The quote from Alex Blechman also comes to mind:

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

/me sighs.

> Funny how that once-in-a-life-time switch to work from home, didn't stick, and all the corporate morons wanted to go back to the office, because they don't care about fuel and energy costs.

I think the theory that a lot of this was about forcing people out has some truth to it. They're psychopaths but it's, for some reason, easier on them if they don't have to make the decision about who gets made redundant and if they pretend the employee made the decision themselves.

There's also some truth that external investors, who had a lot of money tied up in commercial real estate, were demanding RTO policies.

The one thing I don't buy are the excuses they gave. For the most part, WFH resulted in substantial productivity gains for the businesses that implemented it properly. It's unfortunate but the reality is that most businesses do not seem to prioritize the needs of the business over the need to stay in line with what they think people want to hear.

lol, this place is hilarious sometimes

Once again, Jack Tramiel gets no credit despite pushing computers into more hands than anyone else...

(Yes, not an engineer, but neither was Jobs. Jobs was always management and marketing, whatever his background might have been.)

I think the reality is that multiple people turned a hobby into a market and phenomenon. The reason Jobs gets so much focus is, I'm guessing:

1. While like Tramiel, Sinclair, Chris Curry/Hermann Hauser, and the largely forgotten names behind the TRS-80, he pushed for home computers to go to a wider audience than just electrical engineers, he charged more and aimed at the upper middle classes, from where our decision makers and journalists come from.

2. He was one of the few people with power to recognize the importance of the GUI work Xerox was doing and had Apple invest in that and produce the first computer aimed at the audience I just mentioned that had a WIMP interface.

3. He didn't leave.
  - Sinclair quit computing after the Z88.
  - Tramiel was fired from Commodore for dumb stupid reasons, was up against heavy competition from his old employer at Atari, and eventually wound down the latter not seeing it as having a future (and, to be honest, being at retirement age anyway.) As a result most Millennials and younger people have never heard of him. (If you're reading this and haven't, go read about him, he's a fascinating person. Engineers loved him. Marketers admired him. And people in business with him - dealerships, suppliers, etc - hated him...)
- The Acorn people faded out of view being kicked around upper management at Olivetti and then founding other interesting companies which, alas, was at a time the entire computing establishment had decided that only IBM PC clones mattered. Their relevance disappeared.
- Anyone know the TRS-80 people? Regardless, Radio Shack was more a traditional corporation anyway, if there was a Mr/Ms TRS-80, they didn't have much influence once Radio Shack hitched to the IBM PC clone thing.

So that left Jobs who came back to a still-active still-not-bankrupt still-selling-non-PCs Apple. And that gave him a far bigger boost in the public eye than those who had effectively left the industry because their companies could no longer operate doing anything interesting in the IBM PC clone world.

Jobs was not as big a figure pre-comeback. I knew of him, I remember reading the reports of him being fired from Apple in Personal Computer World, but these were inside baseball type stories. He was no bigger in that story than the person who fired him, John Sculley. The fact Jobs was the founder of NeXT was mentioned, but it was very much "Former Apple executive create impressive workstation". The articles would inevitably explain who Jobs was and why he was fired from Apple.

Over time, his rep grew. But don't discount that it wasn't during his first stint as major Apple executive.

FWIW he wore the turtleneck in his "comeback" after he rejoined Apple as iCEO. Before that he really was known for his suits.

> Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake

I'm about 90% convinced they introduced the Ribbon for anti-trust reasons. Here's a change in UI that cannot be fully cloned by competitors (they'd have to make their own custom Ribbons with a custom, non Word, layout to avoid falling foul of copyrights), and which hampers users being able to transfer their skills from Word to, say, Wordperfect (or even Word to Excel.)

Look at the timings, with development occurring at a time when Microsoft had just wiggled out of a substantial anti-trust suit that threatened to break it up into application and operating system companies, and released at a time they were being forced to open up their file formats in Europe, and it explains perfectly why they introduced that user-hostile garbage when they did.

They're not. Electron apps are not accessed via a browser. While it's true you can easily port an Electron app to GNU/Linux, that's also true of a .NET app (which, let's be honest, is likely what they're talking about here, I doubt they're going back to C++ for everything.)

The real advantage of Electron is you can use most of the same code and assets for a website as for an Electron application, which is useful, but given how ridiculously inefficient Electron is, that isn't much of a justification for using it. Over the last 15 years, most desktop operating system's UIs have been debased by increasingly inconsistent designs making them harder to use, and a huge amount of that has been designing for some superficial "web" design that doesn't really exist - at least, not in a form that stands still.

My sense of this:

Microsoft is in a panic. Almost everything different between Windows 10 and Windows 11 is disliked, from the centralized logins to the AI-with-everything. On top of this RAM prices are sky high meaning the bloat is rapidly becoming a problem. What they've realized is they have to do a full overhaul of Windows 11. And one of these is to stop using technologies like Electron where they shouldn't be used. They can literally reduce its memory footprint to Windows 7 levels, and make their code more reliable and less dependent on third party libraries and APIs by eliminating a rather absurd example of abstraction-for-abstraction's sake from their development stack.

This might even be good news.

> The point being...AI doesn't tangibly save time. It might save a bit under some circumstances, but not enough to justify layoffs.

Agreed with all of the above, but my even bigger concern with the idea of changing programming to babysitting electronic code writers, and doing the same for other parts of the business, is we're losing knowledge. Actively destroying knowledge indeed.

If luddites were in charge of the world, they could do nothing more effective to their cause than promote AI. AI means nobody understands what the code is doing, and reduces the number of people who know how code can work in general. In a decade it'd only take a few well placed supply chain breakages and we could be looking at anything from a severe recession to the complete collapse of society. I'm not kidding. Businesses being run this way are setting themselves up as places where nobody from the CEO to the janitor has any idea how the business works.

This is so unbelievably fucked up, and even more so when you consider that the advocates of these technologies didn't simply introduce them, iPhone style, to an excited set of consumers, but actively forced it on everyone, trying to go from 0-60 in the space of 2-3 years. Why? Why the hell wouldn't you give it a chance to prove or disprove itself first?

Because, you (Altman et al) know it's not what it's supposed to be perhaps?

Two things can be bad at once. And this article is about age verification. Calm down and don't attack your allies.

> yet the open source movement is stronger than ever

Really?

The major projects are corporatized like never before, with Google, IBM, and Canonical basically providing most of the funding and about 100% of the steering of the GNU/Linux ecosystem.

Smaller projects like Zimbra, Elastisearch, et al, suddenly turn closed source overnight as they become unsustainable as open source projects.

What was once a massive movement to put software in the hands of developers and users has been entirely coopted by massive corporate interests as a way to shove their software agenda into every corner of computing.

You doubt this? Take a project like systemd, which despite its jackass devs, was created with good intentions and to fix a very specific problem, and look at how unpopular it is. It's even less popular than sysvinit, and the latter is something no sane person remembers fondly. Would it be remotely as unpopular if it were forced to listen to its actual users, if there was the real possibility of forking at any moment because of a healthy free software/open source movement, if it didn't accept corpo-fascist submissions without debate like the DoB field the other day (which, before anyone says "Generic passwd fields", was implemented specifically for compliance with the age verification laws in CA and elsewhere - that was explained in the PR, first paragraph) and refuses to undo those kinds of decisions despite massive public backlashes?

Look at GNOME and the bizarre unfriendly direction its been barreling in. Who looks at GNU/Linux today and thinks "Yes, this is exactly where I'd have expected it to go in the last 20 years since early Ubuntus made it clear easy-to-install-and-use distributions were possible".

Our entire thing is rotting thanks to corporate takeovers and indifference by a community that sees criticism of corporate behavior as "politics".

This is not healthy.

I doubt MacOS users are any different from other computer users, especially in the post-touchscreen dumbing down of computer knowledge we're seeing where Zoomers and Boomers, according to some surveys, appear to have the same level of skill on average.

Another issue is I've met many, many, people who insist on asking me "What do I do?" when any prompt comes up. Anything. From "Overwrite these files?" to "Installation finished. Do you want to launch NewlyInstalledApp now?"

I suspect that 90% of the people who get to the "Launch command line" prompt on a list of instructions will also blindly obey the "Don't worry about the warning dialog that comes up that looks like this, just click OK" instruction from the scanner. As a result, I seriously doubt this'll help at all.

For some reason the patent clock rarely starts the moment a technology is known. MPEG-1 was published in 1991, but patents on, for example, MPEG Audio Layer III didn't expire until 2012 in Europe, and 2017(!) in the United States, 21 and 26 years after the standard was released. While there's been some patent reform since then, it's still the case that a standard can be published in the middle of patent applications, and the 20 years doesn't start until the application is approved, which can be years after publication.

So don't count on any of this being OK in 2034.

It's a shame the expired codecs didn't have mechanisms for, say, HDR, as I suspect with bandwidth availability becoming so cheap, and CPU power better than ever before, it'd be nice to be able to switch back to a simpler, albeit less efficient, codec with no legitimate patents still applying like MPEG-2. Unfortunately even trying to graft HDR onto it would be a problem - the ITU did apparently add something in 2014, but that means you won't be able to trust it until the late 2030s...

Nothing should have happened (except between Hillary and Bill if Hillary wanted it.) It was never any of our businesses.

But multiple people got their names dragged through the mud on it. So what you're saying is just absurd. Years of breathless commentary in the news, a pointless impeachment, and over what? A affair between two consenting adults where the only victim was Hillary?

Meanwhile Trump isn't even facing an investigation for half the shit he's doing, and was able to be re-elected despite constitutional provisions banning insurrectionists from being elected President.

Unfortunately, from a legal point of view, AOMedia hasn't done anything against Dolby. It's simply created a video compression codec. It doesn't use the codec, it just publishes documentation on how to use it.

It's arguable, I guess, that by claiming their codec is royalty free without mentioning Dolby's patents, AOMedia may have caused harm to Snapchat. But that would mean Snap would sue AOMedia, not Dolby.

Does this suck? Yes. But unfortunately you can't just sue someone on the basis of "who's the bad guy", you have to prove they caused damage to you in some way. And in AV1's case, not only did AOMedia not harm Dolby, they actually helped them, by creating a new patent royalty stream for them. Sucks, huh?

Moderators are, for some reason, modding my post down pointing this out, so once again:

The above comment is a complete misrepresentation of what I said. A lie indeed. In no way can my original comment be interpreted as meaning that I am in favor of Florida style age verification laws.

Powercntl doubtless has his own reasons for claiming that. But it's quite simply a lie. I proposed nothing more than CA mandating that if an OS has an optional age verification feature be there, it be used by apps and web sites needing age verification, and that strong privacy controls be added.

This is the EXACT FUCKING OPPOSITE of what Florida has done.