This comes as absolutely no surprise to me -- my mother was recently transferred into memory care, and the changes to her memories are definitely showing some interesting changes. The foremost was that her new "apartment" is shared with one other person, gives off a bit of a dorm room vibe. First day, she was talking about how excited she was to be going back to school and seeing her boyfriends again(?!). I said, "Oh, like Doug? [my dad]". Her response? "Ew. No."
But, she's come around on that, and recently been upset about the affair he's been having (they divorced in 1980), and is irate over him having another kid with his new wife (1983), but isn't surprised that I haven't spoken to him in 12 years. She's never surprised at how I've aged, but doesn't remember her grandkids even exist and insists on meeting them soon (but remembers them when she sees them). Two weeks ago, she called to yell at me for things I did in high school (1990). At this point, I seem to be the anchor for everything recent, but when I'm not around physically, it's scattered everywhere else.
It's hard to write this, but before my grandmother died about 45 years ago, it felt like she'd lost almost all her memories, but was easy to take care of. She was in her late 80's.
My mom & aunt took yearly turns keeping her in their homes. If you kept her away from the stove, she still seemed quite happy helping fix her own breakfast, taking her meds, etc. Give her a warm washrag after, and she'd wipe down the table and then proceed to putter all around the kitchen, wiping and straightening. She preferred cartoons on TV (easier to see, I guess), and was always glad to fold clean towels or clothes, if she had the chance.
Once, she actually recognized me, and remembered my name. It was a very precious 5 minute chat, but then the memories were gone. Still, I'll always remember her that way, because it was just like how I remembered her, when I was a child.
Man, that makes me happy. I'm guessing your grandmother was a very upbeat, happy person who dealt with change well. My mother's the opposite, so now every little thing going wrong is the end of the world. It's rough, but I also get to see these moments where I can see how she was when I was little/before I was born, and those are moments that I do really enjoy.
These stories scare me. I'm happy that you were able to enjoy glimpses of your mother's past.
Mine is showing signs that several of us believe to be dementia, but she refuses to be seen and screened. It has gotten worse over time - repeated conversations, sometimes inside the same phone call, and a shift from "can't remember things if she doesn't write them down" to "needs to ask on multiple occasions because she hasn't remembered to write it down" - but not to the point where she seems to be a danger to herself.
I love my mother, but she is difficult. She also has grown with age. While she is difficult now, she used to be abusive and manipulative. My father would never speak ill of her, but from some things she's said I believe she was worse before she was raising us. If my mother regresses to an earlier state of mind, we will both need professional help. She will need professional care, and I will need help to not internalize the way she treats me.
Thank you. Surprisingly, less than you'd think. She started showing the first signs around 2020 or 2021, so by the time she had a diagnosis in 2023, I had pretty well wrapped my head around it. (Having a regular therapist has helped a bunch, too.). It's still tough, but that's a difficulty that's spread out over years rather than a sudden out-of-nowhere illness.
I don't know where my wife got mine, but I'm also on Team Meteorite (inset into a titanium band -- CP titanium so I don't need to worry about it being cut off in an emergency).
I think that the biggest hurdle for older developers right now is getting past the filtering systems that review résumés. I realize this is anecdata, but during the mid-2024 to early-2025 timeframe, this fifty-something developer had a hard time getting to the interview phase, but once I did, getting in was a pretty straightforward deal.
I don't know that it's just the issues surrounding junior-vs.-senior experience. I feel like a lot of what I'm experiencing with talking to kids that are in high school and college, is a lot of what I can best describe as "intellectual ennui" -- a lack of curiosity, an inability to analyze, and a lack of any sort of intellectual pursuits. Again, I'm in my fifties, and I understand that my contact pool with that age group is somewhat limited, so I'm not sure if I'm capable of painting the whole picture.
> getting past the filtering systems that review résumés.
I've talked to many folks seeing this from the inside. Thing is, many resumes seem to be written by AI using the job description as the source to create a "perfect match".
As someone in industry who also teaches early career engineers once every two years, there seems to be a tailing off of enthusiasm in the latest cohort. Does anyone know of an actual data source from which one could draw actual conclusions about this sort of thing, by the way?
It makes sense to me that someone coming up today would be less enthusiastic about the effects of technological innovation given the experiences of the last decade. Growing up in Silicon Valley a generation or two ago it was an article of faith that innovation was going to bring great things to us. Taking that away ought to have an impact on enthusiasm.
Not just the latest cohort, plenty of folks that grew up with technology in the late '90s (i.e. mid 30s) are jaded by the last 5-10 years. Constantly hearing about dark patterns, grifts, anti-consumer practices (and -worker for that matter) will do that.
This is definitely true, and we definitely need something similar again. I've been using a game ("The Farmer Was Replaced") as a jumping-off point for teaching the kids Python, but the more I think about it, the more I think that they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. It was easy, back in the day, to learn a ton (even assembler) on a system like that, and I feel like there's some value in rewinding the clock back to that point, forking the experience from there, and seeing what a new generation of kids will cook up.
Zach Barth and his former studio Zachtronics released several entertaining puzzle games based on idealized fake assembly languages. These are a lot of fun and useful for introducing registers and multiprocessing.
I keep coming back to the idea of taking that concept and just running with it, IE building up a toolchain alongside some concrete tasks to solve with it and just adding more detail until we reach a reasonably sophisticated level
I've been staring at 0x10c, carwars and battletech and there's a sense that I could build a sort of programming / engineering Zach like
> ... I think they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves.
Something like https://miniscript.org/MiniMicro/ perhaps? It's a virtual machine rather than real hardware, but apart from using disk image files instead of real floppy drives, the experience should be rather similar to what we* grew up on.
* Mine was a KayPro II running CP/M rather than an Apple //e, but you get the idea.
Dude, you can still recover some of those friendships. I went through a phase during college where I alienated a TON of my friends, and that was on me. For a variety of reasons we don't need to expound upon here. I eventually reached out to them, made my apologies, and would occasionally check in and see how they were doing. A few of those friendships are repaired and growing again. I think that there's a tendency toward second chance for people who've recognized their shortcomings, worked on them, and then taken responsibility for their actions.
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