News and opinion about hardware, software,
and the latest trends in technology.

Historic Lows in the Software Development Job Market

If you’re a coder, you already know: There just aren’t as many jobs as there used to be.

Tim Paradis at Business Insider takes a less-than-penetrating look into the job market for software developers, but he did include a link to a Federal Reserve Bank chart that plots the change in the number of job postings on Indeed.

Beginning in 2020, the chart shows a meteoric rise of software development job postings into the second quarter of 2022. A rise to over 230% from the February 1, 2020 numbers. Job postings have since fallen to approximately 63% of February, 2020.

According to the article, the primary driving factor is the use of artificial intelligence. It’s making individual coders more efficient and more productive thereby rendering larger teams obsolete.

For those of us in the industry, as the above quote observes, the chart is unnecessary. If we haven’t already been laid off, we’re waiting for that Muskian email asking us to justify our employment. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we all have a front row seat for a modern reimagining of Death of a Salesman, and we don’t need the Fourth Estate talking us through the play.

Digg.com Reacquired By Founders, Relaunch Planned

The relaunch of Digg envisions a new era of user interactions denuded of “misinformation, spam, and the emotional toll of navigating hostile interactions.”

The new twist will be the use of artificial intelligence to create a more-human experience:

By combining Ohanian's and Rose's historical knowledge and deep understanding of what has and hasn't worked from their experiences at Reddit and Digg with today's technological advancements – particularly in AI – Digg plans to become an online destination with humanity and connection at its core.

As of this posting, the homepage redirects to a subdomain with a landing page collecting email addresses.

Dark Storm Does DDoS Damage

Elon Musk confirmed that the social media platform X was the victim of a “massive cyberattack” today. The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack was perpetrated by the cyber warfare group Dark Storm Team.

Orange Cyberdefense reported that the group has a pro-Palestinian agenda and recently pledged to launch a series of cyberattacks targeting government websites of NATO countries, Israel, and other nations supporting Israel. (Hindustan Times)

There is no information on the group in the MITRE ATT&CK® database. However, Musk reported that the attack originated from IP addresses within Ukraine. Both of these data points suggests an (ostensibly) ideologically-motivated group with no qualms for hacking-for-hire opportunities.

Daily Digestible: Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Humanoid Robots

The quest for domesticated automatons is bringing to market new aspirants on the daily. Figure.ai isn’t a johnny-come-lately, but it has recently announced its robotic humanoids, the Figure-02, will have a hive mind called Helix AI to enable organized operation. They anticipate an accelerated timeline to getting robots into your pantry.

Quantum Computing

Microsoft has announced its Majorana 1 quantum computing chip. The most notable distinction is its “Topological Core” architecture. However, keywords in Microsoft’s celebratory article like “expects,” “progress,” and “offer a path” paint an optimistic portrait of the world to come; but the language of the publication do not indicate efficacious operation in the here and now.