Stasis is a strange animal. People want it, yet it is bad to get stuck in it. Especially in tech.

They even comfort themselves with platitudes about how stupid and evil managers are, how the C suite is stuffed with psychopaths. What I call the inverse worthiness effect. The lower one is on the food chain, the smarter and more adroit they are.

Yeah, and it was pretty obvious quite a while back. I knew a reckoning would come around the time the "learn to code" BS was happening - there was some politics happening at that point, trying to change demographics of coders, but still, you could read the tea leaves. I discouraged some people from becoming programmers.

I have never had a problem reinventing myself, have done it many times. I'm probably an edge case. But is is a needed skill within itself. But yes, tech doesn't stay still, and it is no career for those who demand stasis.

Now to AI. While I'm pretty sure the "We need our own nuclear power plants for our data center!s!" and the AI referencing itself to rewrite "truth", we're going to move on from that into something more sustainable. I've paid attention since the LLM models burst on the scene, and they are catching up fast.

So though I'm technically retired, I'm learning how to incorporate AI. Not sure if it will ever have a large impact, as the non-technical side of my work involves a lot of human interaction, it if it can, I'll use it.

Well put! Inertia, plus distrust with anything new.

The most I can add is from historical experience. When I first got into tech, technology was largely tube, with transistors starting to be employed. Even early RTL logic IC's in a few places.

Tube guys didn't want to upgrade their knowledge.

Computers were migrating from ferrite core drum memory. Dunno if many people lost their jobs over migrating to IC's from that, probably some.

Ive seen people lose their jerbs over refusing to transition to digital photography from chemical. Or transitioning from Ozalid viewgraphs to photochemical viewgraphs to 35mm slides to PowerPoints. 3-D animation work going from VTR frame buffer frame by frame recording to non-linear Editing. I'll bet the newer people here never heard of some of those things.

Tech Fields are not fields for people who resist change.

You're too lazy to even have an identity. Run along, coward.

An employee of Meta is that, an employee of Meta. Their responsibilities extend to the requirements of their direct boss and are not subject purely stock and revenues. A CEO is an employee of the board and shareholders. Their responsibilities extend to creating returns and thus their performance is wholly defined by stock and revenues.

You're right though he can't be fired in general, but the point is: why would anyone fire him? He is demonstrating great performance.

To revert back to your example with a personal example, I have once before directly caused an outage at a facility that cost us 1/6th of our yearly turnover. I wasn't fired, why? It was a question of value. Would someone else not make the fuckup? What is the cost of replacing me with someone who may make a similar fuckup? And more importantly how much value do I provide beyond that fuck-up. Fun fact I got an "exceeded expectation" on my year end review and a nice bonus.

How's this relate to CEOs? Shareholders expect CEOs to not just sit around and let the ship run. They expect especially in the technology world for CEOs to try something new - especially when it means entering new markets with potential new revenue streams, and there's not only an acceptance that some of this costs money without payoffs, there's an outright expectation for it.

Large numbers play against us here. In terms of units of revenue Meta's *expenditure* in something like AI is not out of the ordinary for R&D investment any tech company makes. In fact it's on the low side. People just can't comprehend this because they loose touch with just how much filthy fucking money floats around Meta. When you knock a zero off the back of it, and give it any other company name you don't blink an eye.

You don't understand. Never before have so many deckchairs been rearranged. This is MASSIVE.

Your logic is circular. An act of parliament is required to launch a referendum which needs to meet the legal requirements of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 which is a law created by parliament. As such the choice of whether a referendum is binding or not is entirely at the discretion of the parliament.

But ultimately you're missing the point. The point is that the referendum wasn't binding, and that subsequent acting on it was stupidity. To answer your question:

Presumably the Prime Minister would lose his job... oh wait he did that anyway and his party absolutely tanked the following election. So literally the worst outcome happened when following the "will of the people".

Yeah I heard of it. It's a group of countries that didn't agree to work on joint security until many years after the customs union was formed. Heck for a long time only half of Germany was part of NATO including a walled off part of Berlin. NATO existed while a significant portion of Europe was still at war.

Not sure what point you were trying to make, but you made it poorly.

False, the parliament does get to make laws. They also have the final say, and they frequently reject European Commission laws and ask for re-wording or rephrasing.

The makeup of the Commission is exclusively determined by the European Council and the European Parliament, both groups which are made up of fully elected representatives.

Get a clue buddy.

Unfortunately people are completely ignorant about the EU. There is not a single legislation or rule passed in the EU that wasn't voted on by a representative of the people in the EU. The "unelected commission" can only make recommendations (and is approved by represenatatives of the EU parliament which is elected by the people). The final rules are approved by the council (who are heads of state democratically elected by the people of the EU's respective countries).

The only non-elected and non democratic process in the EU is through the EU Court of Justice, and that's a good thing because electing judges is fucking stupid.

I'm with you on this point though. As much of an EV fanboi as I am, that doesn't make much sense.

Yes they do and when they do so it's usually at the hand of a dictator, or usually called out for the utter stupid move that it is.

Exactly my point. There's not really conclusive proof of anything in the entire debate, even back in 2016. When a polls, votes or referenda are conducted and show only a slight majority they should only be acted on if legally required. The UK fucked itself over an idea that had no significant support.

FYI, the UK is pretty rare among modern democracies in allowing critical things to be decided by a simple majority. Most democracies require both a significant barrier along with a super majority because you don't fuck your country for something that isn't certain would be supported.

The real stupidity is that based purely on demographics and life expectancy alone, that the valid votes assigned to age groups in the UK meant that between the vote and the actual leave date, the votes will have flipped simply as old people die assuming no one changed their votes. So in a way the outcome was decided by people who never lived to see it, just another way the old generation fucked over their young.

I was halfway expecting him to be "honored" with an UFC peac prize between cage matches tonight.

I'd bet that nothing gets signed Friday. What the US administration is claiming is in the deal looks far different than what Iran states is in the deal.

Also, does anyone else remember Trump making up some BS about Iran promising some really nice gift to him? I think the odds are high Trump screws this up, even if the negotiators land on agreeable common terms between now and Friday.

Which is a problem with those individuals, not the devices, or any apps, themselves.

Mitigation is fine, but you have to mitigate the right parts of the equation in order to have an actual affect on the result. Mitigating the usage of cell phones isn't the solution you think it is. Better mental healthcare is. It also doesn't eliminate the problem, but it does actually mitigate it like you want.