If I knew that, I'd be a tech billionaire inventing them.

The best part of innovations is that they are NOT obvious, but once they are in the world, you can't do without.

Quite so. It's been how many years since something really new came out of Cupertino? Granted, Apple is more profitable than ever, but the company clearly shows what the result of placing a supply-chain expert as the CEO does.

The really sad part is that there's nobody ELSE, either. Microsoft hasn't invented anything ever, Facebook and Google are busy selling our personal data to advertisers, and who else is there who can risk a billion on an innovation that may or may not work out?

That's wrong. I stopped using wrist watches 25 years ago and haven't looked back a single day. I don't want shit on my wrist. Try living without for a year and you'll realize why. It's hard to express in words. It's like having a chain removed.

Headphones, on the other hand, I use occasionally. For phone calls or for music on the train, plane, etc. - and especially for the plane if the noise cancellation comes close to my current over-the-ear Bose I'd take them on the two-day business trips where I travel with hand luggage only and space is a premium.

Do I want a heartbeat sensor? No idea. I don't care. But if there's any use for it than at least for me that's not a replication. I'm pretty sure many, many Apple users don't have a smart watch.

So he claims that social media - the platform where everyone pretends to be more happy, more active, better looking, more interesting, more travelled, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, - feels "fake" ?

Man.

Next he's going to say that artificial sweeteners taste might not be natural.

Seriously, though, social media has been the domain of bots for at least a decade. Even people who actually write their posts themselves use bots to cross-post to all the different platforms and at "optimal" times. Nothing on social media is not fake. Well, maybe your grandmother's photo album because she doesn't know Photoshop exists.

Do you want to bet on the percentage of Fortune 500 companies that use amateur-level procedures for their prod systems?

"Above 50%" seems like a guaranteed win to me.
"Above 75%" is where I start to think "maybe not that high". But I fear I'm giving them too much credit.

It is impossible to do now that half of what we have always considered clear indicators of a scam or phishing attempt are actually being done by actual companies.

But the "m" in npm always stood for "malware", did it not?

The npm ecosystem is deeply flawed. Look at some of the affected repositories. Many of them are just a few lines of code, yet over a hundred other packages depend on them. At least half of them have no reason to even exist. A lot of them have last been updated years ago.

We have an ecosystem where seemingly every individual function has its own package. That is just ridiculous. It is modularization driven to its absurd extreme. It's why you add one package to your project and it pulls in a hundred dependencies.

And the more tiny packages there are, the larger the attack surface and the smaller the amount that can be monitored for malware injection and other problems. I wouldn't at all be surprised if one or more of these packages will never be updated and have the malware in them forever simply because the only dev with the password to the repo has since died or gone to do other things with his life.

There's your prob.

Mark of Meta doesn't "submit complaints". One of his aides calls the office directly and orders them to take the page down and make sure it stays down.

It's a completely different channel.

War is the failure of politics, not the continuation.

We have all but removed them already. In many kills these days, a human presses a button and that's about it.

But yes, removing them entirely removes that last bit of accountability. Next time a drone slaughters a market place full of civilians with no terrorist anywhere in sight, we won't even have someone to put on trial.

Well, we can try with the LLM making the decision. I'm sure it'll apologize a lot and invent a number of threats to justify its actions, if current AI is any indication.

Why are we applauding this?

We've taught machines how to kill us. Doesn't matter which side did it first, there is no way this has a good ending. No, not because of machine overlords and AI uprising - because it removes accountability and the last remnants of warfare that's not utterly "kill anything that moves".

We need more differentiation.

Because, for example, gemini is better at translating whole sentences than google translate. So if I use gemini to translate one sentence in a foreign-language source, that's "AI usage" - but if I throw the same sentence into google translate, it's not?

Some stuff I write both for work and my hobbies, I through into a local LLM (for confidentiality) and ask it to flag grammar and spelling mistakes as well as confusing sentences. That's essentially a better spellchecker. Is that "AI usage"?

Heck, I figure that within the year your built-in spellchecker will be AI-based. Most IDEs already have AI doing code checking.

In some areas, we are trying. "AI assisted" is already a term I see often to contrast with "AI generated".

So in essence, the clickbait article needs to be more clear where it draws the line before its numbers have meaning.

Anit-social behaviour like that has become the norm. And complacent people letting it happen as well.

In moments like that, I think that maybe China got it right with their "social scoring" system. Or I wish we were in the magic kingdom of Cory Doctorow. If everyone else on the train could give the fucker a thumbs down and it would impact their lives, maybe they'd stop.

And then, of course, I realize the immense abuse potential and privacy concerns of any of these systems and am happy we don't have them.

But man, we do need a way to punish anti-social behaviour, because the old ways clearly don't work anymore.

This is the part about the cyberpunk genre that gets sidelined so easily for the visuals and computer stuff - corps making the rules up as they please.

If you are arrested and put on trial, you have a right to be told what you did wrong.

But corps can fuck you over and never explain anything.

Sadly, we missed the point at which we could've said "well, you're basically a public place now and here's the set of rules you need to follow".

No, not yet.

Innovation still largely happens in the West. China and others are rapidly catching up, but they're not there quite yet. And their disadvantage of cheap labour is slowly diminishing as well as the Chinese people demand that they benefit from the whole thing as well.

That is all smoke & mirrors. How many companies from Europe do you see outsourcing to the USA because of the lower minimum wage and the weaker unions? None. Because those are just bullshit arguments they've been peddling for decades because they work. Sadly, our politicians these days are (in general, a few exceptions nonwithstanding) both incompetent and corrupt, so it's working even better now.

I've been involved in a few location decisions on the company level. Pay is a factor. But language is a huge one (what good is cheap work if they don't understand what you want them to do?), logistics is another (how far is it from our current location, and how easy to get to?), surrounding infrastructure, availability of qualified people nearby, options for additional space to expand, heck I've seen a company move HQ because the new location was closer to the CEOs home.

Yupp, the Silicon Valley style of solving everything. Companies buying into that soon learn that manufacturing is a lot more than a couple people/robots doing stuff.

That's what I said. Assume for your example that you need not just a few techs, but also at least one or two people who actually understand how manufacturing works. Where do you get these people when there are no more manufacturing jobs?

Let's force all the decision makers (politicians and CEOs) to make a month-long "vacation" in Detroit. Drop them off with nothing but their clothes in the city center. They all got where they are because they're so smart and successful, so shouldn't be a problem, right?