It is peak irony that - honestly - the whinge about how miserable the "internet" (as a broad synonym for social media, I guess) is, is followed by one of the most authentic, non-political*, most Old-Slashdot-Flavored engaging discussion I've seen here in at least the last 5, maybe 10 years?
Thanks, this was a nice post & engaging discussion. Even the people I disagree with on balance were making persuasive points.

*so far. It's 2026, I don't hold much hope it'll remain pristine.
Even my simple posting here, I may have tainted it. I have a lovely anon-stalker (I am pretty sure I know who) that follows any post I make with political bile, regardless of the subject.

The sort of people who could turn Google into a profitable innovation powerhouse no longer work at Google. Google lives and dies on how tightly they can hold onto their existing advertising empire. That's all they've got now and it is all they will ever be.

Not the worst billionaire fashion choice.

There will be winners and losers. And I don't think any of today's companies are necessarily going to be the AI leader 10 years from now.

Who will lose the most are the middle class with retirement investments that are mismanaged and put into these unstable toxic investments. And potentially bail outs for financial and chip companies when the market corrects disastrously.

Everything as a service has been the dream for the billionaire class for a long time. Creating a dependency for end-users (often called "consumers") is viewed as the path to stability and profit for a company. Having folks pay every month for health insurance, medication, vitamins, smartphone service, cable TV, internet access, streaming services, etc.

I'm surprised that Reddit, of all places, is emulating twitter?
As far as I can tell "for you" is just a firehose of shitty people that disagree with me politically.
On the other hand "following" is (I guess?) derived from the posts I've actually followed, and that's a firehose of shitty people that I ostensibly agree with, politically, but clearly don't in nearly every other respect.

I think the intent is that one feed will engage me angrily, while the other will engage me affirmatively.

In fact, together they've made it astonishingly easy to never check twitter, ever. Kinda like facebook and reddit.

1) the IAU manipulated what they knew would be an unpopular discussion and the vote they wanted was pushed quietly to the "cleaning up junk" phase of the conference when the majority of attendees had LEFT. Does that sound like a kosher way to handle an IAU issue that the general public might actually, for once, care about? Sounds like a deliberate coverup to me, maybe you have a different view.

2) Nobody yet has explained why the list of planets had to arbitrarily be constrained. Why not expanded? "Eris is more massive, if we included Pluto, we'd have to include Eris" yeah, and? What would be wrong with ADDING Eris? Or if we found larger objects, why not add them? The "must clear their orbit" is vague handwavy bullshit. Depending on your definition, EARTH hasn't 'cleared' its orbit, either. And what happens if planet 9 turns out to be a Neptune-sized gas giant in the Kuiper belt? Would the IAU say that's NOT a planet?
In fact, EVERY SINGLE PLANET has other bodies in its orbit - Jupiter has tens of thousands.
The fact that later in the ruling the IAU simply decreed "(these) are the 8 planets" shows that even they recognize their definition is functionally worthless.

Yes, I continue to object to arbitrary, unjustified rules passed en camera by a small body of elitists. No matter how long ago, ESPECIALLY when they're so stupid that they set themselves up to be almost inevitably self-contradicted and need revision...again.

(I could bring up some other issues that are "done" that we continue to debate, if you'd like examples? But I think as a disingenuous AC you're already aware of them.)

TSIA

If you're upset about "everything":
a) take your ritalin or prozac or whatever cocktail of anxiety meds you're on; you missed a dose.
b) you control you. Nobody MAKES you addicted to the social media feeds; yes, absolutely they are CRAFTED to be the visual-cortex version of heroin. I get that, they are meant to be addictive as fuck. NEVERTHELESS you are (supposedly) a human with agency. Just. Put. The. Fucking. Thing. Down. Go for a walk. Read a book. Turn off your router for a while, if that helps.

Otherwise you're just a herd mammal bleating that you don't like the pasture YOU put yourself in.

$99 billion in cash reserves will probably insulated them from most of the AI bubble pop.

None of the junior people can pass our interviews. And none of the seniors want a full time job babysitting an code-generation machine. Modern AI has turned coding into the equivalent of a mindless factory job watching things go by on the conveyor belt.

It's really tough to measure and interpret results, I don't fault anyone for struggling to have perfect clarity in outcomes and business results. But part of the problem with the corporate world is an unwillingness to question their metrics and call bullshit on assumptions that cannot be supported by evidence.

The callous part of me thinks that was the intention from the start: wash out the capable engineers who were competently producing and hire ethnic cohorts who played the game.

It's Amazon. Anything that gets them the metric that they can put in their promo doc is a good thing.

6-12 months later, when they've been promoted, they can nix it and add it to their next promodoc as company savings in efficiency.

Are you honestly summarizing the current state of advancement in LLM capabilities as "somewhat better search"?

It's apparent from that statement that you've not even been paying a slight bit of attention to state of the art. It isn't 2023; we're a far sight further than you conceptualize, and you'd be well suited to start familiarizing.

Using a definition for success that is not outcome-based turns out to be a giant scam!