voilavilla's comments

Then I would hire that person to be a requirements & specifications archival expert! ;)

The bell-curve meme popular on reddit showing both extremes using the same solution, while the "average" cries, is dead on.

OP is on the right path: think before you code.

One of the neat things about being in the last few years of my career (started in 1988) is how the tools change. I'm a senior principal software architect at a large-ish company. And I don't write a single line of code. I write everything in Visio, Word, and PowerPoint (and sometimes PlantUML). As you move up the abstraction ladder the tools become simpler. I define architectures that will deploy into 10-year lifespan applications (think military, medical, and automotive tier-1), and the code that implements it--or even the language used--has absolutely zero impact on the architecture. Mostly C and C++ (went through an Ada period, too), and some of it might even be implemented in Rust over the next few years as it matures into the automotive world, but when you're high enough up, the implementation is irrelevant.

What matters are the building blocks, the apis, and most importantly, the encapsulation because that has an impact on the silicon, security, manufacturing, and test. Stuff that can be drawn and explained in a few slides, and not the code itself. (Of course, my lovely boxes have to be able to withstand upstream discoveries of flaws in the architecture, but that's the fun part!)

Seems to me that studying a collection of every test over the years, without knowing what questions will be on the exam is... actually learning? >_<

>> (where everyone cheated anyways)

This is depressing. I'm late GenX, I didn't cheat in college (engineering, RPI), nor did my peers. Of course, there was very little writing of essays so that's probably why, not to mention all of our exams were in person paper-and-pencil (and this was 1986-1990, so no phones). Literally impossible to cheat. We did have study groups where people explained the homework to each other, which I guess could be called "cheating", but since we all shared, we tended to oust anyone who didn't bring anything to the table. Is cheating through college a common millenial / gen z thing?

That's why MPEG defines "I", "B", and "P" frames (well, one of the reasons).

>> rights holders have engaged in a fundamentally-doomed arms race of implementing copy-protection strategies

Not entirely true. They simply haven't succeeded in created an industry-standard secure pipeline to the pixels on the display. Aside from the "analogue hole", eventually all of the gaps will be plugged, the same way we use secure sockets today. All media devices (including home HDTV/8K/etc) will extend the chain of trust farther into the pipeline. A set of signed apps and hardware will be required to watch any DRM films on HDTV, with each stage using authenticated encryption completely annihilating any MITM siphoning of the video.

So, its not doomed, just moving slowly, but it absolutely WILL arrive. I know, because I'm working on secure embedded video codec hardware, and our customers are targeting this..

How does this make huge sense?

It's a financial goal that is literally based on how long you plan to live, aka, your age.

Let's say I have €100.000 in the bank and that's two years of expenses based on my budget. Can I retire tomorrow? Well, what's my age? and what X do I plan to add to my age to determine if that amount of money is sufficient to retire?