Sorry, your old boys network view is very dated. Make phone calls? WHO THE FUCK IS PICKING UP THE PHONE TO TALK TO STRANGERS? No tech company will hire you. But hey, who wants to work at Netflix/Google/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/OpenAI/nVidia/etc? If you're coming to the job market not willing to adapt to modern times, I question your work ethic. You're not virtuous...you're the laziest fuck I've ever heard of...shaking your fists at people doing what is expected of them today instead of what people did in the 80s and early 90s. No one cares about effort, only results...working smarter is always better than working harder.

Also, you're assuming people aren't asking everyone they know. Everyone I know is. Here's the thing...you only know people you know...and people in top jobs?...they don't socialize a lot....big tech employers do what they can to isolate their employees. It's not like the late 90s where you'd meet them at conferences.

Everyone I know from top employers I know by accident, or they're former coworkers....I was very active in the open source scene local user groups and conferences...I met a lot of people from shit employers there. Once I got a job from a top employer, they stopped paying for me to go to such things and I had to work on proprietary frameworks, so the stuff at conferences and user groups became a lot less relevant....like everyone else who upgraded their employer, I stopped going.

Translation: We're not failing...we're becoming more agile! We either have too many people or are expecting reduced revenue, so we need to do some layoffs and cut hiring...but instead of this being bad news which could affect our stock price, let's instead say we're DOGE-ing the shit out of this company and becoming super high tech and automated. We're not correcting for macro-economic forces, the majority of which are far beyond our control...nope...no mistakes on our part...we're riding the AI wave to glory!!!

Unless SF has some amazing AI 1000s of times more accurate than anything the world has seen, there's no way the current AI can vibe code enough to fully hand off any task. So either they hired an army of useless people in the past with no real-world function...or they needed to cut headcount + added some AI here and there and are intentionally misleading investors and staff to imply the AI is why they can operate with less employees...so nope...not a layoff...people...please buy our stock!!!....grads...please apply to work here!!!...current useful employees....don't seek work elsewhere, we're not a sinking ship!

Marc Benioff is famous for being a lowlife and Salesforce doesn't have a reputation for being a top shop in the industry. They're known as "cloud IBM"...but IBM today, not in the pre-Internet era...so NOT A COMPLIMENT.

When the Gov is paying all of the bills it can really drive down prices

That's why all those tanks and fighter jets and aircraft carriers are so CHEAP!

Or alternatively, consider the US university system prices when the government started providing more money (in the form of loans) to students who otherwise couldn't afford college. Yes, that's not the only factor, but an increase in the demand for something, especially by giving out money for that thing, will likely increase that things price, not lower it.

Netcraft hasn't confirmed yet.

Data Centers are no different than any other complex facility: once built, they have to be physically managed and maintained. There has to be some people there.

404 was created by a bunch of ex-Vice guys after Motherboard went Tits Up. It's a political advocacy group fronted by a blog. That doesn't necessarily mean that they can't write things that turn out to be valuable or insightful, but know up front that their agenda comes first, the same way agendas come first in any politically-centered enterprise (Jacobin Mag, National Review, the New Republic, etc etc). They are, without fail, always going to play their particular angle first and foremost.

Works a treat. I've used disk2vhd for for many years so every "backup" is familiar and quick to peruse.

You make an excellent point. If these tools were any good, you'd be able to design a beta-worthy app in a weekend, if that. These AI houses should be able to develop software at unfathomable speeds....but as a daily user of Claude 4.0 plugin (mandate from employer) and seeing that it often can't even match braces in simple Java refactors...I wouldn't hold my breath. My experiences with ChatGPT were far worse.

...vs a scheme to suck your data into their training model....how much do you trust your e-mail information not to leak out? Google and MS want to mine your data to serve you ads. What does OpenAI want to do?...I'd wager train models.

Uhhhh....can we use living organisms to convert plastic waste into something useful AND inert? Drugs are bad...M'Kay!!!! What happens when this gets out in the wild and starts producing this drug, which is deadly in high doses....what happens when it evolves to produce it in enough concentration that it lures fish...they OD...they die...and the ecoli can break them down. Normally, GMOs don't scare me, but this one does.

"History" won't give a flying shit. Great men in history... and women... have rarely been "good". Steve Jobs will be remembered far more than Torvalds ever will, and he was absolute garbage as a person. Like it or not, history cares about winners. Genghis Khan will always be remembered more than, say, Mother Theresa.

I expect that to drop dramatically because Toyota just recently opened a new battery plant for their hybrid models. And I wouldn't be surprised that Toyota will start sourcing battery packs from third parties for their burgeoning hybrid lineup.

Also, all these battery plants could be supplying hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles out there. Toyota is aggressively pushing hybrids, Honda is starting to do so, and I expect Nissan to go that way (if they survive).

I agree that this therapy is not without significant risks, so it's not to be taken lightly.

That said, the long-term health outcomes of T1DM are also significant. So the way I see this development is that it is one more step on the path toward finding a durable, safe, and effective cure. And if approved, it may offer some patients another choice, one that of course should involve an informed discussion with competent healthcare providers.

It's important to keep in mind that healthcare is not a "one size fits all" thing. Two patients that have the same condition can respond very differently to the same therapy. Before the discovery of insulin, diabetics literally just...died. So on the path to understanding this relationship between the individual patient and the selected therapy, medical science can only offer a range of treatment options. At one time, humans believed in bloodletting, lobotomies, and arsenic to treat various illnesses. We built leper colonies. And in some places in the world, menstruation is still considered "dirty." We have made many advances, but there are still many more to be discovered.

Historically, that's true. However, that's a coincidence, like Moore's Law. Also, most breakthroughs occur so slowly that the economy has time to adjust. Technology has replaced lots of people working in photography, travel agents, typists, stenographers, but it took awhile for each. Once you have AI that works as promised, you're going to have a massive amount of job loss. The only shining light is that modern AI is a pyramid scheme and the results are never as promised...but what if that changes?

I think it's safe to say that once you have AI that can reliably replace a software engineer, you'll have AI that can reliably replace a truck driver...a lawyer...an accountant, etc. That will really decimate the economy. I think today's LLMs are a far cry from their promise and mostly garbage...for many reasons I've ranted about in the past on this site.

If they find a way, a LOT of people will lose their job very quickly.

My prediction? LLMs...at best, can replace stack overflow or Google...but not people. An LLM only predicts tokens. It has no idea what it's doing. I use Claude 4.0 every day for work and it still can't reliably match braces. Seems easy to fix...but at that point, you're building an AI with a rules engine....they've poured trillions into this. If it could be done, it would be and they'd be making near infinite money with a magic box that can take an English sentence and produce useful code...an app, a video game, a video, etc.

IF...LLMs actually worked, you'd not only see them selling your LLMs, but actual solutions based on them...like a generate your own FPS game service...infinite levels for your favorite game...JVMs/CLRs/Node.js/Python runtimes that could transform your functional code into expert-grade assembly, giving you blistering performance and reducing your cloud spend. Once we see those?...I'll get nervous.

However, to your point. There's no logical reason why technology creates jobs. It just has in the past. The new demand has outstripped the reduction in positions. Those are two competing variables. Once the rate of job loss exceeds the rate of new demand created, you have a massive economic issue. Wait until white collar work is gutted the way retail was...ask anyone who worked at Sam Goody, Blockbuster, ToysRUs, etc.