What's the possibility of getting a news source that's giving me just straight and complete facts, not curated for emotion, not carefully crafted to enhance some bias, not cherry-picked for a convenient narrative? I'm an adult and have enough EQ to handle bad news if it comes along, don't need puppy posts to keep me happy....

But wait... here we have a /. post re. some negative human trait, and it got me riled up enough to reply with a rant. I've been played and I lost... again.

A seemingly pro-WFH article on Slashdot??? Oh the sacrilege.

The org I'm working for (contractor) is based in Europe - so we have important/leading team members there, but the actual grunt work is done by team members in a cheaper location. Conclusion: Our team needs to work remotely IN ANY CASE, whether we sit in an office or at home. For my part we could be 100% WFH.

We do have an office rotation that takes us to the office about 20-25% of the time. Those occasions are generally hated by our team on both sides for all the obvious reasons - office distractions, commuting time, and worse amenities than at home, are among the most important. We don't do "people work", we do "computer work", which requires a lot more concentration than collaboration. And we are quite OK with collaborating via the video app; it's much easier to read a share-screen than squinting over someones shoulder to try and see what's going on (getting a conf room with a big screen, and getting it set up, has quite a few more hurdles).

What always gets to me is how the management and HR types trot out the creativeness and collaboration generalities when motivating RTO, yet the work products we see coming from them is just the same old tired MBA tropes rehashed.

If you can spend 10 hours a week stuffing your face with lard and butter, you can spend 10 hours a week at the gym, lifting weights and doing cardio (or some other form of adjusted exercise). Of course, working out 10 hours a week will also cause 10 hours a week of additional eating, but it's eating for a different reason.

My crossfit coach often repeats the platitude: Abs are made in the kitchen (meaning it's much easier to restrict calories via diet than it is to burn them via exercise).

I saw a dietician the other day and her serious opinion was that good sleep routine is probably more important for weight loss than calorie counting (working with the body's circadian rhythms to keep hormones balanced.)

Then again, eating healthy and having a good workout does tend to make me sleep better.

Oh, I'd say that between owning nothing and being happy, taking public transport everywhere (and doing a lot of walking from one connection to the other), and eating insect protein, there's not much need for bronze.

Silicon, yes, because that makes it a lot easier for the king (or whatever you call the shot-caller) to keep tabs on everyone's social credit score.

How do we then lessen the impact of AI on our lives? As stated in the summary itself:

That number "goes down to 40 percent for emerging markets, 26 percent for low-income countries,"

So to protect more humans from the effects of AI, we just need to turn their countries to "low-income countries".

I don't know where everybody was in the previous posts for the last decade or so about EVs, where EV fanbois expound on all the virtues of EVs and then as the bottom line say something like: "and when you do your roadtrips once or twice a year where the EV doesn't have the range, you can always go rent an ICE."

Where are you gonna rent the ICE if the rental companies have also switched to EV? Ever think of that?

Yay, another breathless Slashvertisement.

I think you are trolling, but in case you are not, let me assure rhat from my POV quite the opposite is true; the message I get on social media is all but Trump's or Putin's (and good thing too), but has been fairly relentlessly leftist, woke and autocratic. (I don't do TwitX though, had already been cooled to social media by my FB experience by the time it took off.)

I guess it depends in part on the tint of the spectacles and the adjustment of the blinkers through which each of us look out at the world and social media.

There's a plugin to make it work in IntelliJ (which incidenally since the latest version also comes bundled with Jetbrains' own GPT4-based code assist tools). Chat obviously hasn't been available as of this past Friday, we'll have a look when we get back to work on Tuesday.

It's true that sometimes a workplace restricts one to certain IDEs and AI tools, especially when they worry about IP being uploaded to the tool provider.

As other commenters in this post have mentioned, Copilot is not ready to replace humans just yet. I find that going through the generated code's logic with a critical eye (which is necessary more often than not) very nearly outweighs the benefit of not having to write it from scratch. It also seems a bit "reluctant" around some "newer" Java features (Streams and the chrono replacements for Date come to mind). I mean Java 8 has been out for yonks, but I guess its training data may be leaning heavily on legacy code that "just works" so updating to newer paradigms is not priority - similar to how StackOverflow has a plethora of answers that are long superseded by newer versions of the underlying tech.

... and it's not so much about getting sufficient proteins - it's shown time and again that a healthy vegetarian diet can supply that, and that the modern diet may even oversupply it - but about a multitude of "co-factors" that arise from biochemical processes of living bodies. As one example, a dietician I once read talked about "the vegetarian sweet tooth" (check) that seems to arise out of insufficient phosphorus. (I wasn't able to check that out independently, but I sure do have little if any craving for fruit and sweets on Meaty Mondays.)

I once kept a few chickens (and occasionally ate their unborn children). The roost where they sheltered at first was very rudimentary and quickly improvised, since the friend I got them from was given 1 day's notice that he was not allowed to keep them in the city. When the new Hotel Gallofornia was ready for them, the adult birds could jump/fly up to their sleeping roost, but the chicks could not and a ramp was installed for them, which they were unfamiliar with. At first they still slept in their nest at ground level were they were hathed. I took one of the semi-tame chicks, chased it with my hands up the ramp, once. That night all the chicks slept on the roost. I was mightily impressed by their learning ability.

That said, I still eat eggs, chicken, beef, and other meats. I grew up vegetarian and switched in middle age, and saw a marked improvement in my health. Complex organisms need to consume the nutrient-dense bodies of slightly simpler or equally complex organisms.

What about plants? Is it OK to consume plants because they don't have emotions, intelligence, or social structures? If you think that, you might want to read "The hidden life of trees" by Peter Wohlleben.

With campills already in use, and new things like this being developed, I've wondered what happens to the battery and electronics once this thing comes out the other end. I don't imagine most people being scrupulous enough to fish it out again... especially as the supplier doesn't want it back. So it lands in whatever waste treatment system, which I guess aren't designed for those battery chemicals. Which then end up in the ecosystem, or even somebody's drinking water supply.

(About 20 years ago there was some publicity around the rising levels of estrogens (from birth control) in European water supplies - which isn't known for being an arid region-, which was nearly impossible to remove economically (source: friend at water utility in a slightly more arid country with a greater need for recycling). I sometimes wonder how much that contributes to the alphabet soup proliferation, but I digress...)

Another thing we do know for a fact that Glyphosate does, is it disrupts the so-called Shikimate metabolic pathway (which inhibits the production of enzymes needed to synthesize some amino acids). And thus the target organism, which is now unable to produce proteins, dies. That's exactly why it is the active ingredient in a herbicide: it kills plants.

The good news is mammals do not possess the Shikimate pathway (they have to ingest the amino acids that they need). Plants, bacteria and fungi however do posses the pathway.

The bad news is that human (and other mammalian) gut is full of such bacteria and fungi, one could say we live in symbiosis with them since they are pretty important for us to help digest food and absorb nutrients (and even creating some nutrients inside our digestive tracts). Hence prebiotic and probiototic foods and supplements having become all the rage in recent years (health practitioners are often seen recommending fermented foods like yogurt, kombucha, sauerkraut, etc.).

As an example: I own a horse, and know a couple of other horse owners, and have a friend I've known since college days who produces a probiotic supplement for horses and other animals, based in part on soil microorganisms extracted from earthworm castings. It is quite striking to see the improvement in health, condition, coat shine, and temperament in horses who are given such a supplement.

So it would IMHO be conceivable (although certainly not a proof) that a human with sub-optimal nutrient uptake would also obtain less of the nutrients (vitamins and anti-oxidants) that would help his immune system to clear up precancerous cells, eventually leading to cancer in some individuals. (Of course, muddying the waters is that multiple factors in the modern world are detrimental to humans' gut biome, like antibiotics, sugar, alcohol, stress, processed foods, etc. Adding Glyphosate to that is not helping. And we presumably ingest more and more residues of the stuff, as things like Roundup Ready crops and the practice of crop desiccation becomes more established.)

The other bad news is that the soil also contains bacteria and fungi. (The guts of the earthworms already mentioned are veritable reactors, where these same microorganisms in high concentration digest plant matter. Incidentally pretty similar or identical to the microorganism population in our own guts, when healthy, ours are just less concentrated.) These microorganisms and other soil life are useful because they help to build soil structure, retain moisture, sequester carbon when they die, and - important - live in symbiosis with plants, which helps the plants with better nutrient uptake and thus better plant health - and ultimately causing better nutrient quality further up the food chain (which is important for humans if they are the ones getting nutrition from the plants).

As much as I love the progress and innovations stemming from western culture, we do seem to have this weakness that we often fail to see the forest for all the trees: our in-depth focus on details in isolation prevents us from seeing the holistic picture and the interactions and relationships between the parts - hence "unintended consequences" being so common.

I'm fortunate in the sense that I have some space, so I'm increasing my own production of chemical-free herbs and vegetables, relying less and less on the store for food needs. Horse manure, compost, and castings from my earthworm bin all are very valuable substances in the pursuit of this.

"And yes, that means for big companies ... does the copyright stay with the person who created it, or do they take ..."

Where I have worked all my life in software development, the company IS the original copyright holder, because the software is being written by employees acting as part of the company and not as private individuals (refer employment contract, including remuneration for said writing). I guess that is pretty standard for the vast majority of the software industry worldwide.

I don't see that it needs to be different for a company like Disney having story writers, cartoon artists, or what have you on their payroll.

That's assuming the flashing effect is not already due to subliminal advertising being flashed onto your retinas in between frames.