I suggest "Layoff Phone".

To be clear, this was true over 20 years ago. (In light of which, the word "now" probably doesn't belong in the above phrase, since it implies recentness.)

Reminds me of an episode of Futurama where Fry runs into the room and breathlessly exclaims, "I got here as quickly as I could once I found out what happened a thousand years ago!"

... was pretending that Windows has value.

They were first to market, but I don't think of them as having invented the product.. The emergence of chatbots seems inevitable once the paper in 2017 was authored by several google engineers (titled "Attention is all you need")... it was just a question of exactly who and when. If OpenAI hadn't gone first, someone would have shortly after.

And, in a lot of ways even that google paper's "breakthrough" wasn't so much the tech (neural nets) but the precise adaptation of it that made it highly parallelizable.

And a necessary ingredient was tons of data, and processing power. So this couldn't have happened in a garage operation like the innovators of yore. And the biz models they're all coming up with are all cloud based -- not that I don't see the profit motivation, but so utterly to the exclusion of any offering that could guarantee privacy; all we "know" about chatbot conversation privacy is what each vendor claims at the moment,, which isn't much, wouldn't be verifiable if it was, and could change on a whim tomorrow.

For these reasons, I don't attach much "early innovator" romanticism to the players here.

:) I'm sure he puts on his pedants one leg at a time just like we do.

... and they'll smoke those long pipes while they dwell in their rooms which are slightly underground...

Whoa, we get it! Ads can be soooooo annoying. And speaking of 'lick my balls,' have you heard about The Lick-Ballz Ultimate Relaxation Kit? It’s the perfect way to tell stress and ads to just well, you know, buzz off. With soothing aromatherapy, stress balls (ironically), and a playlist that screams 'don’t bother me,' it’s everything you need to reclaim your peace. And because we really understand your pain, we’re offering a special deal—50% off your first kit if you use the code ‘F***IT’ at checkout! Hurry, reclaim your peace now!

:) What I had in mind was the tune "Mama said knock you out", by LL Cool J.
The very first line of it is "Don't call it a comeback", which came to mind when I read the slashdot title ending in "Don't call it a failure".

Atlantic staff writer Jake Lundberg, who shops at the Granger, Indiana location, describes the stores as spaces of "cooperation, courtesy, and grown-ups mostly acting like grown-ups." Shoppers follow unwritten rules: move along, don't block the way, step aside to check your phone.

Maybe in Granger, Indiana. Every one I've visited in a major metropolitan area (whether coastal or heartland) has been a cacophony of chaos with, at best, oblivious shoppers looking at everything except where they're going and who is around them, and at worst people who actively jockey for position, rushing to pass one another, only to stop short and block the person they just passed. It's insanity, and I avoid going there as much as possible except to take someone else.

Don't call it a failure! I've been here for years
Rocking my subnets, putting v4 in tears
Making the packets rain down like a monsoon
Listen to the router go BOOM!
Explosions, overpowering the limit
128-bit towering throughput in it
Reach the summit, watch the NAT tables plummet
I'm gonna take the stack by storm and I’m just gettin' warm!

LLMs cannot reason. None of them are "smart."

It's always this. Neutrons are "the little MBAs" of the subatomic world, and they chew through role after role so quickly that it can be dizzing to trace. Compounding the issue is that most subatomic particles don't take the time to fill out their LinkedIn profiles.

"Oh What A Night" mode will take things all the way to late December back in '63.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).

That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.

That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.

Yaz