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Comment Re:It's always about what you want to pay for.... (Score 1) 273

"those goals seem to be nearly impossible to attain"

Is it impossible to obtain - the national ethos sees absolutely no problem with the unbounded consolidation of wealth and power, so long as it is in the private sector.

The joke is the private sector is so powerful at this point, your public sector is just a sock with the private sector's hand up its ass.

That'll never change as long as the concept of even moderate, reasonable redistribution of wealth is a national non-starter. It's impressive watching the way the US twists itself this way and that, where everybody is just a temporarily embarrassed billionaire voting for less taxes, less spending to make their supposed future rich selves happy for when they finally join the billionaire class.

Comment Re: Useful If Verified (Score 5, Informative) 248

Dunno if you're a programmer or not, but if you're not extensively testing and verifying what you wrote before you put it in production, you're doing it wrong.

You have to verify and test *all* code. LLMs are great for producing a bunch of boiler plate code that would take a long time to write and is easily testable. The claim that LLMs are useless for programming flies in the face of everything happening in the ivoriest of towers of programming these days. Professionals in every major shop in the world use it now as appropriate. Sorry that makes you mad. I'm not young either. I've been producing C++ on embedded systems used by millions of people for 20+ years. Nobody doing serious programming takes the "LLMs are useless" opinion seriously anymore.

Comment Re: How is a 10% reduction in traffic a success? (Score 1) 111

How would you know what a shot number was? If the goal was to restore flowing traffic, reduce horn honking from standstill traffic, increase city revenue for mass transit, seems like a decidedly non-shit number to me. You dont need to cut traffic in half to make the roads work, a modest decrease from full capacity will do it.

Comment Re:How to loose your ... (Score 1) 106

Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.

Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment history inside that bubble used to be a positive thing on your resume. I'm not sure how true either of those things is any more. Maybe those who are still there and making premium TC in a big US city are still getting a decent deal out of it. For others, most of those big brands seem to be increasingly unattractive, and having history there seems to be increasingly regarded as neutral or even negative when employers outside that bubble are hiring.

Comment Re:WTF? (Score 1) 50

FWIW, I'm a little more optimistic. In the UK, we don't have the kind of pork barrel politics that is endemic to some other western democracies. The ICO are, like many government regulators, under-resourced, but they are basically trying to do a decent job and I think moves like the one we're discussing here today are going in the right direction.

Comment Re:What a horrible idea. (Score 3, Insightful) 137

"To cease all production and consign us all to a pre-industrial way of living? "

This is weapons level stupid and or disingenuous. Do you actually think a) that's the point of the suit b) the person who filed it wants that?

It's mostly a bad idea because it will not succeed, and in the current judicial climate (no pun intended) of the USA may very well set some kind of precent at complete odds with the goal of the lawsuit.

And I say this as somebody who thinks the people behind such a lawsuit are not in it for money or notoriety or whatever. People can be driven by emotion for certain things that are right - you know, like if your mom died on a night that was substantially warmer than you remember experiencing when you were a kid. Suing oil companies could *very well* help with "the transition" as you call it, if only to decimate their ability to lobby for policy - people really don't understand how subsidized their industry is.

None the less, what appears to really sell right now in the US is antagonization so here we are. It's somehow "our fault" witch to me smacks of somebody who really isn't particularly interested in the larger scale details.

Comment Re:WTF? (Score 1) 50

And most people will roll over, or bend over, for this shit - either because they feel they have no choice, or because they're incapable of grasping the implications and consequences.

Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Comment Re:"The ICO warned manufacturers it stands ready t (Score 2) 50

Then you'd see no air fryers, smart TV's or smart speakers being sold in the UK for a reasonable price.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

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