The answer to the headline is, atypically, "Yes". But in fact every age has been the golden age of stupidity. When the microcomputer revolution was occurring... most people were idiots. When the transistor was invented... the world was full of morons. When Einstein and Bohr and Heisenburg and Planck and Maxwell and Schroedinger were revolutionizing physics... yes, they saw stupid people everywhere. When Newton was publishing on gravity... yep, dumb people everywhere. When Aristotle was teaching promising young Greeks in the Lyceum, or Plato the academy, the general populace (hoi polloi) were as dumb as now.

You're leaving out an important element, and you can't even really start discussing it validly until you include it. This element is that the union is itself another firm. It is not the workers exercising power in their control; the union exercises the power.

The same people who are now handwringing about how datacenters are going to overwhelm the electric grid were pushing electric vehicles pretty damned hard; they should be happy that both aren't happening.

If the other landlords are also using the software, and all are working off the same information, then the software can determine the prices the other landlords would choose as well. In the limit, if every landlord is using the same software, they can can all act as-if they were colluding even though there is no communication between them.

On the one hand, my libertarian side objects to this. On the other, I think such software can pretty much only be used for evil. Which is to say, allowing the landlords to eliminate all the consumer surplus.

Woz isn't eligible:

Woz is happily not dead yet.

And that's why end-to-end encryption is the only sort which can be trusted by the ends. None of this "SSL added and removed here" stuff. But of course governments strongly discourage its use, and especially any way to make it easier to use, because they want to eavesdrop.

Good news: no new misfeatures for a while

Bad news: migrating to Azure will probably break everything occasionally.

And in 2005, if the Apple Calculator had leaked arbitrary amounts of memory... it just would have been a bug report in a queue. Because it's just a little utility, not an emergency.

He inadvertently disproves his own thesis by linking to the Spotify bug. It's from 2020, when his chart was still in the green, though it's likely there are multiple different memory leak bugs discussed in the thread.

It's true that in the much-further distant past there were fewer bugs of this nature. Or at least fewer that made it to production. That's partly because when you have 64K of memory and no memory protection, these bugs become very apparent very quickly. And partly because software was operating in a much simpler environment -- one application running at a time, not much of an OS at all. There were still plenty of bugs though!

Most of his examples don't support his thesis at all

Todayâ(TM)s real chain: React â' Electron â' Chromium â' Docker â' Kubernetes â' VM â' managed DB â' API gateways.
Each layer adds âoeonly 20â"30%.â Compound a handful and youâ(TM)re at 2â"6Ã-- overhead for the same behavior.

That's how a Calculator ends up leaking 32GB. Not because someone wanted it toâ"but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users started complaining.

Apple Calculator uses exactly none of those.

Then he talks about AI models and software inefficiency. No; AI uses a lot of power but it's highly optimized. Because unlike a Calculator utility people care a LOT about the efficiency of AI training and inference.

He's noted a real problem (that a lot of people also have) but his detailed diagnoses are nonsense, and therefore his solutions are unlikely to work.

When the Ruskies need to hit a 2m MTA exhaust port located among skyscrapers to blow up the city, this technology is really going to help them a lot.

That's why it's called work and not fun time. You trade your physical well-being and/or your mental well-being for pay.

Oddly, last time I was at an obscure hipster restaurant (well, bar, really) in Brooklyn, they ONLY took cash.

These clowns have been around for over 20 years, always promising and never delivering.

I own, but do not operate, a few IT companies that manage corporations in the $600MM-$1B receivables range.

Based on our own help desk ticket software, our clients have opened 40% fewer tickets since ChatGPT was rolled out to every desk and phone. 40%. I expect another 40% drop (total 80%) by next year as end users just manage things themselves.

I won't downsize as the tickets aren't really generating revenue as much as headaches. One of my engineers had a broken PDF file that took her 6 hours to fix, and the end user spent 6 days trying to fix it themselves with Ai.

But -- the basic stuff? Reboot your computer stuff? Email rejected because you mistyped a domain name stuff?

You don't need a human, and we would probably have outsource that stuff to India anyway next year if not for ChatGPT etc.

Didn't the Supreme Court JUST REJECT a similar case about the Dylann Roof church shooting?