Yes, the real reason why netflix used to have a fantastic catalog at low cost was because at the time, the rights holders didn't take Internet streaming seriously and so cheap deal to Netflix was a low risk easy bit of free money.

Then they took it seriously, didn't get the deals from Netflix they thought they should be able to get and started making their own streaming services instead. Probably the first sign of things was when Starz demanded to be a "premium channel" on Netflix. Frankly if Netflix has accepted that arrangement, they might have been the defacto broker of streaming services in one app, though the user experience suffers, but it suffered anyway.

You might call it a tad goofy to turn a somewhat b-movie "hero" into a high quality bronze statue and place it in public display, but this was entirely a private initiative and it's standing in a commercial property and the owners where in on the fun. That's how stuff like this (and weird woke projects) should be done.

I get the joke - RoboCop was also a commentary on the derelict state of Detroit - and would pay the statue a visit.

I suppose I wasn't clear, when I said they are dutifully generating code, I mean they *are* using the AI tools. So the leadership is left with the possibilities that either AI isn't fit for the task of suddenly halving their headcount without any transition plan or the employees are to blame, and so they are deciding the employees are to blame.

The leadership cut entire teams and then just assigned their projects to the other half who had never seen the codebase, never used or talked to users of those projects, no knowledge associated with meetings and emails and instant messages, only tickets and a codebase to go on. AI was the stated answer as to why not only could they double the workload, they could AI-away the traditional need for typical transition efforts.

The trend even in theory doesn't seem to keep pace with the depreciation on the assets.

My subjective experience is opposite, after an initial rapid improvement in LLM behavior, the subjective experience has plateaued. Doing a better job with getting the right stuff into context without having to manually stuff it with certain tools, and that counts for a lot, but given the same context the outputs are about as unreliable as they have been, including gemini 3. If it generates too much code, then it's more trouble to fix that code than it's worth. Digestable snippets are useful... sometimes to save on tedium, but the investment seems to expect to just replace people, and it's not going to be there from what I see.

And the marketing has been obnoxious, pretty much going back to GPT3 I keep seeing some advocates saying "It can write your code for you!" followed with the next iteration of "well, admittedly, it couldn't before, but *now* it can!" GPT4, Claude, Gemini, I keep seeing the claims and then dismissing the previous claim to say "this time it's true!". This is starting to really impact companies, I know of a company that laid off over half their developers without any warning or prep, with execs telling the remaining people "you can just use AI to maintain and improve the code, it's going to be no incremental burden". They seem very disappointed that a bunch of things have stopped happening and have been saying the devs must be some sort of luddites refusing to use AI to just do the work, even as they are dutifully generating code.

Historically speaking, that last part is frequently elusive. Lots of crashing and burning of once "sure thing" tech companies. Some have survived, but it's hardly an assumption that can be made.

Reminds me of when an executive left our company and higher ups were rushing to assure us that we shouldn't be too worried and don't let this hurt morale while mostly we either didn't care or were kind of glad to see the idiot go. Meanwhile the execs speaking would get obviously angry at the guy for betraying them and leaving.

It was clear that day that the executives actually think we give a crap about any one of them.

Not knowing anything at all about Apple and Dye and Lemay, the story seems depressingly familiar and totally believable based on my experience with big companies.

Someone useless occupies a high position because he convinces peers he is somehow insightful, everyone hates him for his crappy 'leadership', his departure pisses off the leadership team so much that all his allies are dead to them.... Yep, all of this absolutely looks like things I've seen at other companies...

Nope, they are going the other way. There's a proposal to dramatically increase residential power rates, in part to fund the 'increased demand due to datacenters". They want residents to pay for stuff instead of making those poor, cash-strapped AI companies have to pay for what they are inflicting...

Not a weirdo, and it's all about their business interests against the users.

A user increasingly keeps their device over a longer term, 8 year old devices are common. Between their needs not evolving and to the extent they are, they focus on their phones. As a result, Microsoft gets thrown a few dollars by the OEM when the device sold, and that's it.

Meanwhile, if they get someone into a microsoft account, they can upsell them on subscriptions to office and onedrive, and easily make more money per user per year than they made from many of those users over a decade.

... is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting, among other things, in the fact that migrating your upstream Git repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.

Git is one of those things that bring the genius of well planned and built software to full display.

BTW, if you want to host your own web-interfaces upstream repo, Gitea is a very neat open source software for doing exactly that.

Ingress NGINX controller is being retired.

A viable, maintained alternative is NGINX Ingress Controller.... Totally different project....

To make his suggestion at *least* vaguely closer to reasonable, even if not there, could just say text will be in the phonetic scripts. So maybe not Kanji, but sure, Hiragana and Katakana.

If it is true that no one will reasonably provide fonts for cheap to cover the thousands of Kanji, you could still be in native language with a manageable scope by sticking to the phonetic scripts.

If a bot-car can be held up by a gangster simply stepping in front of it in a situation where you'd actually like to rather plow through, how safe is that car for the people in it? Given, cars are more dangerous for their environment most of the time, but sometimes its the environment that is more dangerous for the car and the people in it.

Also driving through a rising river that is a meter deep may usually be a bad idea, but if the flood is rising it might be well worth the risk and a very reasonable decision to attempt it. You want to be able to actively make your car do that in those situations.

... wether a dumb command or AI deletes everything makes no difference.

I hope he had it in place or learnt his lesson.

No need for AI or other fancy stuff. Just redo your constitutional setup. Multi-party representative system, 5% barrier to entry for parliament, President becomes (largely) a ceremonial role, coalition government, independent non-private federal bank, independent default subsidized media, any member of a government that exceed 3% of debt per legislative period may not be re-elected ever again and a few more details and you're good for the next 250 years.

This isn't rocket-science. We all know what's broken and needs to be fixed and contrary to what some USians like to think, you can have a total revolution with not a single bullet fired. It's not that the vast majority of people in the US ain't noticing that fundamentals of the US system have to change. You got this.

After all, you guys already helped build a (quite well) working prototype of USA 2.0. It's called "modern Germany".