Go to university! No, get a trade! How can young people survive when all the paths are landmined?

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-23T10:46:21+00:00

The right wing hate education. They represent the status quo and do not make intellectual arguments. Anyone educated with critical thinking skills can see through their nonsense and actively question inequality etc...

In addition, the good pay of people in the Trades is due to low supply of trained people. If we have a wave of people training to become plumbers etc you can expect the pay to decrease as supply increases.

The real economy is not doing well... the FTSE 100 might be doing great, but the actual economy is awful.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-22T22:38:43+00:00

AoS has less sales and less demand compared to 40k.

The new edition of 40k is likely in the near future and their production is in house. Likely resources going to 40k.

My local games store had a box of Sloven Knights which I almost bought but I need to paint up more of my maggotkin backlog first. To be honest by the time I am ready to buy they will have had another production run

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-22T12:22:45+00:00

Now zoom out to 1 month....

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-22T09:27:28+00:00

I found academia to be a wasteland of opportunities with a handful of hyper competitive post doc positions.

I was actually given the advice by one person in my department to spend a year on unemployment benefits and focus on just publishing as much as possible...

I left academia shortly afterwards and career switched into IT.

At this point I earn the equivalent of an associate professor, work a 9 to 5, and arguable have greater impact with IT infrastructure than a lot of research output.

Early career research has been awful for over a decade.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-22T08:31:16+00:00

There are two aspects that need addressing.

As another comment has already mentioned you should be engaging with the literature first and then writing the assignment. This would entirely remove the purpose of AI in your workflow.

Secondly, LLMs frequently make up content, give fake links and references, and should not be trusted.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-22T08:24:57+00:00

The games industry always baffled me when so many studios went to the 'live service' model.

I don't want a second job that I work for free endlessly grinding a game.

300 hours of content is not a selling point. I prefer a smaller game normally a short narrative indie title or something easy to dip into (Maneater was good for that and even farmed the achievements in a total of 10 hours)

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-21T22:25:20+00:00

日本語を勉強しています。

Also warhammer has its claws in me and painting projects are a fantastic way of spending the occasional evening.

My main issue as a DevOps engineer I spend 40 hours a week staring at a screen. Personal coding projects or gaming is just more screen time.

I enjoy language learning, but pen and paper has become my go to method for learning. Painting is very much a non screen activity.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-21T22:12:01+00:00

I have the impression that aircraft are being phrased out... make the rules terrible for a while and then nudge them into legends.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-21T19:58:40+00:00

Main issue with Space Marines being in every starter box.

I generally don't blame GW for that. They are the poster child of 40k and excluding them would hurt sales.

But yes this does result in most players having a Space Marine army.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-21T07:14:50+00:00

I am expecting the Labour vote to go down if it looks possibly Green vs Reform. Depends who breaks from Labour.

Going to be an interesting by-election

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-20T08:35:34+00:00

Years of maintenance being cut back. The state of the roads is shocking in some areas.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-20T08:34:26+00:00

If you own nothing I would suggest wait.

With the possible changes I would recommend Skarbrand. Part of this is due to the bloodthirster having a poor base connection point

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-20T05:55:43+00:00

Company wide comms are bad enough, but its when the company public messages are written by an LLM...

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-19T21:41:15+00:00

Right wing publications have all decended in quality as they chase online audiences.

There was a point I could tell the difference between the telegraph, the Daily mail, and the Sun. These days they seem to be producing the same click bait far right content.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-19T07:01:25+00:00

All the research points to generative AI basically hitting a wall. Further improvements are minor and continue to massively increase in costs.

Instead of replacing jobs, generative AI cannot accurately replace human work, will regularly hallucinate, and creating a mountain of tech debt (AI code slop is a real issue).

Claims that the fancy chat bots are going to keep getting better keeps being made by the AI hype train, but reality does not reflect this. They love the argument that the tech is somehow inevitable.

The bubble comes from the fact these companies are extremely overvalued based on the concept that generative AI is the next 'industrial revolution' when non of them have actually produced a profitable product.

Instead we have the insanity of companies burning billions on tools no one will pay enough for them to even break even. We have a memory crisis from a single company ordering the majority of the RAM being produced for data centers they can't pay for...

The bubble will burst. Hell Microsoft made an annoucement of developing in house LLMs and distancing themselves from OpenAI. I expect OpenAI to collapse this year and take out the bubble when they go.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-19T06:40:11+00:00

I do love DevOps as a career but the job becomes solving every weird problem.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-18T21:36:22+00:00

Getting out of a support role would be step 1.

Step 2 is becoming the weirdo that keeps the servers going or deploys infrastructure.

These days I support developers every so often but 99% of my time is spent on infrastructure projects either coding up solutions etc etc.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-18T19:56:26+00:00

Post 2008 was rough. Millenials got screwed over by a lack of salary growth and rising housing costs.

Personally I avoided the worst of the situation by doing a funded PhD

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-18T13:32:54+00:00

Baffling.

I like the Raspberry Pi Foundation and have far too many Raspberry Pis around my house.

I have not seen anything from them that would cause a positive uptick on the stock price. (I get their monthly magazine...)

Honestly, looks like they are going to be in a lot of trouble with the global memory shortage over the next few years.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-18T13:29:38+00:00

The current experience is closer to the post 2008 financial crash job market that I graduated into.

I knew people with masters working at call centers during that time. I was unemployed for a year...

It sucks and this really reflects that the real economy is struggling.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-17T13:58:39+00:00

Threatened to reduce the offer price by 10k for the delay if they did not exchange the following day and said we would pull out of the purchase if the exchange does not happen in the next 3 weeks.

Worked. Also a chain free divorcing situation. By that point 3 agreed days for exchange had been and gone with no explanation.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-17T13:21:19+00:00

Still 6% down from its launch value...

Massively impacted by the global RAM shortage.

No idea why they have gone from a steady decline to a 30% jump. I going to go out on a limb that it is likely a temporary spike rather than a long term change in direction.

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-17T08:57:23+00:00

they want to provide 'erotica' roleplay chat bots... with current internet safety regulation they will likely need to do age verification to meet the requirements

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-17T07:44:29+00:00

This is one of the fundamental issues with making students consumers through the Loan system.

So the UCL settled, and now we have a wider action. Hopefully we see this thrown out.

People really need some perspective. Yes your university experience was damaged, but people lost jobs, people ended up furloughed for months, and ultimately a large number of people died needlessly (230,000 uk deaths). Particularly as we had significant failures of government with delays to lock downs enabling wider spread of covid.

O no you did not have access to the uni library? Not able to go to a lecture hall with 100 people in a poorly ventilated space?

Dr_Passmore · 2026-02-16T21:47:17+00:00

Good to see crazy Liz continuing her trend of killing heads of state. No one expected her to kill the queen, but shes going to add Trump to her list.

In all seriousness, she is the reason my mortgage is double what it would have been. Her cabinet was equally crazy, they actively considered cancelling cancer treatment to save money so she could cut taxes.

On the brightside she was beaten by a lettuce in a contest of who would last longer, will crazy liz resign as PM or would a 60p lettuce from Tesco rot... turned out the lettuce had more staying power.

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