At least part of the drop in users is because AI is being used to moderate posts and then use that "moderation" to temporarily and then permanently ban users, in the process completely deleting ALL posts on all pages. There is little to no human/personal moderation now - just AI makes the decisions and users have to suck it up. How do I know this for a fact? It's happened to me and I was given no opportunity to delete or argue for the "offending" post. This has happened to several friends as well for various reasons. You'd have to pay me to have anything to do with meta ever again.

Anecdotically, it seems harder to get jobs as fresh graduates now, at least in Computer Science.
Been teaching undergrad and grad students for about 15 years. seniors used to send 15 applications and get 3 interviews. Nowadays, they send hundreds and might not get a single call back.

If you look at the numbers you provided (thanks for that), the definition of recent graduates is "22 to 27 years old who hold college degrees". So maybe the first 3 month after graduation got much tougher, but within 5 years it evens out.

It is clearly not meant to address the fundamental issue. Remember that arXiv was never meant to be a peer reviewed repository. There are still tons of bad papers in there.
I am guessing it is meant to cut on the volume and avoiding polluting the system with too much crap.

Think of it as a spam filter. You don't need to filter all the spam. Just filtering the "this obviously is spam" already helps a lot.

Working for a chosenite and expecting ethics? LOL

Every time they tried to recruit me I deliberately wasted as much of their time and as little of mine as possible.

I did some video where I had a script. So it was easy to extract subtitle and compare to script. Yeah, its pretty bad. Probably every other sentence had some obviously incorrect subtitling. And these videos were on clean audio inputs: no background noise, good mic.
I ended up having to correct the subtitles using the transcript.

I have seen a study recently on noisy audio in a group setting, so the speakers maybe not be perfectly mic-ed and all. The speech-to-text was done with a couple of Whisper models. The error rate was something like 30% of the transcription was bogus. (yeah, 3 words in 10.) I imagine that YT would do some preprocessing. But overall, I find the subtitles not terribly good. It's useful and better than nothing.

One of the counter arguments - that I don't agree with by the way - is that if people are allowed to even try to repair stuff that they will "wreck it". My response is that if they do, that's on them as the "right to repair" means that it is repairable, not that anyone and everyone can do it.

At Gadget Review https://www.gadgetreview.com/s...

Abso-fucking-lutely!

The JS ecosystem (and frankly the python ecosystem too) is made of lunatics who think I have nothing better to do than patch my system every 3 month because they decided that it was more pretty to swap the order to parameters somewhere.

The number of NPM packages that are deployed widely and that just break at an upgrade is staggering. And because fucking JS, you don't get a proper error message at the upgrade recompilation. You need to rely on having a test that catches the difference. What a fucking nightmare of an ecosystem.

I am currently the maintainer of a small project but we can't break production. We did our major upgrades in summer 2024. So we used the most up to date release, v22, that came out 3 month before. This was 18 month ago, and its EoL is in about a year. Who has the ability to commit the engineering time to upgrade every single one of your services every 3 years?

These are not minor changes, these are going to be different majors. So I do expect some feature break. The last update which was also within 3 years caused a forced upgrade of database driver and abstraction layer to a new major. And they decided to rewrite their entire fucking API.

I do not understand web people. How do they not go insane because of the horrible engineering decisions they keep on making in that field? You know what, the shitty Perl webservice I wrote in 2010, it still fucking works! And no one has touched it since.

It's a question of cost really.
A 1TB NVME SSD is about $150.
A 1TB SATA SSD is about $100.
A 1TB HDD is about $40.

If you are mostly interesting in storage and not performance. HDD are hard to beat.

Well now I definitely need to read it. Thanks for letting me know!

Someone didn't see the "/s" ! :)

The stat is based on the past. But the new models they are real good. You'll see in 6-18 month all jobs are gonna be done by AI.
Chat GPT 5.x was terrible but now we've got Chat GPT 5.x+1 and now it's reall good!

Do you even prompt bro? /s

DYI anything is usually an order of magnitude cheaper than a professional production.

Most movies these days seem to spend as much money promoting the movie than they spent producing the movie. Here promotion was free to him. So that's a factor 2 right there.

DIY amateur does not mean it's bad. In video games, we've seen that story unfold a hundred times in the last 20 years.