They can take Fort Ross, but they can’t pry Clam Beach from our cold, dead hands.

That last one was just people shooting at magic suits.

My first tech job out of college, I was told to go talk to “Dave,” the guru old-timey programmer and learn the lay of the land. He turned out to be this crotchety old guy, with low tolerance for idiots, but a soft spot for someone who actually paid attention.

A few months in, I was told to go fix a feature in the company’s main product which was sold to power utilities. This was a MASSIVE code base, with a mix of C, C++, assembler, and a bit of Fortran thrown in. I spent a while week poring through all the code trying to figure things out. Then I hit a mystery workflow that didn’t make sense.

I walk over to Dave’s office and ask a specific question. Now, mind you, he had worked on this years ago, and had long moved on to new products. He leans back in his chair, stares at the ceiling, then without looking at the screen once tells me to go look at such and such file for such and such variable, and a list of functions that were related. I go back to my desk and damn if it wasn’t EXACTLY as he described.

Now, I’m probably as old as he was then. I don’t remember what I wrote an hour ago. No matter what I build, I’ll always be in awe of Dave and what he could keep in his head.

Getting less programmer_humor and more “I didn’t get the promo” angry vibe from this.

I use the same tool. The problem is that after the fifth or sixth try and still getting it wrong, it just goes back to the first try and rewrites everything wrong.

Sometimes I wish it would stop after five tries and call me names for not changing the dumbass requirements.

Most IoT devices that died did so because the vendor went out of business and had to shut off the servers. Most lived in hope that a last minute investment would keep them afloat. In a few other cases, it was the middleware software provider (like Google IoT) that shut down and bricked a device.

This legislation might apply to a big company that decides to discontinue a product line and could then send notices out, but most startups won’t know (or admit defeat) till the last possible moment. By then it’s too late.

I used to work with big companies collecting IoT data. 90% were collecting telemetry without knowing why. Or having business goals they could easily achieve in other ways, without hoovering everything and violating our privacy.

The rest were doing it so they could sell it to data brokers and make money.

None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.

So many ways…