Um... Neither you, TFS and TFA seems to understand what "exclusive" means. A "Playstation Exclusive" would mean only on Playstation, so also releasing it on PC would be the opposite of that. Just sayin'. I know it's quaint these days, especially politically, but words actually have meanings. /pedantic :-)

Like with re-surfacing the Reflecting Pool, Trump will "know a guy, that's done work for him" - that he'll later say he's never heard of - and it will end up being be a no-bid contract for $35M, that will end up actually being a large multiple of that, which we find out from a reporter who Trump will call treasonous and/or stupid - for pointing out inconvenient facts/truth. In any case, just another avenue for corruption, at our expense. /s

Except it's not a concerning issue. Hantavirus doesn't spread well from human to human except when in close quarters (e.g. cruise ships). When you do the math based on the number of people on the ship, the likely R_0 would be *way* less than one out in the real world. So realistically, if they had evacuated the cruise ship after the first case, most of the people who got sick wouldn't have gotten sick, and you'd have at most maybe one or two cases in people who weren't on the ship, and that's about the realistic limit to its spread.

I don't remember the exact numbers I came up with, but it was something laughable like an R_0 of 0.15 or something.

It's a human interest story, because folks felt for the people trapped on that ship, but it was not a meaningful public health threat given the numbers involved.

It's not just oil, it's Jets (Boeing), Jet engines (GE), Intel, Dell, and I don't remember what else. Makes a mockery of any and all insider trading rules.

It of course works to some extent. It doesn't work to an extent that it can replace a meaningful part of engineer time, though it can certainly be used for rapid prototyping and other special cases.

Most of engineers' time isn't spent writing code. It is spent reviewing code and understanding the code. When a person writes code, they are doing this while they write the code. When AI writes the code, that time is spent on the back end while reviewing the code. This is actually more mentally intensive than writing the code to begin with, because you're having to concentrate much more continuously. This means it takes longer, on average, and you're much more likely to make mistakes and miss critical errors during the review process, because you're trying to shove all of that mental effort into a much smaller amount of time. So you save a lot of time up front, and you pay back nearly all of that time at the end.

Until such time as AI can write perfect code that doesn't require human review, the review process will continue to be the bottleneck, and I'm not seeing any evidence that AI is approaching that point.

AI is great for creating demos that you're going to throw away and rewrite a dozen times. Teams that are playing with ideas for new features can potentially generate a lot more prototypes quickly by using AI. But they're saving time precisely because it's throwaway code. As soon as you're trying to use it for production code, the savings evaporate. Or at least this is what I have seen pretty consistently.

This is not to say that AI is useless for coding. When used as a glorified autocomplete engine, it can save you from a lot of tedious busywork. When used for code review, it at least has the potential to catch interesting bugs before they make it into production. And so on. But the notion that this will suddenly allow for cutting a large percentage of programmers is utterly naïve. Given their previous cuts, they've already exceeded the expected payoff from AI. So blaming this on AI savings isn't realistic.

So the real question is whether they'll be able to get their AI tech up to the quality and scalability level where they can survive on only that revenue before their social media platform craters from inadequate resourcing.

It's the dream of sociopathic greedy billionaires everywhere. Too bad for them that it's a pipe dream.

Here's the harsh reality: AI doesn't work. You can spend days cajoling AI into doing something correctly and spend days reviewing the bad code over and over until it gets it right or you can spend days writing the code. On average, the time savings are minimal, and the cost in terms of code understanding is enormous, resulting in less and less maintainable code over time until you eventually end up having to throw the whole thing away and rewrite it from scratch at an enormous cost.

Mind you, Meta was probably at the point where their whole code base needed to be thrown away and rewritten from scratch at least five years ago, given the level of bugginess that I've seen, so maybe AI lets them extend the long tail of badly written code a bit longer before they completely implode, but that's hardly a position for other execs to aspire to.

They won't. They'll have a bumpy few months followed by mass attrition from the complete destruction of employee morale, followed by panic when they realize that they don't have enough remaining employees to keep the lights on adequately, followed by even bigger panic when they realize qualified candidates aren't even bothering to apply for their open positions.

Nobody wants to work for a dying shell of a company that laid off a third of their workers over only a couple of years. As a company, if you're not innovating and growing, you're dying. Meta is dying. Their AI is basically worst-in-class at this point, and everything else is getting shoved aside to make more money for that latest boondoggle, because their execs don't know how to recognize a sunk cost fallacy.

It would take a literal miracle to save Meta from the death spiral that this will cause. If I owned Meta stock, I'd be selling in a hurry right now, or at least selling covered calls to buy protective puts to limit my losses. Stick a fork in it. They're done.

That probably would have been a really hard sell to Congress, even a Republican-controlled one.

So sad Elon missed out on getting rich. :-) More seriously, how much more money does Elon need? /s

Unfortunately, those rules won't really matter while the guy at the top rigs things in favor of "friends" (meaning sycophants). Yes, Elon lost in court, but he's got two and a half more years and a ton of "flatter the king" money to change things in his favor. Also unfortunately, our current business and political climates are just cults of personality where money gets you everywhere. Those rules are also about to get skewed even more by the $1.7 billion slush fund the IRS is setting up for Trump, for dropping his bogus, and probably illegal, lawsuit against himself, so he can pay people he thinks were wronged under Biden, like the Jan 6th insurrectionists.

They drag them to school, but at that point, there's a record, and if it keeps happening, it becomes a legal problem for the parents, who have a responsibility for making sure their kids go to school.

To a school that is under-funded in part because kids aren't meeting the minimum attendance for the school to get paid.

All of those things are the responsibility of their parents. Those are adult problems for adults to solve. Kids can't realistically solve them, and can't reasonably be expected to solve them. And as soon as you let kids try to solve them, you're reinforcing the cycle of poverty by preventing them from getting the education that would enable to them to break that cycle. I'm not saying it's fair or good, just that preventing such things is better than the alternative, where we have child labor who grow up to be adults who earn minimum wage or worse.

As a comedian said: "Reparations? From the U.S.? They need to get in line." :-)

Noting that Trump has a Bachelor of Science in Economics from The Wharton School of Finance and Commerce (name when he graduated).

(And he *still* claims exporters pay his tariffs, which are import taxes.)

That sounds like insider trading. :-)

I spent about half my career as a software engineer and half as a systems administrator, sometimes overlapping, both on everything from a PC to Cray-2, and never really thought a Master's degree would help with what I did day to day - or, at least, not for the extra effort and expense. I had co-workers with Master's who got a few tasks that exercised that extra education, but those didn't really interest me that much and, because of my longer experience over a wider area, I earned the same if not more than they did anyway. I like working on hard, or "impossible", practical problems that usually required detailed working experience over a wide number of systems and programming languages, as well as porting scripts and programs, historically between combinations of Unix, Linux and Windows, and a Master's won't really help with any of that.

Meaning: We're investing a LOT of money trying to replace you, so shut up, do what you're told, how you're told, and be grateful you still have a job - for now.

Also, I'd still want to know who's on that rocket and especially who I'm sitting next to. If it's Elon or one of the other rich, entitled, um... CEOs - pass. /s

Remembering what Jordan Klepper said on The Daily Show about Trump's recent trip to China with all the tech CEOs:

Chronic illness is rare, and at some point, you try to figure out a way to get the kid tutoring.

I see what you did there.

If half your kids are chronically sick, there's something wrong with your school — environmental issues like mold, social issues like bullying, or senioritis like Bueller.