I just cancelled Disney+ and Hulu a week ago. Obviously this was their response.

The FBI and DHS are now focused on Trump's round-up of illegal aliens.

Way to completely miss the point...

It's not that this never happened, or even that it was some extremely exceptional case in the millennial/GenX/boomer eras...but it was extremely different.

For starters, I think that there are two sides that have both valid points and problematic extremes. In the days of yore, companies generally saw employees as an investment. It wasn't uncommon for people to work at the same company for 25 years or more. Certainly not every company, but the majority of them accepted the tradeoff that new employees would require a good amount of training before the company broke even on their paycheck, and in return, the employee who stayed would earn the company a tidy profit over time, receiving enough money to support a family in return. Today, it seems that everyone wants to 'skip to the end' - companies want to hire savants with 20 years experience in Debian Trixie, make them always-on-call, and in return want to pay them less than half of a living wage, and keep a fear of layoffs at the front of everyone's mind.

The counterbalance is that Gen-Z knows this is the case, and treats employers with the same sense of expendability. If a company sees an employee as someone not worth investing in, with little ability to get promoted, and both promotions and layoffs being abstracted from job performance or dedication, it's not unreasonable to adopt the mindset of "if they're doing what's best for them, then I'll do what's best for me"...and it's only a few more steps from there to "I'll work when I feel like it", which is demonstrated in the willingness to no-call/no-show, doomscrolling at work, or having to be 'helicopter managed'.

This leads us to the downward spiral - with both sides leaving themselves vulnerable to exploitation if loyalty and dedication are expressed, it is only natural to reduce that vulnerability moving forward. The result, however, is both sides getting worse...it's a Prisoner's Dilemma, and neither side has incentive to break the cycle.

So close... but no cigar.

There are at least three different reasons this is bad.

First, this is one more sign (of about 15 court cases at this point) that this court is willing to give Trump massive powers simply because he is pushing for them and they agree with him politically. And there's no reason to remotely think he's going to stop.

Second, it means that the Presidency (already an already too powerful office in the modern form for any one person) is going to be even more powerful under for the first time under a far more authoritarian person without any safeguards in place.

Third, is more subtle: even if we get through this with Trump with only some damage, the long-term damage and threat to stability is massive. In general, parliamentary systems or presidential systems with somewhat weak presidencies are more stable than those with powerful presidencies. One sees this in for example the high instability in many presidential republics in Central America and South America. The standard explanation for this is that when there's functionally a winner-take-all system, the stakes becoming higher and the degree to which any side has an incentive to moderate becomes small. One question then is why this hasn't happened in the US? One explanation is that the US had the illusion of a not deeply strong President, in part because everyone (including the Presidents) agreed tacitly not to push the limits of their authority that much. The precedent breaking nature here undermines that illusion, and makes it more likely that we'll have years (possibly decades) where the Democrats and Republicans will even more than usual treat everything as a zero sum game with no respects for democratic norms.

The bottom line is that everything about this is bad.

macOS has been doing this (using a video wallpaper) by default for a while, and I'm guessing that's what brought this idea to the fore (again).

And yes, it's basically just a pointless, silly distraction - why would anyone want this? Unfortunately (from the OS manufacturers' position) operating systems are pretty feature complete, and basically the only "new shiny" thing they can offer is adding pointless bloat. Oh, also they can actively break things I guess... which always seems to go hand in hand with adding pointless bloat.

Bear in mind that this woman, while she is undoubtedly right about everything about Facebook's issues, almost certainly joined Facebook at the urging of, and as an asset of, NZSIS. Her background reeks worse than a CNN news analyst's.

Even on the freak occurrence that someone with that background decided to join Facebook for pure idealistic reasons wholly unrelated to their FPINT past (which she would have you believe), I can guarantee you that if I think she's a spook, Facebook thought so too. She was allowed into the powerful position she got because Facebook wanted a cozy relationship to another five eyes bigwig.

So yes, listen to what she says about Facebook, but don't assume the power imbalance is in Facebook's favor!

It holds up in some cases, not in others, and calculating an average muddles that.

Personally, I use AI coding assists for two purposes quite successfully: a) more intelligent auto-complete and b) writing a piece of code using a common, well understood algorithm (i.e. lots of sources the AI could learn from) in the specific programming language or setup that I need.

It turns out that it is much faster and almost as reliable to have the AI do that then finding a few examples on github and stackoverflow, checking which ones are actually decent, and translating them myself.

Anything more complex than that and it starts being a coin toss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's a waste of time. So I've stopped doing that because coding it myself is faster and the result better than babysitting an AI.

And when you need to optimize for a specific parameter - speed, memory, etc. - you can just about forget AI.

Hey, industry, I've got an idea: If you need specific, recent, skills (especially in the framework-of-the-month class), how about you train people in them?

That used to be the norm. Companies would hire apprentices, train them in the exact skills needed, then at the end hire them as proper employees. These days, though, the training part is outsourced to the education system. And that's just dumb in so many ways.

Universities should not train the flavour of the moment. Because by the time people graduate, that may have already shifted elsewhere. Universities train the basics and the thinking needed to grow into nearby fields. Yes, thinking is a skill that can be trained.

Case in point: When I was in university, there was one short course on cybersecurity. And yet that's been my profession for over two decades now. There were zero courses on AI. And yet there are whitepapers on AI with me as a co-author. And of the seven programming languages I learnt in university, I haven't used even one of them ever professionally and only one privately (C, of course. You can never go wrong learning C. If you have a university diploma in computer science and they didn't teach you C, demand your money back). Ok, if you count SQL as a programming language, it's eight and I did use that professionally a few times. But I consider none of them a waste of time. Ok, Haskell maybe. The actual skill acquired was "programming", not a particular language.

Should universities teach about AI? Yes, I think so. Should they teach how to prompt engineer for ChatGPT 4? Totally not. That'll be obsolete before they even graduate.

So if your company needs people who have a specific AI-related skill (like prompt engineering) and know a specific AI tool or model - find them or train them. Don't demand that other people train them for you.

FFS, we complain about freeloaders everywhere, but the industry has become a cesspool of freeloaders these days.

The number of people isn't the problem here.

The "started every" is.

How did they not catch that during development and found a solution? I mean, the meme's where a TV ad starts Alexa and orders 10 large pizzas are a decade old now.

If "general public thinking" is the metric... the naming seems unhelpful in that regard since, at least based on TFS, it's not orbiting the earth - it's orbiting the sun and just staying in earth's proximity.

I would think something like "near earth asteroid" would be a less confusing term for such objects.

Al Bundy.

Oh, you are 100% right. This was basically my childhood experience. My dad was in the US Army; and, back then (1960s-1970s), he was getting moved a lot. In terms of my age, my family moved at: 0, 1, 4, 5, 7, 7, 7 (yes three moves while I was in second grade), 9, 10. On top of that, at (my age) 8 he was shipped to Vietnam, then they wanted to ship him there again when I was 11... so he decided to get out.

Interestingly (and possibly ironically) when he left active duty, he moved into a mostly equivalent full-time position with the Army Reserve - doing personnel and logistics management in support of the frequent moves of active-duty personnel! But he never had to move again, thank goodness.

Eventually the army figured out this wasn't a good way to get people to re-up... but yeah, it totally sucks to keep leaving your friends. Doubly so if you're a shy kid, like I was.

You're overthinking this. All he needed to do was appease shareholders. Many of those being investment bankers by profession... You know, those people that get the big bucks for investing no better than you if you flipped a coin.

His explanation points to something even they have heard of that ian't Facebook's fault. That is all that is necessary these days.

We have only his word that this is actually what happened. And, this being Facebook / Meta, they are known for lying through their teeth.

I wouldn't put it past Zuck to demand his minions make up some explanation that didn't boil down to "our tech sucks".