If you are forced to consider those as applicants, maybe I should consider putting in applications.

Life's given me some raw deals though, so I dont have a degree.

I can at least write code using only an API desk reference, and can diagram my code on my own, though.

From what you are telling me, that's premium entry level talent.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-07-07, 21:44:

Are you *seriously* telling me that I, a guy who stopped that path after only learning some awful high level shit like visualbasic, am somehow *more hirable* than what is in the modern talent pool?

Well, when the support guy ends up fixing a bunch of bugs after "modern developers". Somehow I'm in the second place with commit count since I got access to the repo last year. And my main role is dealing with customers...

wierd_w wrote on 2026-07-07, 21:57:

If you are forced to consider those as applicants, maybe I should consider putting in applications. […]
Show full quote

If you are forced to consider those as applicants, maybe I should consider putting in applications.

Life's given me some raw deals though, so I dont have a degree.

I can at least write code using only an API desk reference, and can diagram my code on my own, though.

From what you are telling me, that's premium entry level talent.

At least the place I'm at apparently has no standards and priorities are backwards. Let's just keep making new half-baked shit and never make old shit work right. So yeah, maybe at the very least you could get by if you ended up at such place.

I just seem to have this thing with spotting basic things that others get wrong. I tend to get lost in bigger codebases and my brain takes forever to put few lines of code together. So not sure I'd attempt to try my luck somewhere more serious.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-07-07, 21:57:

If you are forced to consider those as applicants, maybe I should consider putting in applications. […]
Show full quote

If you are forced to consider those as applicants, maybe I should consider putting in applications.

Life's given me some raw deals though, so I dont have a degree.

I can at least write code using only an API desk reference, and can diagram my code on my own, though.

From what you are telling me, that's premium entry level talent.

Before you start sending applications take note that some companies drank the "vibe coding" cool-aid, and would actually consider candidates regularly using LLMs higher than people that actually know how to code. I also think that most of those companies (as already demonstrated by some examples that went bankrupt or on the way going there) are putting themselves on the road in the direction of a chasm.

For the non governmental sector, depending on the country and company the lack of a degree might be not an issue if you have a demonstrable multi year experience(Most often 3 or 5 years) of working in the industry. Note that in some countries if you don't have a degree you cannot have the word "Engineer" in your title, but most often you can do the same job description, just there will be "Software Developer" on your papers and in the database instead.

So, you are suggesting I should volunteer on some FOSS projects for about 5 years, so I can claim the experience on a CV, then I would be 'hirable'?

wierd_w wrote on 2026-07-07, 22:27:

So, you are suggesting I should volunteer on some FOSS projects for about 5 years, so I can claim the experience on a CV, then I would be 'hirable'?

Well if you would start working on the projects now then 5 years is unfortunately too long time to say anything with any degree of confidence so don't consider this to be a direct advice, the industry can shift in that long of a time frame. However if the trends remains the same then I would say yes, most companies also consider open source projects in the experience if they are relevant to the field they are working in, in-fact one of the candidates that we have originally wanted to hire as a "Software Engineer" got a "Senior Software Engineer" position when during the interview showed that he has contributed functional code (And we have actually checked the code and found it to be good quality) to eight open source projects.

good to know!

Sorry for the derail, I just find the revellation astonishing. I have withheld such efforts, as I do not enjoy wasting people's time, and verifying broken logic, or worse, hammering it back into shape/usefulness, is exhausting.

People's time is better spent elsewhere, if at all possible.

I have honestly evaluated my skill level to be too low to be of serious usefulness, and abstained from wasting that time of other, more capable people.

Maybe I will re-evaluate, given ... the implications... of this exchange.

I will say that I have written functional VBA backend stuff to tack on 'new functionality' for CAD software at a former employer, that included heavy use of recursion. VBA is of very limited usefulness, but it was the only API the cad suite exposed to work with.

I consider adhoc stuff like that below notice, but if your kids cant even do the seive of erothostenese, well...

Ok, back to shitty ram shortages!

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-rtx-3060-12-gb-gr … ming-market-is/

I don't really know if this is more of a comedy or a tragedy (probably a combination). It surely is indicative of the unprecedented circumstances that surround the world of consumer pc market/ personal computing. And i am afraid things are going to get much worse before this whole thing gets fixed.

lti wrote on 2026-07-07, 17:25:

Great, now I'm the one who derailed this thread with the 3D printer thing.

Back on RAM, I'm going to say that 16GB is going to have to be enough for me. Even if I have the money, I don't want to buy any at current prices out of principle. My dad still needs the upgrade (just buying a second identical module off eBay or something), but I'm sure that his computer is also badly infected (I don't know of any portable or bootable scanners to see how bad it is, but it does funny stuff like disable Windows Update in the registry or suddenly have about 100 rundll32 processes running). Windows itself is such a mess that it's hard to tell if some program running out of a temp directory is malware or a real Windows process. Also, his 256GB SSD is full, so now he's working out of the external hard drive that was meant for backups (meaning that he has no backups). I was going to get him a 1TB SSD, but I didn't get around to it before prices exploded. Of course, I don't have any spare SSDs that I would trust, and my own storage situation is screwy. I switched back to my older desktop and suddenly realized that I haven't made a backup of the new desktop in a while. I need some files off of it.

Look up Dr. Web CureIt free. Always updated and spawns randomly generated process names so viruses and other malware cannot block it.

I have been using it for years, whenever I run across a computer that is infected before I install a good anti-virus / anti-malware suite on it. My current choice for the past many years is Bitdefender.

I have an 8TB hard drive in a RAID array that's been making rapid clicking noises as though it's trying to rehome the heads.

Prices for those drives have almost doubled since I bought them. Not only that, but this drive seems to be unavailable now anyway, and the only alternatives are more than double the cost.

This is what have we gotten out of this monumentally stupid murder of the economy for the sake of making AI chatbots that are equivalent to a really brain damaged guy looking things up in a huge encyclopedia.

Give them some more credit. The brain-damaged guy looking stuff up in an encyclopedia is faster and makes fewer mistakes.

As zram was already mentioned in this topic, I have to also mention zswap as an alternative:https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/zswap.html#zswap

Which one is better depends on both the HW, the size of the swap partition and the workload, so to get optimal performance for your system you might wish to try both to check which one works better.
Note!: Do not try to run both at the same time!

Dimos wrote on 2026-07-07, 23:07:

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-rtx-3060-12-gb-gr … ming-market-is/

I don't really know if this is more of a comedy or a tragedy (probably a combination).

Relaunching the RTX 3060 at the retail price of 330 USD is ridiculous, but the card itself is fairly decent. I got a used one last year for around 200 EUR. After cleaning, repasting and undervolting it, everything runs cool and quiet, and I can play most modern games at console equivalent settings. In the worst of cases, the 3060 can be around 10-15% slower than the base PlayStation 5. Though that depends on the game, and more often than not, they are pretty evenly matched.

Basically, if I play at 1080p and use DLSS 4.0 (not 4.5), the RTX 3060 can easily match or even exceed PS5 levels of performance and visual quality. Works great for people like me who prefer couch gaming on their living room TV using a controller. I can either max out the visuals and get 30 FPS (equivalent to console Quality Mode) or slightly tone down certain settings and get a mostly stable 60 FPS (equivalent to console Performance Mode). If they offered it at a reasonable price, the 3060 would be a solid choice, but Nvidia is just too greedy to care.

My anecdote is that a 500GB Samsung 870 EVO SSD I bought in 2023 for $39.99 is now going for $250-$300.

My Windows 11 rig is currently an i7-4970K on a Z97 motherboard. It uses DDR3 RAM of which I have plenty. I've looked into upgrading to an i7-8700K/Z370/DDR4 platform, but the RAM prices have killed that idea. I'll just plod along with what I have. I can't play the latest Steam games, but I don't play modern games anyway.

Dimos wrote on 2026-07-07, 23:07:

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-rtx-3060-12-gb-gr … ming-market-is/

I don't really know if this is more of a comedy or a tragedy (probably a combination). It surely is indicative of the unprecedented circumstances that surround the world of consumer pc market/ personal computing. And i am afraid things are going to get much worse before this whole thing gets fixed.

People are so obsessed with VRAM, the value of these things has gotten completely overblown over the past year.

I understand that 8GB is limiting depending on your graphics settings, but a 3060 is MUCH slower than a 3060 Ti, 3070 or 3070 Ti. I got an Arc A750 8GB the other day, brand new, for $139, and those will match a 3060 in a lot of games (not not so much in others)... for almost $200 less than they're asking for a new 3060. I could almost understand if it was a 4000 or 5000 series so it had DLSS frame gen, but it isn't. A 12GB 5060 or even a 4060 would be so much better... but that didn't happen for some reason.

I'm not sure what the used market is like in other parts of the world, but with a little patience you can find a used 3060 Ti, 3070 or 3070 Ti for $200-$250 on hardwareswap and probably other places. I would definitely go that way unless you absolutely know that you need 12GB of VRAM and don't need that much actual GPU performance.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 03:45:

People are so obsessed with VRAM, the value of these things has gotten completely overblown over the past year. […]
Show full quote

Dimos wrote on 2026-07-07, 23:07:

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-rtx-3060-12-gb-gr … ming-market-is/

I don't really know if this is more of a comedy or a tragedy (probably a combination). It surely is indicative of the unprecedented circumstances that surround the world of consumer pc market/ personal computing. And i am afraid things are going to get much worse before this whole thing gets fixed.

People are so obsessed with VRAM, the value of these things has gotten completely overblown over the past year.

I understand that 8GB is limiting depending on your graphics settings, but a 3060 is MUCH slower than a 3060 Ti, 3070 or 3070 Ti. I got an Arc A750 8GB the other day, brand new, for $139, and those will match a 3060 in a lot of games (not not so much in others)... for almost $200 less than they're asking for a new 3060. I could almost understand if it was a 4000 or 5000 series so it had DLSS frame gen, but it isn't. A 12GB 5060 or even a 4060 would be so much better... but that didn't happen for some reason.

I'm not sure what the used market is like in other parts of the world, but with a little patience you can find a used 3060 Ti, 3070 or 3070 Ti for $200-$250 on hardwareswap and probably other places. I would definitely go that way unless you absolutely know that you need 12GB of VRAM and don't need that much actual GPU performance.

I just waited till the 5060Tis 16Gb went on sale here last Xmas and grabbed one well under MSRP, IIRC was about 580 AUD for it at the time, they are around 900-1000 AUD right now. Its not an amazing GPU but its not terrible either and I figure itll last a good while in the machine its in.

I know for certain I wont be buying any top tier GPUs from now on and likely wont be touching anything nVidia related either, it felt wrong buying the 5060 at the time knowing I was supporting the terrible business practises of Jensen and CO but 580 bucks for a 16Gb GPU was too good to miss at the time.

If the 9060XT 16Gb had been on sale at the time I would have grabbed that .. its a great GPU too.

Shponglefan wrote on 2026-07-03, 13:31:

You might be surprised, there are younger people who collect physical media including CDs. Any time I've gone thrifting, I'll see younger people browsing the CDs for sale at thrift shops.

There are also a surprising number of music/video stores where I live.

there's a bit of hope, but not that it will affect the momentum - more that some small proportion of people will preserve media. however at a large scale i think most people just go along with what they are used to, and current generation became used to everything online, nothing owned. still, there are some interesting numbers i found:

https://www.accio.com/business/dvd-sales-numbers-trend - decline but slowing decline
https://www.digiraw.com/films-and-shows/insig … et-report-2025/ - interesting, looks at US and UK markets

but long term context is:

https://cordcuttersnews.com/dvd-blu-ray-sales … illion-in-2024/

so maybe we're just seeing the stubborn remains of the market now rather than anything resurgent

Barley wrote on Yesterday, 03:18:

My anecdote is that a 500GB Samsung 870 EVO SSD I bought in 2023 for $39.99 is now going for $250-$300.

crazy.... as a hobby its just not worth getting involved in newer things anymore...

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-07-07, 19:12:

I remember when it seemed like eggs were gonna be 10$ a dozen forever too. Things will cool off, more production will come on line, its just a matter of when.

Considering how memory and storage (and much of other high-end semiconductor stuff) is made by handful of colluding shady companies and law enforcement is more toothless than it has been for decades, "when" might be quite a long time away.

computer hardware will become national security in the near future.

I firmly believe that countries that are unable to make thier own chips will lack future economic growth.

the internet itself is now one of the most important resource of humanity. anything chip wise is extremly important for society.

from the western world , only the united states has a little bit more sense as they have invested and are investing in manufacturing chips. europe done nothing , africa nothing , south america nothing. south korea and china are the only other 2 countries that invest in chips...

also , only 3 main ram manufacturers... almost 0 competition... china is trying to enter the game but even for them with all money in the world is difficult.

the manufacturing process for anything to do with silicon wafers is expensive and requires technology that is not easily accesible to most companies.

basically , we are a bit screwed... we are at the hands of 3 suppliers... they dictate the price and not much u can do about it.

bitzu101 wrote on Yesterday, 10:10:

computer hardware will become national security in the near future. […]
Show full quote

computer hardware will become national security in the near future.

I firmly believe that countries that are unable to make thier own chips will lack future economic growth.

the internet itself is now one of the most important resource of humanity. anything chip wise is extremly important for society.

from the western world , only the united states has a little bit more sense as they have invested and are investing in manufacturing chips. europe done nothing , africa nothing , south america nothing. south korea and china are the only other 2 countries that invest in chips...

also , only 3 main ram manufacturers... almost 0 competition... china is trying to enter the game but even for them with all money in the world is difficult.

the manufacturing process for anything to do with silicon wafers is expensive and requires technology that is not easily accesible to most companies.

basically , we are a bit screwed... we are at the hands of 3 suppliers... they dictate the price and not much u can do about it.

Agree completely. Canada needs to become way more self sufficient but the government is hellbent on selling every bit of the country to foreign governments.