"GitHub claims that 96 percent of its customers will see no change to their bill"

I always love this ploy. "You are part of a small percentage of users whining about this, but our price changes are actually good for everyone else", as if you're supposed to take one for the good of humanity. Or Microsoft.

The word "independent" in this context has specific legal meaning.

Arguing about plain-use definitions is a waste of time; intentionally trying to confuse people with bullshit is malicious.

Someone at the FCC was watching and modified the website right after that exchange.

For those of you playing stupid games centered around the word "independent", I will suspend disbelief and assume you are simply ignorant of what the word means in context.

In a narrower sense, the term refers only to those independent agencies that, while considered part of the executive branch, have regulatory or rulemaking authority and are insulated from presidential control, usually because the president's power to dismiss the agency head or a member is limited.

It wouldn't do jack shit, because no one watches CNN. Travelers used to be stuck with their network, as CNN used to pay airports to display their network, but that ended in 2021 as mobile devices took away that information monopoly, and CNN lost that ad revenue. CNN has half the viewers of MS Now, and only a quarter the viewers of Fox. CNN is way past their glory days, and essentially has become an Also Ran. And cable news doesn't have nearly the reach that the traditional US Big 3 news networks does. All the major cable news players combined still make up less viewers than the lowest rated Big 3 player, CBS, with 4+ million viewers. Which, btw, pales in comparison to ABC, with 8+ million viewers, and NBC with 6+ million. The idea that the Ellisons would "take over" American media is laughable on its face, even if they got Warner Bros. They'd still be a distant third in broadcast reach behind Disney and Comcast, hysterical wailing to the contrary.

OK. When? Because I've been hearing worst case scenarios all my adult life, and most of them are now past their predicted dates. Beginning with Paul Erlich's infamous predictions of mass-starvation in the 60's and 70's, nearly every year the press is filled with credentialed experts that tell us the end is nigh and that the point of no return is almost here. If you want to know why most of the public is so Meh about these doomsday predictions, it's because we've been inundated with the Boy Crying Wolf all of our lives. Would you like a timeline of all the point of no return predictions over the years? It's readily available.

Uh, no, it isn't. Post COVID, some companies are trying to guilt trip customers into tipping all employees in every job... I'm looking at you, fancy-pantsy coffee shops like Starbucks, Dutch Brothers, 7-Brew, etc.... but the vast majority of employees do not ask for nor receive tips as part of their jobs in America. And in jobs where I'd like to tip them for extra service.... grocery pickup, for instance... they're generally not allowed to ask for or receive tips.

Tipping is fine for waitressing, because if the service is good they can make considerably more money. But the post-COVID attempt by some companies to normalize tipping in their industries never took off in the US. Americans resented the push and saw it for what it was.

Exactly that is a big part of the goal - do the same thing to CNN that has happened more widely at CBS.

It is a Hungary-style media rollup attempt. Buy up, intimidate out or (eventually) sure competing voices into submission.

The land of the free, baby.

And vice-versa.

He has complete control of the company. If he doesn't know what is going on somewhere in the company, it is because he isn't paying attention or doesn't want to know.

And this has been his only job. His entire adult life has been dedicated to manipulating people through a screen to make line go up.

Why would he care about people getting scammed when the line can go up?

Dynamic typing is a design choice, trading speed of development for large-scale development features. (Advice: if you demand static typing in your language, never, ever look at Perl...) Doesn't mean you have to like it, but not every language needs to be statically typed.

But if we want to grouse...

I hate python's ecosystem. It is effectively impossible to run multiple nontrivial python applications on the same machine without encapsulation of some sort (virtualenv-type hacks, Docker, separate VMs). And even then, experimenting with anything involving switching libraries requires setting up new throwaway environments to handle, otherwise doing completely normal development stuff risks breaking the "system" python (whatever is packaged and probably used by the package manager).

Just a fucking mess.

I propose Stasivision. All the cool narcs wear them!

This is classic executive lemming behavior. The C-suite almost always ends up full of crowd-followers - "leaders" who prefer to do stupid things as a pack to risking trying something novel that fails.

So Tony here sees the rush to turn everything into an LLM front end and it is literally a no-brainer to him. Doing otherwise means answering questions about why he's ignoring 'the biggest tech story since" whatever. It literally has nothing to do with the user.

RC4, short for Rivist Cipher 4

Nope. It is short for Ron's Code 4

Middle management and above:

"Hey, Mista Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you".

The last three corporate hackers in a mop closet somewhere:

"Still had the idea, though."

You're thinking of the modern civilized places. (Do the weirdos consider those joints woke?)

The one I used to live near was the original Grimaldi's under the Brooklyn Bridge, which burned anthracite until it closed.

I have no problems with coal-fired pizza joints and similar. The amount of pollution from this is minuscule, and in general small-scale, artisanal use of stuff doesn't hurt. It isn't that coal is morally evil in and of itself, it is the massively abusive use of it as a routine energy source that's destructive.

Those places suck for the neighbors, though. I lived a few blocks from a coal-oven pizza place for a few years. Only smelled it sometimes when the wind shifted the right way, but I would not want to live any closer to one.