> That's an assumption, but even if it's probably true, to what end? The issue most working Americans face is that the cost of living rises faster than their wages.

Mortgage never rises (in the US), can only fall (if you refinance when rates dip). So that locks down the housing cost. In that sense, inflation helps you in the long run.

What do you mean "mortgage never rises" in the US?

It can if you have an adjustable rate mortgage. But that's not all. Lots of people leverage their equity for cash (HELOCs, etc.) to remodel, take a vacation, buy more junk, etc. So your house can easily become a financial boondoggle.

And your mortgage isn't the only cost. There's maintenance and repairs, property-related taxes (which can go up), healthcare, food, gas, automobiles, the price of basic necessities, a meal out, etc.

Tons of people are living in homes that have increased substantially in value, making them "rich", but they're still under financial pressure if not outright struggling because the prices of everything else they want and need in life have increased faster than their wages.

And then what happens when the company you work for reports record profits and...lays you off into a market where tens of thousands of people who do what you do have also been laid off?

The problem with the modern American economy is that the path to "success" for the average worker gets narrower and narrower. You can "win" in one or two areas and still lose in the end. Very easily. Happens to tons of people.

> You don't own a home until you've paid it off.

That's not quite true. If you want to think that way, then you'd never own it because you'll always pay property taxes so the paying never stops.

But as soon as you buy a home it is your asset. Yes, you have a debt against it. But you are the owner. Go look up the owner in the county records and it is you.

We both know the pay off in this instance is referring to mortgages

The US is not particularly rich. The GPD is way out there, but that doesn't mean anything. It is highly concentrated in a tiny fraction of 1% of the population.

And the bulk of the population who by global standards might be middle class in terms of dollar income, are nonetheless struggling with multiple jobs, huge health care and kids education costs, no vacations.

Who could be happy?

> I thought cursor became mostly obsolete with Claude Code and Codex TUIs?

I wouldn't think so. At work I have both cursor and claude code and while I use both, cursor is by far the most pleasant to use. If I had to give one up, I'd let claude go.

The game only works if they also have a lot of people losing money.

> In the enterprise space, if you mention globally reachable address space, the discussion tends to end pretty fast because “its not secure”.

Topic drift, but for younger people who didn't live it, that's how it used to be!

For most of the 90s my workstation in the office (at several employers) was directly on the Internet. There were no firewalls, no filtering of any kind. I ran my email server on my desktop workstation to receive all emails, both from "internal" (but there was no "internal" really, since every host was on the Internet) people and anyone in the world. I ran my web server on that same workstation, accessible to the whole Internet.

That was the norm, the Internet was completely peer to peer. Good times.

Pretty much all tech companies and universities had a drop-in ftp server where anyone could, anonymously, put and retrieve files. It was a collective 'pastebin' useful to exchange information with clients and partners.

On the ftp server of the company I worked for, someone had put a cracked copy of our software for their colleagues to use.

Same! I even had my home network on a public /24.

The good ol’ days. Same. Had a public IP on my computer, could SSH into it to read my mail.

That I still do, but now it goes through a firewall, a bastion host and a second different firewall.

i still do this today!

You run a mail server on a residential IP? I thought that pretty much guarantees non delivery nowadays?

> Good times.

Hope you're sarcastic, because they really weren't. It was a shitshow for decades until we figured out just a bit of a clue about security practices.

Very early in my career I'd take these vulnerability reports as a personal challenge and spent my day/evening proving it isn't actually exploitable in our environment. And I was often totally correct, it wasn't.

But... I spent a bunch of hours on that. For each one.

These days we just fix every reported vulnerable library, turns out that is far less work. And at some point we'd upgrade anyway so might as well.

Only if it causes problems (incompatible, regressions) then we look at it and analyze exploitability and make judgement calls. Over the last several years we've only had to do that for about 0.12% of the vulnerabilities we've handled.

That’s basically my experience as well. Just upgrading is much easier and cheaper.

Of course with latest supply chain failures we don’t update right away or automatically.

If it is RCE in a component that is exposed then of course we do it ASAP. But those are super rare.

> They made a donation ... somewhere.

Likely some kind of gold statue was involved. And just like that, laws change in your favor.

> if less efficient to execute like Java and Javascript and Python

One of these is not like the others...

Java (JVM) is extremely fast.

JVM is fast for certain use cases but not for all use cases. It loads slowly, takes a while to warm up, generally needs a lot of memory and the runtime is large and idiosyncratic. You don't see lots of shared libraries, terminal applications or embedded programs written in Java, even though they are all technically possible.

The JVM has been extremely fast for a long long time now. Even Javascript is really fast, and if you really need performance there’s also others in the same performance class like C#, Rust, Go.

Hot take, but: Performance hasn’t been a major factor in choosing C or C++ for almost two decades now.

I think it is the perception of performance instead of the actual performance, also that C/C++ encroaches on “close to the metal” assembly for many applications. (E.g. when I think how much C moves the stack pointer around meaninglessly in my AVR-8 programs it drives me nuts but AVR-8 has a hard limit and C programs are portable to the much faster ESP32 and ARM.

A while back when my son was playing Chess I wrote a chess engine in Python and then tried to make a better one in Java which could respect time control, it was not hard to make the main search routine work without allocating memory but I tried to do transposition tables with Java objects it made the engine slower, not faster. I could have implemented them with off-heap memory but around that time my son switched from Chess to guitar so I started thinks about audio processing instead.

The Rust vs Java comparison is also pointed. I was excited about Rust the same way I was excited about cyclone when it came out but seeing people struggle with async is painful for me to watch and makes it look like the whole idea doesn’t really work when you get away from what you can do with stack allocation. People think they can’t live with Java’s GC pauses.

> If we just had school teachers, or whoever else you idealize, we’d all be living in mud huts.

Let's just look at countries which have high income and very low income unequality, like Finland.

Turns out they don't live in mud huts, and most aspects of society work far better than in the USA.