jdwithit (u/jdwithit)

jdwithit commented on Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025) thewave.engineer/articles... · Posted by u/scrlk

brazzy · 3 days ago

It has almost 4 times the number of pieces, but is only about 50% longer and wider - there's just way more smaller pieces. Price per piece is very misleading when comparing older and newer sets. The newer ones have more details, look slicker, but have a lot less "meat". Which is not that great for creative play.

jdwithit · 2 days ago

Definitely agree on the reduced usefulness for creative play. My kids got a lot of Lego sets as gifts when they were younger. Which is great, I love them playing with Legos. But once they're done with the instructions that's just kinda it. A Star Wars or Frozen or Minecraft themed kit ends up being all weird one-off specialty pieces. They are necessary to make an extremely detailed replica of the Millenium Falcon. But they have no place if you just want to grab a handful of bricks and start building whatever your imagination comes up with. We have a tub full of thousands of pieces and it never gets used. I think it's a bummer that they've pivoted to pushing these intricate $120 kits to adults rather than designs featuring more reusable components. You need to go out of your way to buy tranches of generic bricks if you want to have free play.

jdwithit commented on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions twitter.com/JosephPolitan... · Posted by u/enraged_camel

stego-tech · 7 days ago

It's bad, yeah, especially for folks on the job market (it me). Some statistics first, from my own job search logs:

* Since I hit the pavement in late January, I've tracked 100 job applications

* Of those 100, only 7 have turned into interviews

* Of those seven interviews, 3 turned into second-round

* ~50% of all applications never receive a response

* ~20% of rejections for any reason have the role re-posted within thirty days

* For rejections stating "higher quality applications", that role re-post rate is closer to 50%, suggesting ATS systems culling too many candidates to fill the role or ghost jobs

* Despite my state requiring salary requirements be posted in the JD, only around 70% of postings included what could be considered "reasonable" estimates

* 100% of interviews have been for local employers requiring 3+ days on-site

And now, some observations not captured in the data directly:

* Employers are trying to "under-title" folks; Senior roles want to hire former Leads, and Management roles want next-rung candidates for prior-rung titles (e.g., hiring what should be a Senior Manager for an entry-level management role)

* Employers are also trying to underpay workers by a large margin, especially folks coming from Big Tech ("We don't pay {SV_FIRM} money" while offering salaries below the local 50%ile for the role in question); they're blaming a "surplus of tech talent", which may or may not be true (I lack the data to prove either way)

* The two above points are in conflict, because rent/mortgages in these areas are so steep that even with major lifestyle changes to cut costs, these wages simply aren't survivable for local areas

* "Credential Creep" is back in force: Architect certs required for mid-level engineering roles, buzzwords prioritized over outcomes and achievements, and AI ATS' rejecting qualified candidates flat-out

* College Degrees are relevant again as a means of pruning candidates; fifteen years of experience is irrelevant for a lot of Senior roles if you don't have a BS or Masters, which wasn't the case even last year

* Industry-specialization is also back, even for roles where industry specialization is generally moot or easily picked up (e.g., Corporate IT stuff)

* A significant number (~75-85%) of roles explicitly reject H1B and other visa workers; not a problem for me (Citizen), but this is the worst possible time to be job hunting on a non-LPR status.

And now, my personal experiences:

* There's a very strong attitude of "you're being entitled" when it comes down to salary negotiations, even when you show your math for essentials - and share prior compensation history reflecting the cuts you've already taken since your Big Tech salary to "rejoin the market".

* Employers generally have no clue how expensive it is to live right now, especially in major metros; one such employer who balked at my comp floor genuinely had no clue the median rent was three and a half grand per month.

* Compensation seems particularly tilted towards working couples; as in, neither alone makes enough to survive, and employers assume you have a FTE spouse to shore up finances so they can pay you less

* Employers also don't seem to know what they actually want or need. Specialist Engineer roles (e.g., Cloud Engineer, Network Engineer) cite required experience and expertise with the full technology stack inclusive of ERP and HRIS nowadays, which is something that used to be handled by a specific team for the entirety of my career thus far, even in smaller (<1k) orgs. I've also seen Architect roles demanding Help Desk work, and Software Dev roles who want experience supporting Entra.

* AI does not feature in as many interviews as I would've thought. The few times it does, it's very much a "that's nice, but we're taking a wait and see approach" attitude

* There's a lot of eagerness to hire domestically again (I think even middle managers were tired of outsourcing or offshoring), but a lack of budget to afford domestic talent.

Ultimately, it's pretty bleak - but still better than last year, at least thus far (~300 apps, ~2 companies interviewed with, 1 offer in 2025). AI isn't the value-add I was sold on by career counselors and LinkedIn (huge surprise there /s), and there definitely seems to be the appetite to hire, but not the realism of what to expect or how much it'll cost. I very much view it as a sort of tug-of-war at the moment, between workers who did everything expected of them and have cut to the bone already, and employers who somehow think they can pay <50%ile wages while mandating 4-days on-site in a major metro for experienced talent.

If you're an employer looking to hire, I have some advice:

* Ditch the AI ATS or AI summaries and read resumes, especially if you're requiring local presence.

* Understand what you need (and what that will cost you) before posting the JD

* Understand the local cost of living, and budget accordingly (i.e., if your Senior Engineer can't afford median rent, they're not going to stick around when things improve)

* If you value loyalty and aren't paying TC to afford a median home in the area, then you don't actually value loyalty

* Don't pigeonhole yourself with hyper-specific candidates as a means of winnowing down applicants; that level of specialization will flee the second they get a better offer elsewhere

* Post salaries in the JD, required or not, so you don't waste your time with candidates whose expectations don't align with your budget

jdwithit · 7 days ago

I'm also looking right now and a lot of that resonates with me. The posted salary ranges are often a complete joke as you noted. "The pay band for this role is $80,000-250,000 commensurate with experience and interview performance". Yeah OK buddy are you seriously trying to tell me you have multiple people with the exact same job title making salaries over $100k apart? Feels like they're just giving the finger to lawmakers through malicious compliance.

I've also run into the industry specialization roadblock a few times. Got turned down by a fintech company after multiple interview rounds because I did not have banking industry experience, for example. I guess I get it as a tie breaker but I've operated in a PCI compliant environment for years, seems like that should count as relevant experience? Also if you're going to dumpster candidates without banking experience why on earth did you waste several hours of your staff's time giving me tech screens?

Job hunting has always sucked. But it feels particularly busted at the moment. The process is miserable. If you've coasted to an easy hiring in the last year, you're either amazing (and hats off to you!) or got very lucky.

jdwithit commented on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions twitter.com/JosephPolitan... · Posted by u/enraged_camel

Gigachad · 7 days ago

At least in my experience, applying at jobs online has been entirely useless for the last 5 years. No company ever contacts you after using the online application forms. And the only way I’ve got interviews is from recruiters contacting me.

jdwithit · 7 days ago

As someone applying right now I agree. I think I've had one company out of dozens get back to me on a cold application this year. Every contact that has led to an interview was from being referred in by a current employee, or a LinkedIn recruiter reaching out to me about a job. I assume the application forms get spammed with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. It's hard to blame someone for not wanting to sift through all that muck when there's already a stream of vetted candidates coming in from their recruiter. Sucks for the job seekers, though.

I'm putting more time into cleaning up my LinkedIn profile since that's been my most reliable route into hiring pipelines (other than referrals and networking).

jdwithit commented on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions twitter.com/JosephPolitan... · Posted by u/enraged_camel

atherton94027 · 7 days ago

> I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.

Did you get any offers yet? It seems the issue is not lack of interviews but lack of offers. Many companies are looking for a goldilocks candidate and are happy to pass on anything that doesn't match their ideal candidate

jdwithit · 7 days ago

I got laid off at the end of last year and am currently interviewing for Staff+ DevOps/Platform Engineer type roles. I definitely feel this. I've had a decent flow of recruiter inquiries and had multiple companies go 2-3 rounds of interviews deep with me (not counting the initial "do you have a pulse" recruiter screen calls). Then the communication always seems to dry up and I'm left to wonder what box I failed to check on their hiring rubric.

Semi related, holy hell do companies have a lot of interview rounds these days. It seems pretty standard to spread 5-6 Teams calls over the course of a month. I get that these are high salary, high impact roles and you want to get it right. But this feels really excessive. And I'm not talking about FAANG tech giants here. It's everyone, from startups to random midsize insurance companies.

jdwithit commented on Show HN: Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting github.com/moongate-commu... · Posted by u/squidleon

jdwithit · 7 days ago

Very cool work! This is giving me a big nostalgia hit, as a LONG time ago (when UO was a current game ;) I maintained a C++ UO emulator called UOX3. To be clear I absolutely did not initially develop it or even write any particularly large or difficult features. I just took over maintaining the codebase, taking patches and cutting releases, managing the community, that sort of thing. The original author decided to step away and I had apparently been enough of a busybody in the tool's community that he tapped me to lead it for a while. I also helped some Canadian guy with money, hardware, and bandwidth to burn run a private server based on UOX. Both were delightful experiences and I learned a ton.

In hindsight I am very glad Origin was not overly litigious and didn't send the FBI to my house for "hacking" their game.

jdwithit commented on Vietnam bans unskippable ads saigoneer.com/vietnam-new... · Posted by u/hoherd

jason_s · 2 months ago

I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display strategies. From least to most annoying:

- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)

- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)

- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds

- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds

- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds

- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears

I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).

It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.

jdwithit · 2 months ago

There's also the tactic where the layout of the page/app reflows after a second or two, changing where the ads are. It drives me up the wall. Go to tap on a button, SURPRISE, an ad popped in where the button used to be 10ms before you touched the screen and now you're forced into some company's site whether you wanted to see it or not.

jdwithit commented on Vietnam bans unskippable ads saigoneer.com/vietnam-new... · Posted by u/hoherd

rkomorn · 2 months ago

This is exactly something I hate about the current state of things.

Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly entitles them to contact you forever and ever.

jdwithit · 2 months ago

I "love" the ones that randomly decide to reactivate literally years after unsubscribing and never interacting with the business again. The other day I randomly got an email from a yoga studio I once bought my wife a gift card from. We moved and neither of us has been there since 2021. Why on earth am I suddenly getting spam 5 years later. I get similar messages from hotels many years later too. Sometimes ones I didn't even end up staying at, just browsed. You can sense the desperation through the monitor.

jdwithit commented on Ultima VII Revisited github.com/ViridianGames/... · Posted by u/erickhill

aidenn0 · 4 months ago

JRPG games like FF VI are far more accessible than the Ultima games. The Avatar trilogy (Ultimas IV, V, and VI) are essentially unplayable without having all the manuals and taking detailed notes[1]. Even doing that, they are quite hard. Nearly every single Final Fantasy game is easy to beat just by taking a bit of time to grind levels whenever you get stuck.

There is a blogger who teaches a class on old games (I can't remember who) and Ultima IV was one that his students bounced off of immediately because they didn't read the manual cover-to-cover, which is a prerequisite for not being totally lost.

1: Or using a walkthrough, I guess, but IMO the main point of the Ultima games of this era was the sense of discovery.

jdwithit · 4 months ago

The "ancillary" materials like manuals and maps were crucial for old games. Even simple ones. The other day I was going through some of the old SNES games in the Switch online catalog. I found F-Zero, a racing game I played the heck out of as a kid. I started telling my son some info about the different cars and drivers and he was like how the heck do you know that? At no point is that info presented in game. You just pick a car and start driving. There's no tutorial or opening cinematic. If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.

Not saying one style is good or bad. But it's definitely changed since the 80s and 90s, when every game came with a printed 50 page manual full of crucial information. Which often doubled as copy protection. I remember firing up King's Quest 6 and having it challenge me to type the 15th word in the second paragraph on page 26 or whatever.

jdwithit commented on Fallout from the AWS outage: Smart mattresses go rogue quasa.io/media/the-strang... · Posted by u/jerlam

jsheard · 5 months ago

Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.

Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.

(stolen from @PPathole on Twitter)

jdwithit · 5 months ago

I wish society still used AIM Away Messages so I could make mine this, forever.

jdwithit commented on Spotting base64 encoded JSON, certificates, and private keys ergaster.org/til/base64-e... · Posted by u/jandeboevrie

pedropaulovc · 7 months ago

Ey, I'm JSON!

jdwithit · 7 months ago

Eyy, I'm authin' here!