All probably true, but this is something akin to clearing out the typing pool. That is, a big business has a handful of people who "do cashflow". They work out how much money needs to be in any one bank account at any given moment. Any spare money gets put to work in some way or other - some of that work is long term, some is short term. The cashflow folks job is to make sure there's as much money being made as possible, but that they can always cover their payments when they're due - so it's a juggling act of moving money around different accounts, moving it into investments of different types and then pulling it out of those investments when they mature, or when the money's needed somewhere (accepting there'll be a financial penalty for pulling out of an investment early).

This is absolutely an area where "AI" can help - most likely some ML and statistical modelling (rather than an LLM). In fairness, JPMorgan are in the process of productising something that's very specialised, quite hard to do (because it's specialised, and because there's no "dev environment" to try it on), and potentially could make businesses a bit of extra money, and save a bit of headcount.

How that means entire businesses can go to 3.5 day weeks I'm not really sure. My guess is humans leave a lot of money in accounts that doesn't need to be there (humans thinking "just in case" and "CYA"), where computers have much less worries on that score. As such, the computers can move more money into investments, and can probably predict the time the money will be required more accurately (ie. again without the fear-factor overhead a human would add). All that means more money for the business, but I'm still not sure how thousands of people would suddenly have more leisure time as a result.

> What users look for in a battery

Well, we have regulators, who represent users. And they rather like "recyclable", because they look for the whole product to be recyclable in some sort of way because we don't like nasty things in our landfills, and we recognise that we can't just ship it all off to the developing world for them to have it in their (unmanaged) landfills instead.

This raises some interesting questions though... Lets say I have a 1PB of data in AWS today. I've decided that Google plays golf better than Bezos, so I'm going to move to GCP. My minions have built a bit of the environment in GCP, and we're ready to start filling it with data.

How does anyone proceed *and* get the close-your-account-benefits? You're not going to say to AWS "close my account" on a Friday, shut everything down and then just pop up on GCP on the Monday - you'll need weeks, or more likely months of cut-over time. That could make that data transfer hard to distinguish from, say, a dual-provider setup where you replicate from one to the other.

No such hard rules here, but the same general approach. We have a "no devices at the table" rule, which has always held from day 1 (the most distraction we might use at the table is a card game or something). If we're out somewhere, then no devices unless its to take a picture or something - no doom scrolling when you should be looking around you. That may change in their teens, but we'll resist as long as we can.

We've also always talked to our children as much like adults as was appropriate. We didn't "dumb down" stuff, we just broke it down into terms they could understand (it was fun to explain Brexit, the pandemic, the Ukraine war, and now The Israel/Gaza war). We have two kids that can competently talk with adults or other children, and have a lot of knowledge about a lot of things - real knowledge, down to how things work sort of level. One of them reads books like there's no tomorrow, and consequently has a huge vocabulary. The other is a constant talker, so gets to exercise her vocab that way ;-)

As a side note, there's a show on Netflix about pets "super skills". There's a bit about the rabbit that paints and whatnot (mostly on youtube, and seemingly hollywood inhabitants love it). The rabbits owner sums it up nicely - if you stimulate your rabbits brain, it'll learn to do more and more stuff. You just just get your rabbit out of the hutch and expect it to paint, that won't work. So too with humans ;-)

My family and I had a "pink elephant" conversation a while back where everyone described what they could "see" if you say "think of a pink elephant".

My own case, I know there's a pink elephant there, but I can't really see it. If you ask me about its trunk, I can sort of 'zoom in', and I know there's a trunk there, but I can't really see it. I can describe it having wrinkles or whatever because I know them to be there, and I can sort of see them as I'm describing them, but then the rest of the elephant is lost, other than me knowing it is there.

I can't draw for toffee, possibly because I don't know "how things go" (as my school art teacher called it). But I can "feel" my way to things - that is, I can't really "see" anything, but I know the direction to go in, the steps to take and the outcome it'll provide. I can't tell you the "shape" of those thoughts, but I know them - and more often than not, they're actually well formed and "correct" (for different versions of "correct").

Back to the family conversation - the main thing is that whatever it is you do, be good at doing it, and that's all that anyone can ever ask.

These kids need to know what a proper Rock Star actually is.

Sure, you've got your Mick Jaggers, and even Taylor Swifts, with their go-here-do-this-go-there-do-that lifestyles, and their free spirited creativity, but they're not REAL rock stars - nope, the real rock stars have to work in an beige office 5 days a week, and if they're really lucky, we'll make them wear a shirt and tie too - that's really rockin' and stickin' it to the man.

They should rename their company to "Conformity and Compliance Games". Oh, and rename the GTA franchise to "Do as You're Told".

Forks are (IMHO) one of the biggest weaknesses of Git[hub|lab|other]. The ability to fork is obviously cool, but there's no way to know if the fork is any good or not.

What I mean is, you may well find a genuinely good, but perhaps abandoned or otherwise out of date project, perhaps via Google or other means. In some sense then the 'reputation' of the repo has been established, and so you might have some level of trust for it. However, the forks are a complete unknown - it's not immediately obvious if all the changes in the fork have been merged into the main project, it's not very easy to see what's changed in the fork, or what the purpose of it is, or anything else.

As a simple idea, if forks had to have another 'readme', then at least the owner of the fork would have a space to explain what they were up to. As things stand, if you modify the real readme, then that'll show up as a change from the upstream project, which you'll need to be careful not to push up to them.

Back on topic... if the source project in question is itself a fork of another, then this does present a problem (as it'll be hard to know which fork is the 'good' one). In most cases though, top of the fork tree is probably the 'good' one and everything below not so much. If the forks are actually checkout and re-commit rather than real 'fork', then you've got problems identifying anything about anything. Then it's over to Github to fix it for you.

Yeah, I can remember doing desktop support and finding one machine that had about a bajillion outstanding updates. I went and visited the desk, and of course they very dutifully shut it down every night and started up again in the morning. It's actually quite difficult to explain leaving it on overnight is a good thing - it really isn't, and "it might need to do an update" doesn't make it so.

In fairness, you used to have to do this because leaving it on was just foolish - it wouldn't survive more than a couple of hours without something going wrong or else consuming the power equivalent to a small town, so there was no point leaving it on over night. Then along came the boot time GPO scripts... then booting up took longer than it took to take your coat off, go get a coffee, have a chat and come back. Then we started leaving them on overnight (well, most of us). Then finally Windows got sleep modes, and we worried about it less - unless of course you were a techie in which case you turn off all the "automatically go to sleep mode" features.

Leaving it on overnight or not... it's a bloody minefield!

Like a lot of people, I've read quite a few CEO musings over the years. This is honestly one of the better ones. But of course, what he's really saying is "the reaction to our crappy AI responses is totally unacceptable". That it said stupid things isn't really the problem - it's that they got busted for it. If they could make their AI slightly less bad than OpenAI, then they'd be happy with it, the "round the clock" work would stop and they'd be looking for the next new shiny.

Cynicism aside, competition in this space is good, and "on paper" Google should be absolute masters of this stuff - they're not yet, and so it's good to see some concerted effort to get better at it.

As a side note, I love that he had to say "formerly Bard", because even Googlers can't keep up with the constant name changing and product creation/destruction cycles at Google.

> Google is one of those companies that needs to be split.

Probably, but there's no doubt in my mind that MS is absolutely building a "cloud" that locks people in - and they're leveraging people who already have a lot of MS to build a customer base. Whether or not that's 'anti trust' in the flimsy US sense, or more likely in the tougher European sense, I couldn't say - but on-prem windows users don't have a completely level playing field on which to base their decisions when choosing a cloud provider.

(one example is the Teams versus Zoom thing - that looked like good old MS tactics, and has largely been shown to be exactly that)

On the other hand, Google seems to want to make GCP so utterly impenetrably difficult to use that even Windows users, long since used to a crappy experience don't want to use it. Google's other 'cloudy' offerings, like Google Docs, etc are a worth Office opponent, but still seems a long way behind. I would never use MS again if I could, but even I would say Office 365 is better than Google Docs by a comfortable margin. I've never been involved, but I'll bet the decision to use it over Google is made all the easier by some sort of sweet bundling deal from Microsoft if you're migrating a big enough estate too.

Yep, when it comes to giving things names, Google seem to find ways to give the same thing several. Then they also have several products that do the same sort of thing, so for the simple act of "paying for something", which broadly speaking is one thing with a single definition, Google will find a way to give it half dozen.

Google's enshitification isn't (just) privacy related, or even quality-of-service related - it's that they keep on moving stuff around on the shelves, and then give it all new names too. Imagine going to the shop to get bread, only to be told it's in the "Precooked, but repeat cookable" isle, and then the next week that it's in the "flour-dough" isle, and then in the "squashy foods" isle.

The English have many words for a lot of things. Urban Dictionary can recount far more than me, but think of names for a penis, or even a vagina - dozens, if not hundreds each. How about food - yep, probably a couple of dozen names for that too. What about a less-than-even-handed football (soccer) referee? Yep, plenty there too.

I doubt it's unique to us Brits, but as soon as a (slang) word becomes common usage for something, we go ahead and think of another.

> It'll be interesting to witness what happens to Reddit after IPO

Easy - same as pretty much every other IPO. First, the hypetrain will roll in to town, and they'll look sort of good for a while, mainly while the dark money gets its massive payouts. As that money moves out, the stock price will crash, as even the strongest-stomached users get fed up of the enshitification.

A few years later, someone will buy it for maybe a 10th of the IPO price, will promise to bring it back to former glories, will largely fail to do so, and will either go bust completely, or sell out for probably a half of what they paid for it. The eventual owner will probably just turn it into an HTTP redirect to whatever properties they already own.

Merc seem to be making a few proper ugly mingers these days - I mean, right down to Peugeot or Daihatsu level of horrible. I sure hope the interior and the gadgets make up for looking so terrible!?

But ultimately, Merc, like all the others will do what the market wants. That they've come down from 100% to 50% by 2030 is more a reflection of us than some sort of 'big environmental climbdown'.

...that ad the google bot coming to index the site.

Side note: funny how reddit suddenly featured much higher in google results once they announced their IPO...?