She really does seem to be trying to speed run a redemption arc - hopefully no one actually falls for it.

Locally, yes, but the moisture that is accumulating previously evaporated and went somewhere else. What will the impact be there? Very hard to say.

That is essentially what happened. They didn't fire 35%, those 35% just transferred their reports to others and became ICs (Individual Contributors).

The 35% figure at Google is misleading. The vast majority of those people weren't pure managers they were software engineers who managed small teams as part of their duties while also doing productive technical work. A policy requiring a minimum of 5 direct reports for each manager was put in place, forcing all of those people to decide to either increase their management and cease doing significant technical work or cease being managers and focus entirely on technical work. Many chose the latter option, often quite happily (there is no additional pay or other concrete benefit to being a manager vs being an IC (individual contributor)). This partitioning of people who were in mixed roles into roles that were either managerial or technical provided most of the reduction in line and middle management.

Yes, I expect Alphabet would decline. I worked there for 15 years and understand the culture and motivations pretty well. Culturally, doing something like that would cut against the grain, hard. Pragmatically, they wouldn't like to oppose the administration but they'd get a lot more PR mileage out of leaking the request and publicly declaring their opposition than it would cost them.

It seems it can (although whether it's economical to do it at scale is another question).

Hope you're up on your Sumarian antivirals because I'm gonna Snow Crash your ass.

You're still alive, I see. Yes, it's true, the lethal payload mentioned in the above video isn't actually included within it. I knew there was little danger in linking to this video, but don't you realize it could have been much worse?

Doesn't removing the artist's signature usually reduce the value of a work?

That this isn't the case for Sora 2, tells me something about Sora 2's reputation.

AI has invented a new variant of Pokemon Go. Gather points by taking virtual photos of imaginary destinations!

In a slightly perverted sense, I think these are sort of expert systems too, but their expertise is this: "What has been said, and how can I sound like the people who said it?"

And we wouldnÃ(TM)t have to deal with the enshitification of the iPhone and the Mac.

I won't say it about the Mac but it definitely applies to the iPhone: it came pre-enshittified and Jobs was definitely personally responsible it. The iPhone was a terrible regression in the history of PCs, where we somehow went from personal computer revolution of the 1970s back to the IBM-decides-what-you-run of the 1960s.

It would have been good for Jobs to have left the computer world a decade earlier than he did. He didn't need to die, but everyone would be much better off today if, in the early/mid '00s, Jobs had opened a tire shop or restaurant or gorilla costume rental business. Anything but handheld PCs. It's been nearly two decades (!!!) since Apple out-Nintendoed Nintendo and we still haven't recovered. If anything, things are getting worse.

OTOH the modernization of Mac OS to Mac OS X was done very well, and IMHO the word "Mac" would now be a semi-obscure 20th Century historical reference if Jobs hadn't brought in NeXT and made that happen.

If the automated coding tool is reliable, you wouldn't need to be skilled. OTOH if the coding tool keeps emitting code that contains bugs or misfeatures, then someone will need to analyze and debug the emitted code, which is a skill. In some cases, that might requires more skill than simply writing the software by hand.

It's surprisingly similar to AI in that respect. Both technologies have been shown to work in principle, but neither of them has been shown to turn an actual profit, yet.

Yes, those are all great. And geothermal is looking really promising too, with microwave drilling technology potentially enabling it in locations where geography previously made it impractical.

Who said anything about waiting? We should be (and, broadly speaking, are) deploying renewable technologies now, and simultaneously developing fusion technology for later. There's no need to do just one or the other, when we can and will do both in parallel.

One shipping charge from Amazon (whether thats covered under Prime, or is free or whatever) vs five shipping charges from buying from non-Amazon websites - no one offers free shipping where I live.

New Zealand.

Our Ebay alternative is TradeMe, and it sucks. You can use Ebay.com but Ebay forces most sellers to use Ebay Global Shipping, which charges high shipping and also applies import duties to *everything* up front, even when the item falls under the personal allowance for importing into NZ (I remain convinced Ebay are pocketing that).

Our Amazon alternative is MightyApe, and it sucks. At a pinch you can use Amazon AU or US, but its very hit and miss as to what products can be sent to NZ, and shipping prices are high.