Reddit's problems have nothing to do with Google and everything to do with gross incompetence.

I've been a prolific Redditor for some 10-15 years. That ended overnight when they stopped allowing anonymous access to old.reddit.com. If I and a handful of fellow geeks were the only holdouts against their god-awful "new" experience, that wouldn't matter. Problem is, the vast majority of Reddit's mods are - were - in the same camp.

Accordingly, Reddit has effectively rolled over and surrendered to the bots, and now Spez wonders why their stock price is tanking? They have bots policing bots posting for bots learning from bots and arguing with bots. Far from improving the situation, AI has made the whole mess even harder for the rapidly dwindling pool of humans to deal with.

MMW, a year from now Reddit will be nothing more than playground for AIs. Whether or not it remains viable as a company largely depends on how long they can hide that information from investors and advertisers.

You appear to be violently agreeing with me.

Yes, those articles all say we need better managers. Why? Because the current crop largely suck at the actual task of managing, conflating oversight with line-of-sight. And some aren't even interested in managing in the first place, only in maintaining their micro-fiefdom to stroke their egos. What part of that disagrees with my stance?

If you're taking issue with my choice of quantifiers, yes, I'll readily admit good managers can absolutely make most jobs easier. Good managers are rare, and Covid gave us the receipts. None of that has anything to do with whether or not the work itself can be done remotely - If a car's steering wheel is broken, do we punish the tires?

Observing that some people aren't responsible enough to work without someone breathing down their neck is a wildly different claim than saying the work itself couldn't be done remotely.

Any task that doesn't require physically interaction with product or customer can be done from anywhere on the planet with internet access.

OB car analogy: Some people really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a steering wheel but the rest of us drive 10-20k miles per year just fine.

The UK was using "listening ears" to detect incoming attacks before radar existed.

I don't think that's really needed in this case, however, because:
1) We do have radar now and human visual tricks don't really matter to it, and
2) Purely optical detection is still trivial for non-humans, this hits exactly one intended blind-spot tuned just for us.

This is a one-trick pony, albeit that trick is very cool if you happen to be a deaf human without access to a variable frame rate camera (e.g. any cheap modern phone), and the payload isn't subject to being centrifuged into oblivion. Most small mammals will still see it just fine; cameras running at a multiple of its rotation rate will see it as a stable if somewhat blurry image. And a high enough shutter speed (given enough light) would just plain show it as it is.

For spying on protestors in a noisy urban environment - This is perfect. Against any military targets with better tech than longbows and armored cavalry, not so much.

As long as we're throwing out unsubstantiated claims - though this is completely true - I work for a company with effectively zero on-prem non-front-line workers. And not talking about the financial services sector or some niche mom-n'-pop, it employs a few thousand people (is that less than "many thousands"? Does it matter?) in an industry we all use but isn't particularly visible; I'd call it better than 50/50 you've personally received services from my employer.

When I say "virtually all white collar work", I mean exactly that; and while I recognize your hyperbole, I have no issue with it because it's still true, at least as a proof of concept. Your own company's failure to accomplish the same is a condemnation, not a counterpoint. Sure, let's not sugar coat this - Of course there are people who can't be trusted to work remotely. That's a completely different claim, however, than saying the job itself couldn't be performed remotely.

More importantly than our respective anecdata, I'm not the one initiating this claim. I provided a cite, take it up with Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Adam Grant as published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

/ And don't think I didn't catch that context switch between your third and fourth paragraphs... Unless you happen to be a manager of professional social media astroturfers.

I agree with you overall - I work because I need income to live, not because I give the least damn about my employer.

In my opinion, that's still drastically different than working because it gives me a captive audience of people highly motivated to kiss ass. Loyalty or not, I am invested in my work (as opposed to my job) - Doing it reasonably well is directly conducive to the company remaining solvent and me continuing to draw a salary.

Am I merely deluding myself by thinking doing the job well because it's in my and my coworkers' best interest, is at least a tiny bit more noble than doing it because I like having an army of sycophants at my disposal? Maybe, Maybe not; in the context of WFH, though - I still get my work done, while the Bill Lundbergs of the world have realized to their horror they're utterly irrelevant to my productivity.

Covid showed us that far, far more of us can successfully WFH than were previously doing so.

Yeah, IT is the low-hanging fruit here; but we now know virtually all white collar work can effectively be done remotely; and going further, unless your job specifically requires direct interaction with the product or customers, there's little legitimate reason to burn an extra 20% of our waking lives commuting. And that just to hang out in a noisy and disruptive environment full of people more interested in being seen than in doing the job.

The noteworthy exception is, unsurprisingly, management itself. WFH has effectively demonstrated the problem was never us worthless lazy doers, it's been managers who consider visibility as their primary role all along (or worse, ones who "oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity."). But actually managing requires real skill. It's more palatable to leadership to conflate managing with browbeating than finding people who can actually manage.

It's much simpler than all that - Remote work proves management are exactly as useless and attention-seeking as we always suspected they were.

Leaders equating line-of-sight supervision with effectiveness found themselves without their primary management tool

having well-trained, well-motivated managers leads to massive boosts in productivity from hybrid and remote working models. The data support this argument from the flip side, too. Among companies that reported struggles with remote work, this issue was concentrated in firms in which leaders fumbled the management and coordination of their remote teams.

Remote and hybrid workers are struggling with leadership gaps that were never addressed when companies shifted out of the office. Many management habits remain rooted in on-site visibility rather than clear expectations and outcomes.

And most damning of all, The study concludes that narcissistic leaders oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity. Shandell, Elliott, and Grant write that "leader narcissism is a critical but neglected source of resistance to remote work."

This is an example of "overthinking," also known as "underthinking" or "over-concluding."

Based on your UID, you're old enough to remember when games actually worked at release and have no excuse for your ignorance. The current situation is one we allowed to happen with prebuys and a passive acceptance that all software is now effectively in beta forever.

It doesn't need to be like that and you damned well know better.

Banning teens from social media will never be widely successful - Because it doesn't need to be.

These laws have nothing to do with protecting kids, and everything to do with stripping adults of their privacy. The kids will find workarounds like VPNs or AI generated IDs, because they have no alternative; meanwhile most adults will grudgingly hand over their ID cards and subject themselves to completely untrustworthy biometric tomfoolery rather than go cold-turkey from their daily doom scrolling.

And the world gets worse for all of us.

The entire point of gaming consoles is that we can stick a game in, turn it on, and we're more-or-less instantly in the game. Absent that fundamental benefit, why exactly would anyone want yet another locked down computing appliance in their house?

I'm not sure Sony has really thought this one through - They're not just killing physical media (and more importantly, second-hand markets), they're shifting markets entirely. Rather than competing with only Microsoft and Nintendo, they're effectively making themselves nothing more than another AAA gaming studio combined with a lock-in to their walled garden of a marketplace.

Effectively, they're now competing with Steam rather than Nintendo. And unlike Sony, most customers like Valve.

That's what they're trying to claim, yes.

It's not a flawless argument, however. At it's broadest, a swap could basically refer to any financial transaction whatsoever. Courts generally frown on such promiscuous definitions, however, and the CFTC and SEC have both issued several clarifications on how they interpret that - For example, they don't consider insurance as a swap, even though by any reasonable interpretation insurance is absolutely a form of swap, and the way swaps are used in practice (prior to this gambling nonsense) is almost indistinguishable from a type of insurance.

That said, Minnesota and New York have a serious uphill battle ahead. Feds just love throwing around the "supremacy" clause, and rarely care whether or not their rules make the least bit of sense. NY does have a pocket ace, though, in that both Kalshi and Polymarket are both based in NYC; they may not be able to force the CFTC to play nice, but they can make life hell for both companies if they so choose.

It would still be encrypted at rest. This was someone opportunistically walking off with a milk-crate full of hard drives, not a sophisticated attack on their network.

Of course, you could still be right - I've grown numb to how often people fail to communicate sensitive information over alternative secure channels. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see the instructions, including the password, written on a post-it note slapped right on the drive itself.

"Persons" means not tracking and logging everyone that walks by via facial rec. "Papers" refers to your identifying documents - Like your license plate or IMEA. "Effects" refers to your possessions, explicitly including mobile ones, like say a car or phone. Every aspect of Flock's business model violates the 4th amendment...

...That said, you're not wrong because Flock is a private company and we Americans are apparently dumb enough not to make the connection between corporate mass surveillance for the government's benefit, with mass surveillance by the government itself.

The fact we've all gotten used to workarounds for laptops' abysmal battery life isn't a palliating factor, it's a condemnation.