Few things are universally good or bad - despite the desire of the press and politics to simplify. For someone looking to pick up a little extra income (school hours, evening, weekend) it's probably good thing (almost certainly better than any of the driving gigs). For anyone who is doing this because they just can't get full-time, with benefits, work this truly sucks.

A significant part of the problem is that the US, pretty much alone amongst first world countries, ties benefits, particularly health care to employment. Break that connection and this doesn't suck quite as badly.

It's a slippery slope. What's next, universal healthcare?

Or that we all just missed the opportunity to create and then pump & dump the meme coin misantropi4

I feel you missed the "one sided". If the companies really cared about their users and software they would encourage responsible disclosure by acknowledging the issue and paying the bounty. If enough zero-days emerge perhaps they'll start doing this.

More recent references: https://chicago.suntimes.com/n... https://warehouseworkers.org/a...

$15/hour is $600/week (15*40) or around $2500/month. Depends where you get your data, but the average rent in the US is somewhere in the $1650-$2000 range. Even at the low end, that leaves $850/month for all other expenses. $19/hour is better - around $1500/month for all other expenses, but that's still not a lot for, say, a family of 4. If you need a car, the average cost of that is around $1000/month. Presumably if you only earn $19/hour you can manage lower than the average but cars are still expensive and the US has fairly systematically dismantled other transportation options often making them a necessity for commuting.

They pay so little that many of their employees qualify for government food assistance: https://thecounter.org/amazon-... - a pretty much direct government subsidy and something that Amazon should be embarrassed about. So we are, indirectly, subsidizing Bezos space ambitions by allowing him to underpay workers.

They also do get subsidies in terms of things like tax-break to build warehouses, etc.

Or Douglas Adams

When confronted with the Sirius Cybernetics elevators ("Happy Vertical People Transporters").

Problem is, no one is hooked. This worked really well when Microsoft could sell at a loss and put all the competition out of business (Word was a classic case - that's how they dominate the document market).

In the AI coding space there are many alternatives. And, as reported, this is a huge change- from $10/month to $10 a day. They're not boiling the frog - creeping prices up slowly so no one quite notices.. Watch for the unsubscribes - mine included...

One other thoughts is that educational institutions are doing a very bad job of managing the\is transition. When an entry level candidate says "I don't know much about LLMs because I wasn't allowed to use them in my classes" that's a huge red flag.

If you don't understand the code architecture and feel that your job is to implement code snippets, that, frankly LLMs are better at than you, you're going to be out of a job (eventually).

The future of software engineers is to be able see the flow, the interaction, the data paths and the goals well enough to explain what you want in a prompt and to understand what comes out well enough to know that it meets that goal. Language, APIs, syntax, etc. are no longer of any importance.

Except that number is already absurd

185 million of 1.85B really doesn't matter

YouTube has the same problem with 360hrs of video added every minute.

[1] https://barrettmedia.com/2025/...

If it's informative and/or entertaining, is it slop? And, really, given the human-generated slop already in this space what are we supposed to be labeling?

I assume that the attack on Iran was a well thought through plan to encourage the world to decrease oil dependency. Nothing else makes much sense.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear the the US is going to be the beneficiary of this plan. As the rest of the world moves toward clean, cheap energy, the US is going to be left behind. Making gas powered cars that no one else in the world wants and generating power from fossil fuels.

This is why a great many Texas Farmers turned into wind-turbine advocates. They got paid for having turbines in their land but, in reality, it has a minimal impact, so it was pretty much free money.

Good job the government cut spending so this $160B of illegal taxation won't just add to the deficit. They did make thoughtful and intelligent cuts right? right???