IIRC this wasn't really a thing back then and there was a general open debate if software shouldn't just be free for all to pass around, including the source. The " piracy" and "theft" narrative was pushed by Gates and Co. as a result of this debate, yes?

Fill us in on some details please. Great to see you here on slashdot BTW, didn't know you were part of the crew. Nice. Like it.

Demographic collapse, de-globalization. Less people, over-the-top excess money printing, etc. The side-effect being that money loses its worth extra-fast and you get (hyper)inflation. It also means that more and more stock-trade growth prospects turn into pipe-dreams and ginormous money-vortexes like the recent bazillion dollar AI ringtrade involving big-tech. That is on top of l00ny b*llshit like a sad-and-sorry IRC rippoff or a PHP website that stores text and images being "valued" at half a trillion dollars on the stock market. Or the world dumping their money into German housing (because they actually build houses and not cardboard fortresses) and turning any monetary transaction for housing into a pointless endeavor for anyone actually living in Germany.

It's not that we lack money, we lack culture and people (decendants). See todays US or parts of the EU for details on the culture thing. See todays China and Italy for the demographic details.

... and the way it always finds a way. Fascinating.

People are buying less, especially in the US, where tariffs and recurring budget-overruns/lockdowns and non-sensical tax policies put significant pressure on regular people. Add to that more and more optimization, bots and AI doing an increasing portion of physical and mental labor and you've got the perfect storm of overall job-loss. Especially in Orgs such as Amazon that already bank on optimizing huge portions of the consumer-trade economy and have their sole purpose in doing exactly that.

This fits to how I see the best use of LLMs: As a knowledge base and library you can talk to.

That they just cut open millions of books shows how lazy they were. They could've just built a battery of scanbots and resold the books afterwards. Or just get them from the local library.

There are some real dimwit arseholes running some silicon valley gigs, that's for sure. And TFA proves this once again.

Poisoning a work of art or entertain ment by emphasizing The Message(TM) - or any other political message - never goes well. What is surprising is how consistently Hollywood and Game developers continue to fall into this trap these days despite projects built and run that way regularly lose hundreds of millions and are clearly not what the audience wants.

Ubisoft f.e. just went belly-up because of this sh*t. And they've been around for a looooong time, but it only took a few years of dimwits unfamiliar with the gaming medium to screw things up epic stye and have that large publisher go the way of the Dodo.

What makes these headlines so frustrating is that becoming independent would be trivial if deciders had some basic knowledge about computers and digital networks, what exactly those do and how they work. We're taking 5th grade level of knowledge here.

Because that isn't the case, we have huge portions of society and politicians who think this computer thing only works if you spend astronomical amounts of taxpayer money on completely superfluous licenses for trashy software.

If it weren't for the utter lack of a basic digital culture becoming independent of large vendors, US or otherwise, migrating away from propriety vendors would be little more than a formality and would free up hundreds of billions of euros in annual budgets.

... replace the E-Mail protocols already? Preferably with something not originating in the Jurassic Era of computing? And replace DNS right along with it. That would be great.

It is a _very_ plausible hypothesis that helps prevent us from letting a genie out of a bottle we can't put him back into.

Next question.

I'm pretty sure electricians and plumbers have more billable work hours that lawyers.

AFAICT 50 dollers worth of stuff from the hardware store makes a pretty useful gun aswell. Much quicker and way more effective than any 3D printed piece of semi-plastic ever could. Are they going to regulate who can buy pipes? Sounds kinda dumb this attempt at a law.

A little over a year ago I was about to fall into level 2 unemployment support (this is Gemany) while desperately looking for a job as a seasoned senior webdev. That means bare minimum support and you have to let your pants down finance wise and the bureau of labor is all over you like a cheap suit requiring you to take any job that comes along. Fair enough. I talked to my local scooter dealer and was ready to go into vehicle mechanics, a job I never would've dreamed of doing my entire life. I got a new dev-gig just in time, with 20k less but I haven't forgotten my resolve to do blue collar work if all else should fail and AI takes away my coding job.

Repairing motorscooters and small motorbikes is likely shitty pay compared to what I'm used to but I'd rather do that than garbage disposal. I'd be learning something new and improve my ability to repair, maintain and refurbish my own scooter. Not half-bad.

I use Googles swipe keyboard on Android. AFACT it still is slower than a good mobile KB from Blackberry or something similar. That's why these KB phones have a niche. I've been thinking about replacing my phlablet with one of those.

... 50 000 years of waste management and can be set up within months with minimal regulations, a crew of 20 men, a crane and a modern windmill making inroads while the fission and Fusion pipe-dreams are still swallowing bazillions of tax money still are trying to prove their long-term efficiency. ... Other than for Germans that is, who are actually capable of basic math and engineering and thus have abandoned their world-leading fission programs a while ago.

Who would've thunk?

Yes, that's Elon Musk telling Donald Trump that the biggest issue with carbon emissions is that people get headaches if you get to a thousand ppm of CO2.

Well, that is a pretty daunting problem if the atmospheres natural CO2 levels are objectively toxic for humans. We'd likely die out within a decade or two. I don't know how you can be more clear about us reaching 1000ppm of CO2.

As for man-made CO2: Musk has been consistent with his warnings. He says it's not doomsday yet, but there will be serious problems when we reach or exceed 600ppm. That would be up from 440ppm today or 220ppm of the pre-industrial era. It is perfectly clear, even as Musk lays it out, that we are running out of time. You just need to be able to listen to him and be capable of basic math.