Seems you're missing the point. The article says anyone over 133K was classified as upper middle class, and ignored the location. We agree on that bit.

They counted millions of people who are low income for their region and even potentially on welfare as being upper middle class. They said 10% of the population was upper middle class in 1979 by one metric, but then using a different metric that 31% were upper middle class in 2024. They wrongly and quite openly counted millions of households with welfare level incomes, lower class incomes, and middle class incomes and claimed they were in the upper middle class. Everything that follows from the conclusion that upper middle class has grown so much is fundamentally flawed.

A huge amount of the population are millionaires if we define a millionaire as someone with thousands of dollars. That's effectively what they did here. Count millions of household that middle, lower, and welfare-level as though they're upper middle class, and suddenly the upper middle class triples in size. The claims that follow that the lower rungs of the middle class are garbage because they just reclassified them as upper middle class, even though by the author's own admission they are not.

This. The lower end of those "upper middle class" numbers may qualify for welfare in some tech hub cities.

They do point out that it varies by location, but really their number range is terrible. "classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class." From the HUD Section 8 income limits, expensive places the lower end of that is considered low income, like San Jose 143,600 qualifies for Section 8, versus cities like Akron where 72,250 is low enough to qualify. Location, location, location.

As this is /. lots of us live in tech hubs that even though we don't like the costs, they're very expensive places to live. In my current city despite being a full hour commute from the city center 130K is still solidly middle class. Not poverty, but not upper crust either. That income wouldn't require a trailer park, but would have a hard time affording a 3 bedroom / 2 bath home (they'd add another 45+ minutes to the commute distance), one or possibly two small vacations per year.

In tech hubs especially, those household incomes can be very middle class, not upper-middle, and in some places, lower class lifestyles.

Statistically it is not the severity of the punishment, it's the likelihood of being caught and facing consequences.

When the likelihood of facing consequences is high, even frequent offenders comply even when consequence are minimal. Even something like line jumping, it's about if they think they can get away with it, not the seriousness of consequences.

Traffic violations are similar. When "everybody knows" a curve holds a speed trap people drop to the speed limit, when they are past it they lay on the accelerator. When I see a bunch of break lights ahead frequently I will hear GPS call out "speed trap ahead" right where the others started slowing. The perceived risk of enforcement, not severity, is the biggest factor.

Scammers know the risk is minimal. In India many of the big operators include people in politics and police, it doesn't take much of a cut to bribe officials.

In general they've been on the right trend of only playing after interactions.

Most of the time they're ads, and even if they do manage to slip through my ad blocks and DNS fliters, I still don't want them playing.

Waste of bandwidth.

It's one of those issues that often are easily ignored until suddenly it's game-breaking.

For many games that stream assets and build shaders on the fly, if there's a bit of blurriness and stuttering when you first enter an area there are many players who can forgive that. Having that same experience walking into a boss's lair and suddenly the game is choking and stuttering as resources are processed, that's a fatal flaw that can make it difficult to play, or even outright kill the player while loading.

The difficulty is that usually it's an all-or-nothing experience, a tradeoff, games can choose one or the other. There are plenty of games that do build them at runtime, and others that have the long slow progress bar at startup. Different choices give different experiences. As annoying as waiting a couple minutes at program startup is, having a cutscene or a boss fight stuttering for shader compiles is far worse.

Lewinsky never got free trips on government jets and a protective detail assigned to her. Those benefits are reserved for Kash Patel's medicore-country-singer sugar baby girlfriend.

Quite possibly the most incompetent FBI director in history. He's been in office for a year...couldn't someone at the FBI have secured his digital footprint in that time? Oh wait, he fired many career agents with this type of expertise and Trump also neutered CISA. Perhaps he was too busy on "business" trips involving smashing down beers at the Olympics. Or sugar-daddying his girlfriend, who is young enough to be his daughter, and desperately trying to make her a country music star. Meanwhile, where is Nancy Guthrie? What about those people named in the Epstein files?

While that's the hype, it's not going to be the reality.

Yes, what they are doing has a market.

Yes, it will absolutely allow many of the masses to do what programmers have been able to do for ages. It will change the market, the cheese will move, but it won't destroy the marketplace for programmers.

I think work in graphics design is probably the best parallel. People freaked out in the 1980s when home computers could make banners and flyers. As the software advanced, you got more and more people doing Word Art, and enormous clipart catalogs let office secretaries make good looking office flyers, creative garage sale fliers, church bingo night announcements, and much more. LLMs let people continue to create this type of thing, and print-on-demand services let them send their creations out to make custom stickers and such. But most critically, NONE OF THOSE PEOPLE were hiring graphics designers for those jobs before. It enabled the masses to do some of what graphics designers do, but when it comes to real ad campaigns and professional marketing, companies know investing a few hundred dollars will bring in a few hundred people from the community, investing many thousands or millions are essential for large regional or national campaigns, those jobs continue to get the professionals.

More people making vibe-coded websites that satisfy their specific needs? Great. They weren't hiring a team of programmers for software development before, and they're not hiring a team of programmers after. Executives that claim they'll cut costs by 90% by firing all the professional programmers are in the hype, they either don't understand the work being done or are playing the field. They may do well in their quarterly financial statements, but a couple years down the line the company won't have anything of value remaining. The CEO will be long gone, sold his options, collected his golden parachute, and moved on to the next company to be restructured. Investors will have gutted and sold everything of value from the company by that point as well, they'll take the hype bubble, milk it, then dump what remains in an asset fire sale. The companies that continue making great things and not seeking the bubbles will continue to create good value, leveraging the tools where appropriate but still hiring skilled workers to create products with lasting value.

There will always be changes in who is the winner and who is the winner this quarter. Certainly plenty of profit-seeking investors care only about those quarterly results, not the products and services on offer. There are companies that will grow and companies that will die, nothing new is there. It's good that more people will be able to have more custom program options, just like WordArt and clipart collections allowed people to easily make their own fliers. Those who want a specific vision in marketing can start with "here's my interpretation from an image generator, but I want it done better." Similarly when a small business needs a team of developers to build a program, the customer can also bring in what tried and failed and what they want to see differently, and they come back with a better bid being able to reference what the client generated using AI as a starting reference for building the professionally-built items.

Agreed. The ESP32 family of processors are popular for good reason. Some of the chips support RISC-V.

Unfortunately there is far more to the question than the Ask Reddit post contains, cost, processing speed, memory requirements, software needs, and much more. Even so, the ESP32 family and earlier ESP8266 have been popular in IoT devices from smart lightbulbs, watches, cameras, and even light industrial use to Arduino ecosystem and student devices for over a decade now.

It was the kids getting ready for school in darkness, taking flashlights to the bus stop in the cold, dark winter mornings, along with some high profile deaths of kids in the morning darkness, that got it reversed when the US tried it about about 50 years ago.

People are great at imagining the late summer nights, but quick to forget the darkness of winter.

People are also slow to remember the location matters. East VS west VS center of the time zone matters. Latitude north matters. People on opposite sides of the time zone experience about an hour difference, one may see the sunrise at 8 am, the other side at 7 am. For latitude, southern Florida has about 3 hours of variance across the year, Los Angeles about 4.5 hours, New York City about 6 hours, Maine nearly 8 hours between the summer and winter. Juneau is a 12 hour daylight difference. Both matter tremendously in how someone experiences the daylight differences across the year.

At least someone learned the lessons from the Terminator franchise and decided not to build skynet. No amount of money can save you from Arnold or the T-1000 robot coming back in time to kill you before you enable the robot apocalypse.

You must be one of the rare outliers, so it's surprising you're posting on /.

Does anyone in your house or workplace have a cell phone, tablet, or laptop computer? All have the devices, including cheap feature phones, include cameras and microphones. Microphones can easily be activated, and even old dumb phones could have a cell phone set to a speakerphone with the other side mute or otherwise listening without making sounds. Smart watches typically have at least a microphone. Any of these can be activated without your knowledge. What about tech gadgets like automated vacuums, vehicles that include dash cams and legally required backup cameras, smart TVs, all have them. Wireless earbuds are the norm, as phones don't come with wired ports, so listening devices there. Your video game systems can include them, the older XBox Kinect, or if people have headsets for their games, they've got surveillance in their living room even if they don't have one of the digital assistants like an Amazon Echo. Hell, even your microwave oven probably has a microphone in it that gets used with the popcorn button, it isn't online but with smart appliances these days, who knows what exploits exist.

You say cameras are not in the washrooms, but apart from strictly regimented workplaces like government security clearance required, everybody is going to bring their cell phones with them, and some people will even get out the phones while sitting on the toilet, with 2 cameras facing forward and 3 facing back. Doom scrolling or checking message while sitting on the pot is quite common.

It isn't just security cameras mounted on the wall, or clandestine recording devices. We, the unwashed masses, happily surveil ourselves, we buy our own self-surveillance equipment, and have various recording devices all around our most intimate moments.

I do not understand how thinking punishing domestic AI vendors for not enabling mass surveillance, and believing NSA use of AI for mass surveillance is bad is somehow inconsistent?

AI plus NSA is doubleplusungood

Anthropic's primary objection was the use of the AI for mass surveillance, the second for autonomous drone operations (which it isn't designed for). So you think Hegseth using AI to supercharge the NSA an order of magnitude beyond the Snowden era capabilities is cool? We don't beat China by becoming like China. You know, freedom.