There's definitely a scam somewhere in the gift card's history; the guy writing about his situation is upset because Apple glassed his account over it, not over the gift card value. The process of not being credited for the gift card's code and then talking to the retailer to get one that hadn't been tampered with apparently went smoothly; but then the account and everything associated with it got terminated without comment or recourse.

Someone is presumably going to eat the value of the gift card, apparently the retailer either directly or through merchant fees and the payment card processor doing it; but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account if you inadvertently interact with a gift card that has been used for some sort of scam activity; even if you have proof that you purchased it from a normal retailer that sells gift cards; rather than some dodgy flea market arrangement that screams 'bagman'/'too good to be true'.

Aimed directly at the scammers? Probably not, unless the penalties for the scam are currently insufficient. Aimed at the ad networks who, currently, have zero to negative interest in ensuring that ad spend isn't overtly hostile before plunking it in front of you? Quite possibly more helpful.

I don't know if Google has been caught out as dramatically as ; but based on the sorts of ad impressions they deliver their standards are clearly pretty low or apathetically applied, and more or less the same perverse incentives exist.

At this time, it is pretty unclear whether there are any actual productivity gains. Producing more slop will likely just increase costs overall.

The better artists are not losing their jobs. The better code monkeys are not either or only very temporarily. AI code is full of bugs and vulnerabilities that are hard to fix. It makes coders _slower_: https://mikelovesrobots.substa...

So while you may loser your job for a time while this straw-fire burns itself out, you may well get re-hired at an increased salary not that much later.

Yep, pretty much. And a good game means AI use will be very limited. And then the problem will go away.

Given that LLMs and GenAI in general cannot really do anything a tiny bit complicated or original, that may happen anyways, because the current AI hype is still missing a sustainable business model, several years in. A dramatic crash and then very limited special-purpose use is the most likely future. Same as the last few AI hypes, only that the crash will be a lot larger.

Some people have no social skills. You seem to be responding to one of those.

His point is nonsense. If we see Linux on many more desktops, it will be via a small number of distros.

What if I live out of my car?

As a nomad traveling around with a phone and ancient Surface I hardly use, do you see how having a built-in CD player like cars used to have and which I got used to is much more convenient, and the decision to take it away seems much more to do with power and selling subscriptions than practical engineering capability?

What if an 8-track enthusiast engineer designed cars such that 8-track users could plug a player in to use the car's speakers?

Why ignore the article which is about pushing consumers away from standalone tech like CD players (still popular and significantly more so than 8-track) to force subscriptions on us? Why deliberately make it hard to plug a CD player in to the speakers, if they refuse to provide CD players like they got us used to?

You might like mathsgear as a source of delightful trinkets, if you've not seen it before.

Vendor swag (and especially company swag) can be great, but has a shelf life due to the branding. It's pretty embarrassing to sport a T-shirt from a former employer at your new employer (duh!)

What would be cool is a site with tips and tricks for removing branding of different kinds, so you can keep the swag without the stigma shelf life hit.

Eg how to remove logos from fabric without damage? Easy enough when it's just sewn on, but for some kinds of swag the logo printing methods are more stubborn than others and probably require chemicals.

Bullshit. Want to use a tool? Be competent to use it. There is really no excuse and your AdHominem is just complete nonsense.

In the case of Linux, use a distro that matches your level of skill.

Why do the people paying you not understand that selling subscriptions to enclosed abundance produces crap, and why shouldn't you live off a Fed-funded, generous, inflation-adjusted basic income and design free software for devices that won't brick themselves on remote command?

So if I strive for ethical and moral conduct too much, am I unemployable?