Readit NewsI grew up with Tetris and playing a traditional DAS [1] style and never was able to put the time into learning hypertapping. Once rolling came out a few years ago I totally abandoned trying to keep up. My highest score was almost a maxout on 29
Something you'll notice too is that the younger players are crushing the traditional players by changing the rules. So, NOBODY at CTWC is playing DAS anymore and I think Jonas was the last big DAS player, before moving to Tapping. I attribute this to anyone over 30 learning in the DAS style while younger players can START with rolling.
RIP Jonas Neubauer (NubbinsGoody https://www.twitch.tv/nubbinsgoody) he was the guy that kind of lead the explosion of Tetris after the movie came out and Thor more or less retired. He and his wife were very helpful to me trying to get to maxout with some tips back in 2018 to get a CRT monitor as that was a limiting factor back then.
It's also a good reminder for everyone to back up everything!
That said, the problem I do see is that the folks hired into a fully remote environment have a significantly lower "attachment" to the company. Working together in an office fosters a sense of belonging to the group (over time) in a way that remote work cannot. This is the thing that isn't getting attention, IMO - but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we were all overly attached to our jobs anyway :)
Actually I myself joined my current company after March 2020. I can't imagine a 5-day, in-person experience would be any more effective or productive. If anything, I was able to completely pay no attention the mandatory training of "corporate value" nonsense -- it felt great to be "in" the meeting but spend the time doing actual development or doing some household chores.
People doing jobs with more qualified candidates in the pool will probably have a harder time, and that sucks. For them, I hope they can band together as a union and force companies to hire them remote. There is no excuse anymore about it not working, because the whole planet did it through a friggin' pandemic, and work actually improved. We just have to stick to our guns, because the suits will continue to try to ruin our lives as long as it benefits them.
Whether it's vibe coding, agentic coding, or copy pasting from the web interface to your editor, it's still sad to see the normalization of private (i.e., paid) LLM models. I like the progress that LLMs introduce and I see them as a powerful tool, but I cannot understand how programmers (whether complete nobodies or popular figures) dont mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming. Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible (as in most programmers will be so tied to a paid LLM, that not using them would be like not using an IDE or vim nowadays), since everyone is using private LLMs. The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.