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.

It's not just Germany. Most of Western Europe has been trending this way since the end of the Cold War, and the roots of such thinking were there long before Hitler was even an itch in his daddy's pants. A lot of Americans seem surprised by this. But Europe isn't America, and European governments have always had a more paternalistic view of their role than American political philosophy allows for. Further, most Europeans are fine with that. Americans gasp when they see such things, but this is just the latest line of code in the old European We'll keep you all safe, comfy, and warm under the blanket of *insert European capitol here* script. European thinking sees the welfare of their people in totality. So it's not just social welfare you get from such systems... "free" healthcare, subsidized housing, schools, etc... but you also get the rest of the "protection" philosophy... that you have to protect people from themselves. Speech codes, bans on anything the government deems "extreme", they're all part of the paternalistic view that you're protecting and providing for your people. Father's job is to feed, house, and keep the kids safe. Part of that is disciplining and setting rules that they have to follow, for their own good. With a few exceptions, this is No Bueno is most of North America, but again, Europe isn't America. It has a considerably different mindset.

Did you even RTFA?

"Our analysis takes advantage of administrative data from a large, urban, public college system "

The analysts are from Columbia, a private Ivy League school. Not the students. Since they're NYC based, the students they were studying were almost certainly from the public City University of New York system. Not at all hard to get into, and no need for "nepo baby" admissions.

There was a movie called Kill the Irishman, starring the late great Ray Stevenson, that had a similar plot point: Danny Greene borrows money from the Mob to start a restaurant. The courier tasked with delivering the cash decides to take it and buy heroin with it, re-sell it at a profit, and keep the difference for himself. Except the sellers are Feds in a honeypot scheme. The money is gone, the Mob demands Greene pay them back, he refuses, so the order goes out to "kill the Irishman".

Like nearly every product in this area, these podcasts are scams.

The equivalent of all those LLM-spam "books" you see on Amazon.

They are product pumped out with no regard to quality control, dependent on potential consumers mistakenly thinking there's something like fact checking or editing going on because of the name on the tin.

Worse, this is all "hello world" style LLM programming - give it your cute little prompt ("That's where the real engineering goes!"), throw it a couple links to RAG in, and slap an ad on it. There's nothing here a vaguely competent teenager can't build for themself or the robot can't build for them.

That itself is a nested scam - pretending that any of this crap is difficult, that you need your betters at WaPo to write it for you.

And that's just the tool itself - the next problem is Bezos made it clear that anyone with integrity should hit the road, and those folks did. So all the source material may as well be robot poop already, quality-wise.

I suspect there's several different versions of something like this, only with interior floorplans.

I mean, sure, the real estate industry. But I like to imagine high-tech cat burglars using them to plan their heists. More likely someone will turn it in to copware to sell to SWAT teams for planning drug busts.

Microsoft could be making a killing on ex-VMware customers if they would just improve their management tools on Hyper-V. That keeps a lot of enterprise customers away. MS's management software for VM's is barebones compared to what VMware offers. But Broadcom seems determined to dare their customers to leave. They're pretty arrogant because they're confident most of their customers will pay the bigger bill instead of jumping to a far-less feature-rich solution.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them read it.

That's on the horse, of course.