Except the workforce doesn't become optional in any case. It becomes absolutely redundant, and it will be eliminated.
In a globalized capitalist society without any guardrails, it can be assumed that if there is a way to optimize something to provide greater shareholder value / CEO pay and bonuses, it will be done. Just as if something was cheaper to produce in Asia, virtually all of that work will be done in Asia; if AI does something, anything less expensively than a laborer, that work will be moved to AI. That is not to say that some workers may be kept around as tokens, or objects of abuse--bullying robots just doesn't have the same feel.; they will be like the caucasians employed in Hong Kong. Look at us! We are doing well enough to employ a useless white guy!

In this world, It's a constant race to the bottom, consequences be damned. If AI cuts the legs off the working class, and ultimately the whole economy topples as a result, they will not care, so long as the financial quarter before the collapse was the best, most profitable quarter ever.

Rewrite everything in Haskell

My memories of college include feeling lucky if I had enough quarters to do laundry!

Bob? Is that Seymore's brother?

The only defense against a bad AI is a good AI. There has always been an arms race between the hackers and the security consultants; AI just accelerates the pace. Ultimately, we will have to rely on AI to defend us from AI. Better get to training those paranoia AIs, boys... Aren't we already at the point that we need to use an AI to detect AI-generated content?

Like, would you consider your girlfriend having 38% fewer hallucinations to be a big win? (I once had a girlfriend call me up while she was experiencing delirium tremens and describe to me how demons were raping her mom. I told her she was hallucinating. She insisted it was real, she could see it!)

That's not actually the flex you think it is...

We might have cable tv, if that was the cheapest way to get internet in our house. I literally do not know, only one device is plugged into a coax cable in our entire house and that's the modem. I wouldn't even know where to look on my tv to see if they still come with coax connectors on the back, it hangs on the wall and there's a power plug, that's it.

It's true, seifs are for ease of reading ... but so is Calibri. However, I believe Calibri was created for ease of reading on screens, while this article talks about documents on letterhead. So it's possible the choice of Calibri was misguided to begin with. Furthermore, according to the article, the number of “accessibility-based document remediation cases” – which I take to mean instances where somebody requests a document be reformatted for accessibility reasons – has not declined. So he's saying that, while this is a purely subjective aesthetic choice, the original change to Calibri never helped anything anyway.

Wouldn't use of a WiFi jammer incur a $10,000 fine from the FCC for use of an unlicensed transmitter?

Everything is gambling now.

Meanwhile, the most preventable of diseases are becoming commonplace.

Consoles have a 7 year life, the Xbox One came out in 2013; it should have seen a fully new hardware design in 2020. So they're 5 years overdue ("series" are hardware refreshes, not a true "next gen" redesign) Microsoft has never been able to turn around the story of the failed launch the product is likely dead at this point. Microsoft wanted to own the media landscape and at this point they've given up on that vision for 5+ years.

This one magnitude 7.6 ; 2011 was a 9.2, 9.1 thereabouts (I can't be bothered looking it up).

That's 2.5 or so orders of magnitude lower which, for earthquakes is a 10^(1.5*diff.magnitude) factor of difference in energy release. Which, for those who can't do mental maths (see "dollar store" rant) is 10^-(3.6 to 3.7) or between 4 and 6 THOUSAND times less energy release.

You didn't need to wake up fully. I saw the alert on my phone, did the maths, and went back to sleep.

Since "deeply discounted" does not necessarily mean a price tag of 1.00 pound-dollar-euro (or 2000 TzSh or 10000 Won) and such stores routinely post non-simple prices (integers, half integers, etc), there is a sub-story here : an appalling (or hilarious) proportion of people who cannot do simple mental arithmetic like adding up the purchases in their basket as they go round the shop.

I should be appalled, but seeing the number of morons on X or YT (and to a lesser extent here ; lesser, but not zero) who think that posting their prompt to Chat.GPClaude.Grok and the AI's response, I'm not even surprised. And they do it for what are simple matters of arithmetic, or recall of uncontentious science which is at most a Wiki search away using the keywords in their Chat.Prompt. And they seem to think that theirs is a useful contribution to the discussion.

[shakes_head.EMOJI]

People - they're skills you worked to gain (and paid, in cash, hours, or tax) ; and you need to exercise them, regularly, or you will lose them. And if you lose them, you will be fucked over - be it by a street grifter, the clerk at the grocery store, or your elected representatives.

Kids today! Gerrorf moi lawrnn!