its more likely than you think

The early twenties intermediate dev on my team was explaining the other week that if you remember a time before smartphones and broadband, you are old

I personally am familiar with 2 organisations with millions of dollars in annual revenue that deploy critical line of business applications like this in 2024

Weirdest episode of binging with babish

Sounds like a great idea - I suspect the biggest obstacle will be finding someone at the home who is confident enough in what to do with it to be willing to accept it.

I've run into similar issues with schools where they are hesitant to accept donations of things like that because they don't want to be saddled with equipment they don't know how to use and maintain. Maybe worth seeing if you can raise a bit of money for a second hand Xbox or something?

Fun fact, a significant proportion of the people doing these scams are victims of human trafficking who are being forced into it with threats of violence

git-annex maybe?

There is one standard way to cast fireball - it works, it's cheap, it very rarely backfires, it's in all the textbooks, everyone knows how it behaves - but sometimes you sit down in a tavern next to another wizard and you just know before they even open their mouth that they are going to spend the next twenty five minutes telling you about how they learnt this alternative way to cast it and it's taken a bit of practice but they can just about cast it as fast as they could before and how it's so much more ergonomic or whatever

Debugging spells is just as much a dark art as spell crafting itself. When I was a young apprentice we didn't have as sophisticated tools as you do now; you had to make sure you noted down your intermediate runes correctly and use those symbols to divine some meaning from the ashes of your failed spell. One time I mixed up my notes with the symbols of a different spell and when I sprinkled the ashes on the stack I was stuck speaking in tounges for a week.

These days of course you can summon a lesser demon to freeze your spell and ask it about the state, but the demons can be tricky and it's easy for novices to make a mistake and allow the demon to run amok - makes a real mess of the lab.

Dealing with this at the moment - in an org that's been pretty lax at writing anything down about what and why as far as internal software goes, trying (with support from C-suite) to get people to actually write up any amount of detail in their requests is like pulling teeth.

I tend to take that position as well; if it's not defined, I get to define it. If I ask for feedback or review and get silence, that means you approve.

Because accountants mostly.

For large businesses, you essentially have two ways to spend money:

• OPEX: "operational expenditure" - this is money that you send on an ongoing basis, things like rent, wages, the 3rd party cleaning company, cloud services etc. The expectation is that when you use OPEX, the money disappears off the books and you don't get a tangible thing back in return. Most departments will have an OPEX budget to spend for the year.
• CAPEX: "capital expenditure" - buying physical stuff, things like buildings, stock, machinery and servers. When you buy a physical thing, it gets listed as an asset on the company accounts, usually being "worth" whatever you paid for it. The problem is that things tend to lose value over time (with the exception of property), so when you buy a thing the accountants will want to know a depreciation rate - how much value it will lose per year. For computer equipment, this is typically ~20%, being "worthless" in 5 years. Departments typically don't have a big CAPEX budget, and big purchases typically need to be approved by the company board.

This leaves companies in a slightly odd spot where from an accounting standpoint, it might look better on the books to spend $3 million/year on cloud stuff than $10 million every 5 years on servers

Idk, if you want to test people on how they understand formulae and order of operations without letting them just punch it into a calculator. The actual math isn't hard, but if you don't get substituting values into an equation then it's not trivial