If you COULD do this, you WOULD...Someone WOULD happily spend 10x what McDonald's needs it to cost to build a robot chef...think Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or some expensive hotel doing late night room service. There are a billion uses for this technology. Ask any person and they can think 100 surefire ways to make money. I am sure there are many dangerous industrial and oil rig jobs that pay top dollar and cause a lot of workspace injuries that will pay a lot more than McDonald's. Amazon would LOVE an army of these in their warehouses and has been trying for a long time. It turns out manipulating a robot hand in unpredictable space is difficult to do. Even if you make the space predictable, it's still difficult to do...then there's the lifespan issue. You spend several million dollars to build a robot and it breaks down in a few weeks...or food bits get in joints, etc. Who cleans the robot? If it was just a sensor cost or AI issue, we'd see these being successfully deployed in limited scenarios now....maybe not McDonald's but definitely SOMEWHERE.

I have been saying it to anyone who will listen: Mythos won't end cybersecurity. It's not a tool too powerful to get into anyone's hands. it's an incremental upgrade to existing models. I am sure it's nice...it just won't change the world or set it on fire. I also have an insider connection that confirmed...it's no revolution, just a marketing stunt. I thought Anthropic was above the Sam-Altman-grade bullshit, but I was wrong. It's inspired many emotions, but that was based on our imagination, not reality.

That's the pick and shovel vendors. Selling AI is profitable, gambling on AI is profitable, but are AI investments profitable? If you use LLMs in your business, how much are you saving? Yes, nVidia shareholders are making a fuckton. AI can help professionals be more productive. It may pay for itself, but providing enough productivity to tangibly reduce headcount?...that's science fiction...I can imagine MANY ways of doing so with science fiction AI...just not with real world LLMs.

You could automate ditch digging with 80s technology. Take a (digital) picture, draw the ditch, let the robot do it's work...or simply drill some beacons in the soil at the 4 corners. It's not the AI stopping automated ditch digging..it's ALL the other stuff. A robotic excavator would be very expensive. It doesn't take a lot of labor to dig a ditch...one skilled operator and maybe a day's worth of labor, tops. So that tops out around $400 today. Even if you're charging consulting company rates, that's $2000 per ditch...There's no way to automate that excavator to recoup costs. And in your example the human being is there to deal with emergencies or contingencies, such as ground shift.

Using your imagination, any job can be automated...but as a thought exercise, do it....create the robot to replace a McDonald's worker...there's no way you can ever do it cheaper. I can imagine many ways to automate away my job. I can't imagine Claude doing that in the next 5 years. It makes too many mistakes for tasks a tiny fraction of what I do. With AI, errors multiply exponentially based on complexity.

IF your job could be automated....it would be. Someone would have automated your job somewhere. For example, truck driver...IF...it could be automated, it would be....maybe not for commercial, but for combat. The US Army would pay top dollar to transport a tanker truck of fuel through a warzone...risk not having your soldiers killed. They may not do it for all payloads, but they would be trying it out right now and making the news doing so.

I question that the wealthy ARE receiving benefits, beyond the pick and shovel vendors. I don't think the modern LLM AIs are useful enough to really make a tangible dent in your labor needs. Most talk about actual benefits are based on theoretical science fiction AI...not today's version of Claude/OpenAI/Gemini. IF AI worked as promised, absolutely...but first, it has to work as promised. It falls short in real-world usage. If ChatGPT can do your job, it was probably automated a few years ago by simpler technology.

So we're all in this uneasy transition. Today's AI doesn't work very well and shows no sign of working as promised in the short term. However, it's equally foolish to assume it never will work.

The wealthy WILL absolutely benefit from science fiction AI. However Claude/Gemini/OpenAI/CoPilot all fail on the basics today. They provide SOME value, but not enough to tangibly cut headcount.

Modern AI has greatly oversold it's capabilities. However, every tech leader has significant AI investments and is selling picks and shovels. So....you're NIKE...who do you trust?...a guy like me who uses Claude daily?...or fucking Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Beinhoff, etc. If you're the CEO of Nike you have to decide if you're going to believe the most famous leaders in tech saying that AI is going to revolutionize IT and your best staff will all become 10x developers and professionals...or believe actual professionals, like me, who aren't famous who will tell you...yeah, it helps some...not sure how much...but definitely a percentage improvement and not a 2x or greater improvement....you are highly unlikely to be able to reduce headcount. Jensen Huang has publicly stated that the notion of programming languages will very soon be obsolete...so why more programmers than you ABSOLUTELY need to?

I know they know the pick/shovel vendors are exaggerating, but by how much? It gives them hestiation to hire someone new if Claude 5.0 comes out next year and you can lay them off.

This is all a huge fraud. It's safe to say every AI layoff of programmer positions was a routine layoff, AI washed. However, it's far sexier to say "AI Baby!!!!...ride the wave" about your layoff than "interest rates make hoarding surplus talent dangerously unprofitable" or "we overhired" or even worse...."our business is in decline". It shocks me shareholders haven't filed lawsuits about this...I still think that day is coming.

However, every headwind faced by Meta, Google, etc is also faced by Nike and every B-tier and C-tier business that hires large IT staffs. So yeah, we have routine layoffs, CEOs committing fraud by lying that it's due to AI...and everyone else watching, unsure of what is going on....when in doubt, it's safer to close open reqs and downsize. They can always increase headcount once they know what is going on...once they have more clarity as to who is telling the truth...people like me...or AI vendors and the psycho evangelists who are so exited for science fiction AI that they pretend Claude can actually reliably write code that works...or that OpenAI can actually do much of anything of moderate complexity. I understand their perspective...

It just saddens me that this is just another externality of the AI hype bubble, like how EVERYTHING related to computing is now in scarce supply and many factors more expensive than it should be...that technology is actually going up in price and the $1000 will buy you a SLOWER device today than it bought 1.5 years ago...Moore's Law is now going in the opposite direction!...and that's assuming you still have a job to buy a new device...and you weren't laid off.

I'd like to just continue on with my life and ignore this AI bullshit, but I can't...it impacts my job. It emboldens employers to mistreat employees, thinking they have a lot more leverage than they did 5 years ago (which may very well be true). It makes it difficult and painful for me to buy devices or upgrade my personal technology like normal to distract myself from the stupidity of the news.

It's really simpler than Boomer Bucks. Interest rates are more expensive...doesn't matter the cause. There are definitely other factors, but as you said, that's the most obvious.

You're incorrect on that part. All those tools? They don't require AI. They can be done algorithmically. If it can be automated, it has been before LLMs were publicly available. I have worked for teams automating these precise operations. There's too much money on the line to take a human out of the loop. There are various ML automations...perhaps some LLM ones...but LLMs are slow and these 24/7 techs are there to react in seconds, not minutes. However, the state of the art is that these automations are nowhere near advanced enough to tangibly replace humans. Even the older, much more reliable, algorithmic/ML ones?...they were never good enough to replace a human being, just increase their chance of finding attacks/anomalies/downtimes.

The instant you automate that engineer's job?...you give him something new to do. They are highly skilled professionals with valuable domain experience. There's always more for them to do and many ways to bill customers and make more revenue.

Also, if you COULD reliably automate the ops portions?...it would be news on /. Cloudflare are famous attention whores. They have a long history of exaggerating their accomplishments to get that sweet sweet press coverage. If they could automate their ops?...you'd hear about it. They'd open source a framework and offer new paid services with the technology. It would be a massive moneymaker as those skills are so general-purpose they could make a ton selling it to legacy on-prem markets.

I am very confident there is no technological basis for this layoff....just routine business ones. I don't know why shareholders don't file a class action lawsuit for this type of bullshit. If a CEO says they have AI that can replace labor, they should have to prepare evidence that such tools actually exist.

No, like everyone else, Cloudflare simply overhired in the past and forsees reduced revenue opportunity in the future...probably due to industrial trends as well as macroeconomic pressures, like tariffs, increased energy costs, wars, etc. Or they simply overhired in the past. However, they are choosing to commit fraud to investors, like most companies and link it to AI instead of their diminished future prospects and past management choices (which I wouldn't call mismanagement...better to hire for potential opportunity and correct when you're mistaken...but investors may disagree)

Does AI reduce labor need? If you use it, you'd know that's not the case. Claude isn't cause a 20% efficiency gain across an organization. If your programmers didn't suck, they would barely notice. The majority of a decent programmer's time is spent finding edge cases, negotiating requirements, validation, etc. My time writing Java is about 5% of my day...because I know how to do it well and can do it very quickly. The rest of the time, I am meeting with stakeholders, validating my work, finding edge cases, troubleshooting error reports, etc.

The "how?" is the easiest question, the only one an AI can help with. The "what?" (am I doing) and "why?" are the huge costs.

However, let's say I'm wrong...Claude is causing a greater than 20% reduction in time needed. Why isn't CloudFlare using their 10x AI-fueled developers to crush their massive competitors? Akamai and Fastly are huge....So cloudflare is happy with their current marketshare and wants to maintain it for 20% lower cost?....vs crushing all competition? I call bullshit.

So life will be better if Sony and Nintendo are the only viable consoles? They don't directly compete with one another and MS has been very good about supporting their gaming hardware on PCs, including Linux ones. Also, MS really trailblazed the the games pass, something I am confident Sony would have NEVER done had MS not forced them.

You can love or hate MS. I have a slight preference for XBox over PS, but I am glad Sony is around keeping MS from getting complacent. I am personally intrigued by the SteamDeck, but only time will tell if it's a console experience...smooth, simple, seamless, and reliable like XBox/PS5....or a science experiment like the ASUS Ally...where with enough tinkering and sacrifice and working around it's idiosyncrasies , it MIGHT work.

But regardless of your preferences, competition is good.

Most of the beloved hits of the 80s were retreads of older stories you and I never saw. Also, wasn't Top Gun a retread of An Officer and a Gentleman? I remember people complaining about that when I was a tiny movie-loving kid in the 80s. Trust me, people have been saying this shit since you and I were in diapers. It's hard to write an ORIGINAL story. Many are going to be "inspired" by famous stories of the past. Star Wars was inspired by a mashup of Flash Gordon and Samurai movies. However, it was new to me...but rather than shit on the 80s, consider what we have.

I consider modern TV on the same level as a movie and so do most directors. OK. Recent movies may not have been as exciting, but TV fills that gap. Alien Romulus...while a mashup of older Aliens movies was pretty good...forgettable, admittedly, but I had a great time while watching it. However, Alien Earth? I still think about that one. I still think about Kirsch and wonder what he's doing...almost a year later...which is my gold standard of entertainment. If you haunt me, you get a gold star...Aliens still haunts me to this day.

The world has changed. You want to tell a story? Well...in the mid-80s, movies were the only option. TV sucked...and even if you made a good TV show, no one would see it after it aired....so why bother polishing cannonballs? Once box sets of shows because cheap and easy in the DVD-era + streaming made it easy to re-watch...now you start seeing Game of Thrones, Dexter, Carnivale, the Sopranos, Alien Earth, Stranger Things, etc.

Why tell your story in 90 minutes when you can tell a really grand one over many hours, if not years? Some stories in video games are downright amazing...maybe that's your jam. However, if you want to compare eras, you need to compare the entire entertainment landscape.

Movies in theaters? Yeah, a slight downgrade....but considering movies on streaming and prestige TV alone?...massive upgrade....before you consider gaming and new media.

We always judge real accomplishments with more reverence than fake ones. A real car chase is a much more impressive accomplishment than CGI. Should there be another category? I am fine with that. I don't know who to credit an AI script with. Should a prompt monkey get an award? Claude? The Oscars committee decided to ensure we're celebrating humans, not AIs. I think that's wise, but regardless, this is their industry. When it doubt, I'll let people in the industry decide what's best...just as I don't want Disney telling my industry how to run itself.

You're not making a serious and sincere question. You're stating you opinion and your agenda. If you think screenwriting is terrible today, you're forgetting how badly it sucked before. Aliens may be my favorite movie, definitely a great movie, few would disagree, but remember how many shitty movies were released in 1986? Howard the Duck and Cobra were no masterpieces. 2026 is an intellectual utopia compared to 1986. Regarding corporatization? I assume you're talking about Marvel? Well, Top Gun is a literal ad for the US Navy...massive hit in 1984 as well as 2022. I found it entertaining, but it was a fucking ad. Most children's programs were toy ads. The Super Mario Brothers movie from 2023 was FAAAR superior to the one from 1993. I am pretty confident the Street Fighter movie coming out this year will be superior to the one from the 90s. Mortal Kombat?...OK, that was a downgrade...because the original was stupid, shitty, silly fun....and the newest one tried to be high quality...a mistake from not understanding your audience. However, it's fair to say they're closer to commercials than

Regarding AI. If you think that will make no difference?...no, you don't understand AI. It's a pattern matching tool. All movies will look the same, dialog will be awful unless heavily doctored. AI can write a decent short story, but will fall down writing a large piece. There will be TONS of errors and bad and confusing sentences and weird hallucinations. The best case scenario for LLM-based AIs is just averaging a bunch of screenplays....it will be noticeably more uniform and corporate and stale and tame....lacking in originality or creativity.

I think the Oscars committee made the right call. It has always been a celebration of human accomplishment. I don't think AI accomplishments belong in the same awards criteria.

I bought the XBox ROG Ally (the white one) in Dec. I tried playing Brotato and Hades 2 as well as Fortnite and Roblox with my kids. I prefer to play docked, but also tried handheld. It bricked itself twice. I had to lookup the hard reset procedure. Fortnite runs on a Switch (1, not even 2)...but it became a painful slideshow if anything happened on the ally x, both handheld and docked. Brotato also runs GREAT on a switch, docked, at highest difficulty levels. It's a very simple game...but also was very unreliable. I didn't pack my xbox for the holiday, so I just bought the games on my 8yo Nintendo switch and played there. Roblox basically didn't work...it was too choppy...and Roblox is very primitive as well.

The Ally is a science experiment, not a device. You can get it working, but you have to tweak it and hack at it and it's just not that good of an experience if. you do. It uses the windows update services, so it's downloading all sorts of probably unrelated OS patches because it basically is windows with a new screen. You can't fast switch games, like an XBox, so you have to carefully shut down old games or else is will be really painful. It more or less didn't work in a dock...which is my main use case. I don't have good enough eyesight to enjoy a game on a 7" screen...really, even when I was much younger and had perfect eyesight, I never found it fun. I just want a gaming system I can take from room to room or easily pack and setup and a family member's house for visits. So yeah, I was wanting a Nintendo Switch 2, only with the gaming pass...or at the very least, an inexpensive store like Steam....but that's not in the cards.

I bought an Ally and was fortunately able to return it because it couldn't play basic games. However, I don't really enjoy using Windows. I'd rather use Linux or mac....but I like games....how about an OS that skips all the Windows bullshit and just focuses on launching games? I am sure there are many improvements and optimizations that could be made to Windows if the developers knew you were only going to play video games on it and not try to run CAD, office, art, server, or productivity software on it.

My XBox is an amazing machine...perfectly reliable, fast, pleasant to use...on some surprisingly cheap hardware. If I had 3x the power with faster CPU and GPU, I would imagine it wouldn't be THAT hard to deliver the same experience, just faster. I don't think it's restricting the hardware that makes it so great.

So yeah, if I were supreme dictator at Microsoft, I'd create a whole new XBox PC program...certification for hardware and opening up the XBox OS so that it could be run on certified PC hardware to allow hobbyists to spend their paychecks getting a mega-powered XBox....also open it to the Steam store....make a gamer's dream and keep people from leaving you for Mac/PlayStation.