The Libre Office Excel equivalent, Calc really needs a lot of work in the scripting/macros area. For one, code completion just doesn't work, even if you enable it (it is an experimental feature, even though that sort of thing has been standard for decades now). A lot of quite big solutions end up being written in Excel so if Libre Office Calc is going to be an alternative for companies, some time and money needs to be invested in Calc improvements.

Exactly, the very thing that empowers them to get rid of staff also empowers you not to need them anymore. This will apply to many industries thinking they can reap the rewards of AI in some kind of isolation.

He could just buy uber and rename it Uber Alles.

This is such a clumsy propaganda campaign; it reminds me of the scene in Zoolander with Will Ferrell's huge face on the TV screen trying to brainwash Ben Stiller into killing the Prime minister of Malaysia.

I don't really like the style of drawing, but the main problem is that the "animation" it is very lazy for the most part. Often it's just a still image with the camera slowly panning with some cgi snow or rain overlaid. Characters are often facing away from the camera while talking so they don't have to animate the mouths. Lots of lazy cost-cutting tricks to avoid animation. It feels like one of those "motion comics" where people try to make a comic book seem more alive with slow zooms and voice-overs.

The original meaning of woke was being aware of the struggles of other peoples, minority groups mainly. Making people aware of those struggles is a laudable goal. However, overzealous pursuit of this led to the term woke being used critically, even by those with left wing views. Since then there has been a push back, largely successful such that anyone who uses the word woke is now viewed as some red-faced right wing Trump supporter. Consequently, left wing people are quite afraid to use the term now.

Much like politics in general, things have become polarised with some people seeing woke agendas in everything and others denying there is ever any issue at all, and pushing the narrative that you are basically Hitler if you use the term negatively. As always, reality is somewhere in between.

The problem is that big companies are a target for the perpetually outraged, so everything they release is censored and useless. Therefore it comes down to open source (really open weights) AI that can be tweaked and the offerings of smaller companies that can slip under the outrage radar, like Cohere. For example, Command R+ is not censored and is actually useful for writing.

The other issue with containerised dev tools is when you spend ages trying to work out how it's using a version of python you don't even have installed on your system. I'll never install a snap/fatpak version of a program again if I can avoid it.

Initially they will enjoy that extra day of pay but very quickly the economy will readjust so that effectively they are getting the same amount of pay they were previously. Their labour will have been devalued. It's the same for anything that becomes normalised like that. If you are one of a small percentage of people to work a second job, you can indeed enjoy the extra money (if you can stay awake) but if everyone does it, it will become normalised and then everyone will be stuck working two jobs for the pay of one.

I was working at a company that had spent years and a lot of money developing VB6 products. We were all waiting to see what new features would be in VB7 and instead they announced that they were ditching the whole thing in favor of .net. It was a huge kick in the guts because the technology was fundamentally different (garbage collection vs reference counting etc) so you couldn't just recompile or use their migration "wizard". All our potential customers suddenly saw our product as a legacy product and were far less interested. We all thought Java sucked, but it suddenly looked a lot more sensible than sticking with Microsoft. Microsoft's huge gravitational pull sucked us back in though.

Industry had invested a lot of time and money in VB6. If there had been a competitor with their own compatible VB6, everyone would have moved over to it.