This sounds nice in theory, but for quite some time now, that hasn't panned out the way it seems like it should.

Let's use a great go-to example - the finance department. Back in the 1970's, it was mostly-manual. You might see a calculator in the back room, but the ledgers were written by hand, the credit card slips all came from a knucklebuster, and lots of people had full-time jobs doing calculations and data entry and inventory management.

*all of that* is automated away now. Scan a barcode, shipping manifest of the whole palette is entered into the inventory system for delivery. When a purchase is made, inventory is decremented, ledger is updated, credit card company updates the statement in real-time, accounting ledgers are updated, bank balances are updated, information is downloaded into Quickbooks, the Quickbooks file is sent to the accountant, tax calculations - ALL OF IT is done automatically. From the farmer's market to the Fortune 500, *nobody* is doing their accounting work by hand anymore. An accounting firm with five accountants can handle the tax returns for ten thousand businesses annually precisely because of how much is automated.

Now...*some* businesses probably repurposed their bookkeeping staff to other tasks...but the bookkeeping industry today employs a tiny fraction of the people it did in the days of our parents. Did some businesses encourage the bookkeepers to help develop their business? Sure, some did...but most simply laid off the staff and "grew" through the reduced payroll.

AI will indeed help with some gruntwork areas, and it will enable the sorts of projects that used to be done with Excel macros and Access databases...but "capacity limits" haven't been a true barrier for a while. It's been readily possible to higher programmers on a "gig economy" basis over at Upwork for decades. More and more off-the-shelf solutions exist for niche applications as SaaS or OSS on Github.

But the real disconnect is here:

You'd be hard-pressed to grab a hundred people at random, have them think of the software they use regularly (be it desktop, mobile, SaaS, or embedded), and point to a time in the past decade where their software got an update and they were HAPPY. Exceptions certainly exist - most DJ software got the ability to separate vocals and instrumentals in real-time, which was huge for the industry...but for *most* people, *most of the time*, software has gotten worse, not better, because "new features" are far more likely to be implemented to benefit the developer, not the user. Try going to a website without an adblocker now; it's a 20MB cacophony of garbage surrounding two text paragraphs for most of the internet. Adobe Acrobat does maybe three useful things more than were present in version 9 from 20 years ago, yet it's five times the size.
I *might* agree that AI can help improve the process of software development by reducing the amount of time spent on gruntwork...but the overall culture of making software user-hostile has been a cancer on the industry that long preceded the availability of Claude and ChatGPT. If AI accelerates that, then I do think there will be a gradual shift in problems - some businesses will try to DIY their own software, which brings support and liability problems back in-house that were half the joy of outsourcing, but the desire for the in-house option comes from that software being too user-hostile over time.

Chocolate making, cheese making, watch making, banking, staying out of wars, and blowing those huge horns to sell cough drops.

Are you sure about that? Because carriers disagree.

This is the quiet part Stone is saying out loud - the point is to alter UIs.

Now, the data itself is *probably* helpful...but I am hard pressed to think of ANY application - desktop, mobile, or web - that ANY user would describe as having improved over the past decade. From the disappearance of colors and contrast and borders and scroll bars, to 'settings' screens getting their options eliminated, to toolbar buttons losing their text labels, to modal dialogs and overlays and "hints and tips" taking the place of pop-up ads everywhere...there is VERY little software that has gotten better, despite decades of traditional feedback from users.

Meta is absolutely going to use this to ascertain how users have figured out to work around the dark patterns and user-hostile design users have spent the past two decades battling, and making it even more difficult and exhausting to get anything done.

Even if I bought that employees wouldn't be penalized for what the brass finds after putting North-Korean-grade spyware on their computers, there is zero indicating that Meta will be using this to improve anyone's user experience in a way that the user would agree is, in fact an improvement.

Great news! All of the Unreal Tournament games still work for online play on modern PCs! It's still fun, still dirt cheap, no subscription, and SWATHS of maps and mods all over the internet!

Just skip to the part where we go full circle and add a slot on the front of the next Xbox where we can feed it quarters to keep playing.

When I visited the UK last year, I went through customs. It took one of those facial recognition scans. There was no opt-out, there was no agent at the booth, I got no stamp in my passport.

Whatever system they're using already needs to be so pervasive that their solution to "papers, please" is to take the "paper" part out of it. This doesn't surprise me at all...but it would be somewhat fun to attempt using this app on a rooted phone.

https://github.com/Dwedit/NoCo...

Tiny utility to turn it back into the right Ctrl key it's supposed to be. 10/10 recommend because I used to use the MS PowerToys program (1.5GB when the only function I needed was the key remap?!), and while it *usually* worked, *some* software had a bit of trouble with the PowerToys implementation, but works perfectly with NoCopilotKey.

I completely agree with this. My state was all about banning ICE vehicles and gas stoves and furnaces in about a decade...but had very few plans to handle the terawatt capacity requirements...and this was *before* datacenters got a seat at the table.

I'm...not quite sure I agree with this one as much...

This...I think, has some wiggle room. Sure, training new models requires greater amounts of compute power, and as newer models and services develop, there will be a need to increase compute power. However, that doesn't mean that older models are useless. They may not be front-and-center, but they can still be used in lesser capacities. ChatGPT 3.5 isn't quite as awesome as v5, but if it's what is used to serve up ads in ChatGPT sessions, the hardware is still perfectly fit-for-purpose. Same goes for Google or Microsoft - older boards may not be front-and-center, but they can still do boring, smaller-scope tasks that are still useful.

...we can only hope.......

Look, they JUST finished their migration away from Lotus Notes...

Agreed; Stalwart isn't a bad mail solution...but Nextcloud isn't a mail solution. The GP's unsubstantiated statement was that Nextcloud was not viable for a business of any meaningful size. Since the claim was unsubstantiated, however, it was unclear what the recommended alternative would be. GP hasn't indicated why Nextcloud isn't viable, or what would be viable for a company with a need for browser-based file access and syncing.

In fairness to the GP, a large-enough company is going to prefer Google or Microsoft simply due to a desire to pass the buck to someone...but here on Slashdot, it's a default understanding that monolithic tech companies tend to have their own problems, starting with data sovereignty and continuing with the lack of customizability. So, while they're probably right that a big enough company would prefer to problem solve via litigation rather than through technological means, business priorities neither validate or negate the merits of Nextcloud, or any other available solution, hence the question.

While Cloudflare is certainly free to release their own alternative...it's not like Wordpress lacks competition - there's Ghost and WriteFreely for blogging. There's Drupal and Joomla for website building. There's Plone, Concrete, Hugo, Silverstripe, and Ametys (if you hate yourself) for niche requirements. ClassicPress and WPDistrib are direct forks of Wordpress. All of these are free-as-in-beer. Most have some form of OSS license.

So...while I'd certainly agree that Wordpress sucks in its own way, its massive ecosystem makes it attractive to users who value the ecosystem rather than custom code development...and while EmDash might make some inroads due to Cloudflare integration, I'm not sure that the massive plugin/theme/custom code stacks will be drop-in replacements overnight...and until EmDash gives a compelling reason to move off Wordpress (or if the WP/WPE crap flares up again), EmDash is going to have an uphill battle ahead of it to accomplish what a dozen incumbents haven't.

Well, if we operate under your assessment, what would be your recommended alternative for an open source (any license) file sync / collaboration suite? Owncloud? Pydio? Seafile?

Or are you suggesting OneDrive or Google Drive or Dropbox?

No seriously, I'm aware that Nextcloud has its faults and shortcomings...but if you can "hardly believe any sizeable establishment would use [it]", I'm interested in what you'd recommend as your preferred alternative.

No, Unreal Tournament (2014).

It's pretty depressing what happened, actually, because on paper, it was awesome. The base game was free, and it even had a new game mode called Blitz. The amount of maps it shipped with was pretty meager, but the goal was to have modders sell their maps/mods/skins/etc as IAPs within the game and then they got a cut. The game still allowed for private/dedicated servers, and while it lacked some of the polish of UT3, the framework was there and it really worked well as a de facto tech demo for UE4, and was surprisingly stable for an alpha release.

The problem, of course, was that Fortnite quickly became their money printer, limiting how much effort they put into developing the base game, before they finally canned it.

I'm still really bummed about it; I really liked the pre-alpha version I got to play with some friends for a bit.