customer service, not one line about inclusiveness, or any of that bullshit. Pretty for that reason alone, they are my front-runner. I don't think I can take another woke company, and thank God, seems like I won't have to.

NuttBoxer says

Midwest lumber SAAS company this week

I would LOVE to know more about what this SAAS does for it's industry.

GNL says

So, you're selling a 100% privacy solution? Well, as long as the other person on the other end is not recording your conversation or communicating with you while unknow persons are present?

I'm developing a 100% privacy solution.

Yes, of course, anything can be recorded, ANYTHING. Say you want to record a film that from Netflix, you just run the application in a virtual machine, and record the screen. It's that easy. DRM be damned. You cannot stop it. Even with end to end encryption to your television, you can just take the decoded image driving the display to output its data to machine that just records the image being produced. You cannot stop it. That's a complicated way to do it, but you can do it. Blu-ray was "cracked" initially by some person that setup a script to advance the video one frame at a time, and screen shot the image each frame. They then pulled the audio (I don't know how, could have been done through analog) and then used a program to encode all the images into film again. It took a lot of memory storage, but they literally cracked it in a DAY - just to prove they could do it, and there was ENORMOUS amounts of work put into to make Blu-ray impossible to record. The FIRST day Blu-ray went on sale, the FIRST film was cracked a day later.

The real goal is that the people who have access to it can privately communicate. I fully realize the danger of this, however there is direct political censorship by our government. I can't think of another solution around that, despite the dangers.

You know what the dark web is? It's just non indexed web sites. I run "a node" on the "Dark Web", only I can access it. I don't put anything illegal on it, but I recognize that people could with my solution. Ever heard of Peter Scully? Don't go too far into that really horrific case, and it's horrible. But that's ALREADY done with conventional tools today. Every technology is misused and that's unfortunate. I do wish we lived in a better world.

I do support some level of censorship, but our own fucking intelligence run things like Epstein's island. Who owns that island now? Probably Mossad.

I have foreboding about what I'm working on, but if we don't have a 1st amendment, and the ability to communicate, we're going to all end up slaves. I do not want to further enable evil, but when my own fucking government does it, do I have a choice? I can see the benefits of having USEnet resurrected - I miss that. I used to be able to TRIVIALLY talk to people all over the planet, can't easily do that now, not AS easily anyhow. I mean heck, you'd be on some innocent USEnet group and make friends with somebody in Italy or Russia, just have a chat. Kind of want to bring back the 1990's internet, not all these centrally controlled shit sites.

Why can't we talk to an Iranian, or Russian on Facebook, or Twitter, without going through hoops? Can you see we're being geographically and politically isolated? If we could just talk, we could end a lot of these stupid conflicts. Russia is losing the propaganda war, and BADLY, but Americans have no clue what is going on, because we can't talk about it. If people could just TALK, we could prevent a lot of these conflicts. That was one of the goals of making this communication system.

I still think if we could just talk, we could prevent our governments from going to war. War needs public support. If we could just talk, there wouldn't public support. How many Americans IF THEY KNEW that the US overthrew Ukraine, would be posting Ukrainian flags as signs of support? They have no clue that they don't know this is precisely what the US government wanted, a conflict, that could have EASILY been avoided.

rickwicks,

I love this idea and I assume there would be a market for it. At the very LEAST, criminals would pay big $$ for it, no? How much would it cost to make these "boxes"?

Also, I assume it could do everything a VPN could do?

I assume government and high value CEOs have something like this, it's just not being
marketed to the general population?

GNL says

rickwicks,

I love this idea and I assume there would be a market for it. At the very LEAST, criminals would pay big $$ for it, no? How much would it cost to make these "boxes"?

Also, I assume it could do everything a VPN could do?

Like $100. You can run it on a raspberry pi. The pi itself, it's around $75 for full setup, with 128 GB SD Card, which can easily be replaced to upgrade it.

The PI has a lot of stuff you don't need as well. You wouldn't need HDMI output, you don't need wifi, but that stuff might be free now, there may be no additional cost to include the hardware to do it. I think the LEAST the bill of materials would be, would be under $50.

This is the case I use for my set of raspberry pis:

https://flirc.tv/collections/case

The one on the upper left, I have many of. It's a really neat design, in that the entire case becomes the heat sink for the board. I've done my best to over-heat it, it's impossible. The case will get warm with heavy loads, but just warm, not so hot you can't handle it, and I stressed the hell out of it. I was using FFMPEG to transcode video, trying to crash it, trying to overheat it, for a WEEK. It broke 50C in the summer in a hot office.

So this box, can be setup so you can stream video to your television through multiple applications. You can directly connect with a phone or a computer, you can log into it, run what's called "X2GO" which is a remote desktop solution and use it as a computer. I'm adding email capabilities with it (again email, isn't "standard" email - you can only email between these boxes, but your phone or computer can connect to it, but it's not part of the standard email system).

Linux contains all the old tools of Unix. Ytalk is really cool, and I can show it to you if you like. People who first use it are annoyed by it, but once they get the hang of it, it's much nicer than SMS/IM and it's different than a phone call. It's very useful for communication of ideas. This concept is TOTALLY dead, but it does also have significant overhead in bandwidth, but that can be reduced, you can make so every WORD is transmitted, but every time you send a packet, that's at least 64 bytes (I think? Whatever the minimum size of an Ethernet frame with and IP / UDP or TCP header is). You wouldn't want to use this on a phone on 5g. Limiting ytalk to a word to be transmitted instead of a character, that would cut down bandwidth to about 1/5th - average word size is around 5 characters.

GNL says

I assume government and high value CEOs have something like this, it's just marketed to the general population?

My thinking is general population. It's a personal server. You control who has access to it.

Maybe you have a knitting group, or you just have a hobby of I dunno, cars or something. You can just have this little private group where you talk, among your friends and peers, maybe your friends are in another country? Maybe it's a group of people discussing geopolitics. Who knows? The machines can be linked together, so every machine has a copy of the group.

The idea is it simply can't be censored. The feds would have to show up to your home, and physically take the box and EVEN THEN, the box can have every file encrypted, every time you turn it on, it requires a password to gain access to the files. Turn it off, and the only way it's accessible is if you enter the password.

There's lots you can do with it.

richwicks says

There's lots you can do with it.

What would it take to set it up between you and I? Like, what are the steps?

If you mix software dev with some other discipline, physics for instance, it's hard for overseas peeps to take yer jeb!

It'll be a while before AI can do it as well.

I'm always looking for side work / biz ownership as well but so far short and long term real estate is the best I've come up with.

I can't clone myself yet.

mell says

similar to the AF model.

Yams and belt fed M134!

Tenpoundbass says

Kubernetes and Panda

Kub and spark!

GNL says

richwicks says

There's lots you can do with it.

What would it take to set it up between you and I? Like, what are the steps?

I have to get off my asshole, and do complete proof of concept - meaning I need to create all the software for it, to operate seamlessly and effortlessly.

These last 2 years have been hard on me, in that all my naivety is gone now. I'm in Silly Con Valley, and I'm tremendously disappointed in the corporations and people I worked for and with. I'm just recovering from burnout. I've gone from thinking that people were just "going along to get along", to realizing that the people I work with and respected, are actually fucking stupid. That's not to say I'm super smart, these people outclass me in technical ability and proficiency, but they literally believe that the "unvaccinated pose a threat to the vaccinated" - I used to believe that they were just going along to get along, but no, they actually believe this bullshit. They're stupid. Brilliant people I know, are fucking retarded. They have no cognitive thinking outside of work. This realization has been devastating to me, because I've been making the wrong assumptions about people for 3 decades. But at least I know how Nazi Germany and Communist Russia came into being. Fully understand that now, always wondered, and it's terrifying it's so simple.

I can build what I described, I can show you barely functional proofs of concept, but it's not seamless, it's not "drop it down and it works". Everything I've described is possible, but it's all hacks right now. I start out with hacks, then I move up to a solution. Hacks prove it's possible, solutions are solutions.

richwicks says

I can build what I described, I can show you barely functional proofs of concept, but it's not seamless, it's not "drop it down and it works". Everything I've described is possible, but it's all hacks right now. I start out with hacks, then I move up to a solution. Hacks prove it's possible, solutions are solutions.

If you can do what you say you can do, I'm sure you have a product that will sell.