After the last election, I am uncertain why anyone would vote FOR a Republican. It doesn't matter though, both parties are part and parcel of the 'apparatus'. Voting Democrat will still take us to the same place, but by a slightly different route.

Productivity does not matter. That is not the killer use of AI.

Monitoring your behavior is the ultimate use of AI. That will be paid for. By you. There is no AI bubble. It will grow by a factor of 100 and still not be done growing until every single camera and microphone is included in the processing. Your taxes will pay for this.

I offer a contrary opinion: The AI bubble will not burst because the US Government will pay for it. Why would they pay for it? To monitor all of the video cameras and microphones strewn about.

Long story short, AI will be your new taskmaster. Everything you do will be to please AI; otherwise, you will end up in a work-camp, erm, I mean private prison. Flock, Ring, your phone, etc will all be tied in to this. Do you have any idea how much compute will be needed to achieve this supposed utopia? Datacenters will be built. You will pay for your own leash. Enjoy.

In the past 3 years, I have not heard a single song released on public radio that was better than what AI could do. In fact, AI could probably do it better. The music industry has finally succeeded in killing music.

You do realize that the discs have been useless for over a decade now, right? The game will not play from the disc at all. It MUST connect to the Internet and download more data. The disc itself does not include an actually playable release.

Fucking moron. And who exactly are they supposed to shoot? Answer that and you will find your answer as to why they are not shooting anyone. What the hell is wrong with you?

... it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they access lawful speech.

Hopefully doxing the morons that voted for it.

That's not what I meant about taxes. What I meant is that in California, your property tax assessment is set at purchase time. If you move to a new house, your new property is assessed at the new purchase price. That tax situation can easily create a five-figures-per-year disincentive towards moving closer to your job when you change jobs. It may not be your employer's problem, but it absolutely affects where people choose to work.

The corollary of that statement is that if employers truly want the best people, they're fundamentally doing themselves a disservice by demanding too much in-person time, because not everyone is that easily mobile. It also tends to discriminate against older workers, who are more likely to own a home, have kids in school, have a working spouse, and have various other things that tie them to their current residence and make commuting harder.

Yes, it's a trade-off, but there's no evidence that it is in employers' best interests to force employees to make that trade-off, and that's the point I was trying to make.

If we amend the Constitution of each nation to require mandatory prison time for publishing in a closed document format, only then will we properly unseat Microsoft's dominant format. Because there's no fighting the inertia. Not when there are no immediate negative consequences for using proprietary formats, and with short term pain when dealing with less popular but "open" formats.

I'm glad they're supporting Linux even more now. There aren't a lot of us but maybe with Microsoft constantly making their OS worse, some more converts will show up.

The thing is, I don't really use GOG Galaxy because the big value add for me is that I can download and install games to run off line. And admittedly this is what GOG Galaxy does in the background (and it will even backup the installer and fetch bonus content if you want it to). But I don't necessarily need galaxy to run my games, as the installer already does a nice job putting it under my desktop's menu and I can browse or search for games.

Where Steam's app is ahead is that it has better integration with friends lists and makes it easier to invite your friends into a game. It's not that huge of a deal because Discord can already do some of that on Linux today if you grant it permissions necessary for it to track what game you're playing.

If we have full-on, mainstream compatibility layers for graphics APIs (Proton, Crossover), surely its trivial to do the same for documents......

No, you could always either change jobs or sell your house and take a huge property tax hit every year for the rest of your life.

For the overwhelming majority of roles in tech, the pandemic proved not only that those workers could be WFH, but that the company's efficiency on average went up when doing so. Yes, some workers' efficiency went down, usually because of having kids who were also at home, and struggling to manage that, but once that condition went away, there was even less reason why those workers needed to be in the office. This leaves only the people for whom physically commuting to the office was necessary to avoid distractions, which is nonzero, but is again specific to the person, not the role.

I mean, if you include things like custodians, maintenance, security, food service workers, and IT, then I suppose those roles have to be partially or completely on-site, but that's only because the roles are focused on physically maintaining the site. And most of those are outsourced to contractors in any large company anyway.

The employees who truly have to go onsite are mostly support staff, and even in a pre-pandemic, pre-WFH world, were likely to be paid far less than the ones who didn't.

Work travel is a convenience for the employer. It was never actually a requirement for working with people in other states or countries, but rather a sign that they don't know how to properly manage the time zone interactions. But yeah, if they're making you travel overseas to meet with other teams or partner companies or stuff like that, they should pay you more for having to be able to drop everything and be mobile like that. Flip side is that doing so tends to be discriminatory against people with kids, etc., so it is potentially problematic to do so. A better solution is to make work travel optional, and make it "bring your family" so that you spend a week doing work and then your family joins you for a week of paid vacation as compensation.

But the fact that your employer requires you to wear suits puts your employer in the "What decade is this?" category. That's 1980s territory right there, and makes me wonder if the reason you have to be there in person is simply because your company is so far behind the rest of the industry that they can't figure out how to enable remote work properly.

Defense contractor?

I can't speak for the GP, but making 4x my salary wouldn't be a motivator for me. The industry already pays stupid amounts of money. I have enough money to comfortably retire pretty much anywhere in the world, and I'm two decades from retirement age. So if I were in a situation where working from home 5 days a week were extremely important to me, rather than merely a case of me being annoyed at how much less work I get done post-pandemic, then yeah, I'd give that job up. But that's me, and everyone's situation is different.

Because they have decade-long commitments to leasing buildings, and that money isn't going to stop being spent just because people can't use them. Because they want to reduce headcount, and pissing off their workers is a great way to reduce attrition. Because their C-suite has large investments in companies that own buildings, which their companies lease, and if companies lease fewer buildings, it directly affects their personal bottom line. There are lots of reasons, most of which have jack s**t to do with efficiency.

It is well established that most tech companies got suddenly more efficient when everyone started working from home, at least on average, and that return-to-office mandates caused productivity to crater. Most of this is because not knowing whether your employees will be there turns out to be extremely useful, because it causes people to be judicious about scheduling meetings. As soon as we returned to the office, meeting culture came back, and we waste a quarter of our time doing nothing but status reports and listening to status reports.

so let's all move to Utah and become LDS

There are some studies showing more protein helps one lose weight, but losing weight and being healthy are not necessarily the same thing.