Not *explicitly*. Offering such a database would be an invitation for people to look at the whole data broker industry. So what you, as a databroker who tracks and piegeonholes every human being who uses the Internet to a fare-the-well, do to tap into the market for lists of gullible yokels? You offer your customer, literally anyone with money, the ability to zero in on the gullible by choosing appropriate proxies.

For example, you can get a list of everyone who has searched for "purchasing real estate with no money down". Sad people who buy colloidal silver and herbal male enhancement products. People who buy terrible crypto assets like NFTs and memecoins. Nutters who spend a lot of time on conspiracy theory sites.

It's kind of like doxxing someone. You might not be able to find out directly that John Doe lives on Maple St and works for ACME services, but you can piece it together by the traces he leaves online. Only you do it to populations wholesale.

The science of AI, Artificial Intelligence, is rapidly advancing. The "Intelligence" is NOT "Artificial".

The speed of advancement is partly because AI reduces company expenses.

I've no idea whether Ivermectin does anything for Covid, but I do know that if it does work the medical mafia would never admit that they blocked a drug which would have saved many lives at near-zero cost. The lawsuits alone would bankrupt many of them.

What we do is irrelevant in the long term because antibiotic-resistant bugs will evolve in other countries which don't care. We might stop antibiotic-resistant bugs evolving here but the new ones will soon arrive on an airliner.

This was always going to be a perpetual arms race and we're no longer competent enough to develop new arms in the race.

No. It's because you were figuring things out and making terrible decisions 50 years ago. None of you really knew what you were doing. You just called IBM support and had them do things for you, or did what the manual said.

The fact that systems can't be upgraded and have to run in layer after layer of emulation is proof that you did a poor job building a maintainable system. You never changed the program to run on a new system. You always had IBM to save you from doing it by having companies pay them more and more.

Yes. Definitely. Without a doubt.

The problem with these old COBOL systems is that they have decades of patches one on top of another, and very little formal testing. These systems were made in a time long before "modern good practices" were established. They work because the business requirements are straightforward and change very little. And the things they do are relatively simple. The barrier to entry is extremely high. COBOL is not taught anymore, and even if you learn COBOL on your own in Linux, in real life it won't be a Linux OS. It'll probably be several layers of proprietary IBM VM emulation, with Linux running AS/400 running AIX. And on top of that, you have whatever customizations this particular user made. You're a slave of what someone that wasn't necessarily a "wizard" decided 40 years ago.

With a more "modern" language, COBOL can make use of modern "good practices", especially automated testing and such.

the "jump frameworks every couple of years to whatever is trendy" is out of place when you are mentioning Java and C#. Both are well-established languages and have been stable for literally decades now. Java and C# (actually .NET) people are not in the same game as JS developers.

The problem isn't the language, but all of the things that come around it. Using a modern language would, if anything, let you ditch the expensive IBM support contracts for mainframe hardware (and maybe switch to slightly less expensive support contracts for regular hardware)

Interestingly, I would regard never learning how to write PHP over 21 years as one of my greatest successes.

Its not an excuse, its the whole point. The EU exists to serve the public interest, in Europe, and when foreign companies trade in Europe then they follow europes laws.

And who gives a fuck if Apple are successful or not. Thats Apples concern, its not Europes concern. Europes concern is that foreign monopolists, or duopolists do not use their monopolie to leverage themselves into new markets. And to be clear they 100% have a monopoly. Can Epic create their own iPhone store if Apple chooses not to? No? Then its a monopoly. They have a complete monopoly on Software, Hardware and any other component (I'm not clear what other sort of component there is other than Software, or Hardware, but I'm humoring your wierd argument here out of respect) , on iphones . That isn't controversial, its a simple statement of reality. Unless you think other companies also make iPhones? Which would be an odd claim.

How is it for folks more atuned to Gnome? Back in the ancient days I used to use KDE but came to find it bloated and a little too expensive on the machines I'd run it on. Nowdays though, I'm finding gnome a little too sparse and it seems like even baseline laptops have caught up, power wise.

The gnarl toothed beast is still lurking around, but its mostly just used for hosting wordpress and throwing together templates and plugins for it. Theres still a bit of use of Laravel, but its paradoxically very much in the "burger flipper" category of least sought after and lowest paid jobs out there. Congrats for those graduating college with a coding qualification, you get to work on nonsense!

Honestly, I wish JS would go the same way. I hate working with the language, and web dev in general.

And I have a hard time believing that Apple (or whomever) can't brick them remotely, even when in China, after they've been reported stolen. As soon as they connect for an update, the IMEI identifies it and bingo, drop a (virtual) brick on it. Why TF NOT ?!?

That doesn't really matter though, because manufacturers won't make ICE vehicles if they've been told they won't be able to sell then in ten years.

China loves this, of course, because they have little experience of making ICE vehicles and the EU can't compete against cheap Chinese EVs. Almost like they've paid Western politicians to destroy Western auto manufacturers.

wait a week or two and the details will change completely.

Trump is nothing if not mercurial. His fans will tell you he's playing 11 dimensional chess... I have my doubts, but let's say that's true. The problem is that when it comes to the economy it's not chess. It's more like basketball, and the President is the point guard calling plays, except the play being called keeps changing before the players can execute the last call. It's a tough time to be running a business, you can't plan out more than a couple of weeks.

Quoting the story: "Human-only work is forecast to drop 27% over the next five years."

Robots will eventually be excellent for all of us. Most things we buy will cost less.

Maybe we will have 4-day or 3-day work weeks.

Humans will not be doing extremely boring jobs.

The amount of material dumped into the atmosphere by Starlink is dwarfed by the amount which is dumped there naturally by meteors.

This whole "But Muh Pollution!" nonsense has absolutely crippled progress in the West over the last few decades. Which is probably why Russia and China pushed it so hard on us while ignoring their own pollution.