The article talks about long forgotten reasons why things are as they are.
I have heard of a, probably now apocryphal story, of field on a Multinational's paper report that was always supposed to be 0. When the IT team that did the automation of the report, discovered field was the number of bombs that fell that week on a property owned by the company during the London Blitz. Not a big consequence to the company but the story had been lost.
I am from a earlier generation. Owned a TI SR-51A last year of High school, Then a HP-29c first year of University. I vaguely remember the SR-51A had an limited equation programming : multiply by a constant and add a constant. I remember writing sort routines for the 29c using its indirect register access to treat a block of registers as an array. Bench-marked various sorts. I think minutes to sort 20 items.
I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.
At the end of the cycle I can barely run the base phone let alone the menagerie of apps the world would like me to run.
I have opted out of app only service such as a Loyalty programs that forced me to transfer point from a partner only if I installed an app on my phone. They have enough info on me from purchase, they don't need more. (I even offer my card to strangers in the grocery cash if they did not have the loyalty card so they would get a discount and I would get a list of products I never buy in my loyalty list. Its a small, willful act of rebellion )
I teach in a tech/trade vocational program where 1/2 the students are your generation. All kinds of reasons they are there. (Didn't do well in High School, College, University, Grad School, Gaming in their parents basement since they were 10)
When one of the skills click (some try 2 or 3 of the ones we teach) and they start working the says that life is happening for them. The failures, in retrospect, become steps the had to take to get where they are. Perseverance is probably good personality trait to develop.
I chose my handle to have the word prosaic in it because I did many thing in tech (and other fields), none at extraordinary levels, but all done by learning by trying things out. You don't have to be wildly successful in life, prosaic can be good enough.
Early 80's VMS had a Keep/Purge system for history of files. Everytime you edited a file a version number was bumped up by 1. There was a command, "purge", I think that set the Keep count which was default to 3.
This would have been within the contemporary Dos and disk capabilities and size of 160-360kBytes, although slow (5-15 seconds).
When Dave Cutler moved from DEC to MS I expected the Dos console under windows to get that same feature.
Disappointed. A gajillion lost hours could have be saved.
TL;DR Don't sweat the future, it will mess up eventually.
Just Do something now that is productive for a while and don't be afraid to change you mind or your job.
Doing the same thing I have been doing since I was your age.
Learning some that interest me now that could be useful.
Started out as a math and science geek: Organic Chemistry was the target. Two chance encounters: one with two real working chemists that warned me to get a PHD to get a real job. I was to impatient to do that much school so the second chance encounter was with a obsolete computer that was plotting graphs and space games on paper. Three years os CS later I was working on Flight Simulation.
The 1st PC era happened and 5 years later I switched to install 1st gen PC networks. Then Unix got big and I did Sysdmin on that for a while. Then Perl programing which morph into webdev for handful of years.
Then I was "old" at least to the HR 15 guy, years my junior, who would not hire me, so I became a manager. Then there were to many managers I went back to school and got an accounting degree. Did that for a bunch of years and started teaching System Administration. Now looking for my next obsession.
I have seen the effect of tools building in several contexts. The most successful were teams that respected the process in that they each, could and would build tools themselves and would adopt other's tools.
Without the symmetry then the creators has to make sure to keep up the pace on the global progress or be label as distracted by the tool creation.
Worst case the tool creators get separated from the main production and have to maintain the core groups utilities (which will become any code they don't want to maintain).
Tools have to be short to build, widely useful, and placed in a repository that is collectively maintained.
Remember the context that created the need for the tool may move on and the existing tools will have to be upgraded. The group should have a plan how to handle that.
I may be a little more "temporally ludditish" than the author. I have bought the cheapest unlocked cellphone that Best Buy, Staples, or Costco had to offer. Most times on Black Friday.
I typically paid 150 to 250 Canadian. They last 2 to 3 years and meet my needs right up to the next purchase. I am due this year for a switch.
As for PCs and Laptops. All are old BF buys or rescued "garbage". I am setting up a Dell Latitude E5420 (2013) for a current need. (Official disposed by my employer and intercepted before sent to electronic recycling.) Other resurrected acquisitions that are operational are from 2013 and 2015. I can do this because "what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career".
I like keeping this systems out of the garbage for a few more years.
I am well past 60. For the first 30 odd years I was an individual contributor in both programming and system administration and manager of the same.
When one of the financial crises and ageism ended my management career, I went back to school and switched fields. After a few years I got the chance to teach new computer support professionals in vocational program. I have been doing that for 15 years.
As a side note for ageism "victims" our school is growing and is struggling to find enough competent teachers (Window/Linux Admin, Database, Scripting, Networking, VMs, Cloud, Mobile devices...).
Check out your local vocational programs. You can find permanent or bridge work teaching at this level. Usually industry experience is more important for these jobs than a teaching degree.
This is not a topic that can be explained while standing on one foot.
It is a multi layer cake of hand-offs of information
similar to the ISO OSI model of networking (which of course is I/O through the network.
At the top end is a program asking built in function or library to print some text. Many layers down is
the final hardware receiving the text and displaying it.
These two video will cover the lower layers
Your desire that everyone learns to swim is laudable but
as with all useful skills it takes work. Our completely distracted society is loosing skills like map reading, making change, driving manual, tying knots(still learning) ... (Sounds like a reason for Scouting and 4H)
I will even posit shoelace tying given all the Velcro shoes.
12K is a lot for ROV (other comments suggest the could be cheaper ones) but the good news is the operator has had
10,000 hours practice on a Xbox. The Engineer/PM/Accountant in me hopes the ROV is reusable and will be used over many years spreading the cost out over time saving many people.
Hopefully the saved will come to Jesus (pronounced "heysous"),
I mean the local teen working at the swimming pool who has a knack for
teaching adults to swim.
TLDR: 30% success rate for a $89 expense over 200 drives in 15 years is more than enough anecdotal evidence to say it was worth it.
I bought it 15 years ago and have run it on about 200 drives.
My anecdotal results are in thirds with about equal results
for drives(both spinning and ssd) that have measurable slowdown from new.
1. No visible improvement of the situation.
2. Moderate improvement in speed or identification of "bad sections of the drive".
3. Significant improvement in speed or readability.
For the third group especially backup times were horrible or failed so the idea of doing the backup not the rescue first were not successful so we had no option but try the recuse.
In this case after the rescue the backup worked. I then backup up the backup because one copy is not enough (min 3 on different media and at least one offsite). Then restore/image the disk and boot up the system with a new disk and put the old one on a shelf until you have appropriate back ups of the new one. Then destroy the old one so no one can use it.
30% success rate for a $89 expense over 200 drives in 15 years is more than enough anecdotal evidence to say it was worth it.
I have heard of a, probably now apocryphal story, of field on a Multinational's paper report that was always supposed to be 0. When the IT team that did the automation of the report, discovered field was the number of bombs that fell that week on a property owned by the company during the London Blitz. Not a big consequence to the company but the story had been lost.