Duh... I can't add. But the observation is still valid.

That would be interesting. Some of that is available in IRS filings for instance, in 2023:
Their expenses were $39,845,284, with

• 8.3% ($3,287,433) of that being Executive Compensation (not counting Baker's $6,223,660)
• 25.4% ($10,106,669) for Other Salaries and Wages

Of course a lot of the increasing expenses over the years related to Mitchell Baker's ever ballooning compensation. I guess we'll find out this year if the new CEO is sucking up as much of the budget. But that's over $10M just for executives and the questionable value that they provide... all of the rest of the employees add up to less total cost.

Because I've tried using LLMs to generate code and I've seen the results. They are not usable. They *resemble* valid code, but they typically throw exceptions and raise errors, they can't pass unit tests, and they don't correctly handle edge cases. AI-generated code is a mess that *superficially looks right* but isn't fit to purpose.

There is a meme going around about the fact that you can tackle a normal coding task by spending 3 hours to write code and 1 hour to debug and test it, or you can use CoPilot to spend 15 minutes to write the code and 8 hours to debug and test it. That matches my experience.

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

This sort of advertising, especially, is a cancer on our society and the entire human condition. It's trading down human experiences and interactions (like friendly smiles, etc) for profit until they no longer have value and positive meaning to people. The obvious long-term outcome of this is a worse world and the people pushing it must know that it is unambiguously evil.

I just freshly installed Ubuntu 24.04 on a piece of hardware only to find that systemd-resolved fails resolving after a hour of uptime due to some bizarre nonstandard way of handing server responses*. I've been using linux since before Slackware, so I guess I'm old, but I haven't seen this level of brokenness (that wasn't tied to lack of specific hardware support) in decades.

What's being pushed out to "stable" releases of mainsteam distributions under the banner of SystemD is some seriously amateur-level stuff.

* I can't be arsed to find the discussion of the error right now, but it has the obligatory Poettering reply that everybody else in the world is doing it wrong and that putting the resolver into a non-responsive state is the expected and correct thing to do.

Just wait until they try to ban Truth Social, it will start WWIII.

The common thread I'm seeing here is that they were all United aircraft.

I'll take mine with extra covfefe.

Seems like punishment enough.

I donâ(TM)t have an iWatch because I donâ(TM)t need another device that requires daily charging.

MC: You good, bro?
Me: I'm good. Talk to you tomorrow.

"Since you've overpaid for your cell phone service by $50+ per month for the past several years, we're willing to give you a $5 credit for your extreme inconvenience and the threat to your safety." - AT&T

I use my phone all the time and have no issues with an MVNO, but I have excellent wifi at home and the few days I go into the office. I'm also judicious about connecting to hotspots when they're available, and I download podcasts and videos to my devices for offline use when I'm on wifi.