I don't program professionally and never stuck with a language long enough to build genuine competency. I work in tech and do IT in the support direction and even write bugs for programmers to fix from time to time.

My issue with programming is as a skill it requires an excessive amount of practice time and effort to get to a point of doing anything reasonable beyond an address book. I compare every session to sit down and write code is too immature a process, it is like teaching a small child how to build a Lego set, but each time, you have to start over with teaching what Legos are and how they work.

When I last took a programming class around 2009, I was bewildered with how little the IDEs did as far as basic logic analysis. Couldn't catch simple things like loops that never end or obvious off-by-1 errors. The tools had effectively no real evolution at that time from my high school days over a decade earlier.

Started playing with AI code generation a few weeks ago. This is a usable tool for programming, and it's really much closer to where early advanced IDEs should have been much sooner. Not just the language models, but as far as simply describing the math and operations in psuedo-code I want to accomplish against an input and being able to frame up the code framework and explicit code itself.

If we compare this to other technological tool advancement, like say woodworking, we started with the Woodright's Shop (PBS show) from the 50's through the 80's with programming. The 90's through 20's failed to move to electrification and power tools for 30 years (despite knowing how electric motors work) instead dawdling on perfecting Japanese joinery instead of evolving. AI driven code is electrification and power tools.

From maybe a couple years after monetization, YouTube Search became an experiment. Unlike Google search of that time, it intentionally did not provide the best results for the requested content and information when it can get away with provide slightly incorrect content. The goal is to keep you on the site and engaged checking each video result and dropping comments. The reason why title and description generally vaguely work is it would be too easy for other search engines to legitimately index this data and for users to realize something was not just broken, but intentionally misleading in YT Search results.

This is similarly why it typically delivered some catchy unrelated left turns about 4-6 videos down the scroll as well as what I can best describe as "adversarial" content. By adversarial, I mean they provide or lead you to content the algorithm knows you will fundamentally negatively react due to any number of technical, theological, ethical, moral, or presentation and style grounds.

Google Search adopted some of these methods. The explosion of blogspam ~6 years ago and subsequent growth in Google Search results isn't an accident and it isn't that blogspam suddenly was indistinguishable from legitimate content. They started promoting the blogspam and ignoring the previous relevance / click through / success metrics.

I did this through college with a couple different Windows tablets. The original Surface Pro was a godsend and dropped at just the right time as the first year with an Atom / netbook architecture tablet was a bit limiting (Q550).

Made "do you have notes from..." -- "email? Here's a PDF." an almost amusing joke with friends. I even did homework long hand in OneNote and print out the pages to turn in.

I hope he is sanding down his fingers.

The real problem is advertising is a middleman industry just skimming from consumers and workers who buy and bring products to life. The bourgeois moved from being merchants to slimy advertisers, but notably, still grabbing their cut in the middle while providing no additional social value.

Problem with your argument of marketshare oriented taxation, the core component of your whole screed, is you game that with *non competitive* regional monopolies. And then you allow the regionals to collude *cough* I mean collaborate on industry standards. Just a repeat of the baby Bells.

Even outside regional monopolies, they can just go with local gerrymandering / redlining as politics already has.

Competition models only work with a prize.

I bet this even coming up is due to Disney+ success. Paying for Disney+ is among the most socially malicious choices consumers can make with respect to content purchases.

Disney is intent on bringing back the vault system and likely salivating to charge extra for temporary exemptions.

This isn't even a big oil lie. It's a public policy lie from elected officials.

Politicians didn't build the infrastructure promised for recycling.

The best argument against the [Green] Left is never the views of the right (which have become their own racist, fascist shit show). It's guys like Harry Reid submitting to NIMBYs to block an already bought, built, paid for, and critical nuclear waste facility, OR in this case all the recycling capacity never developed, while you the dumb citizen are still sorting things between the blue and black bin.

Blocking IP blocks belonging to China and Russia goes back to the late 90's in the earliest days of the Internet.

Nothing of value to Europe, North or South America will be lost if we de-peer them. Mega corporations with continued ties to China or Russia will just have to make do with paying for dedicated non-routable circuits using the existing transit that lets those two peer with the world today.

Isn't the solution straight forward to follow existing laws. Once the CBP has the data, it should be public domain and subject to FOIA requests or an automated portal access. Do the same with license plate data bought by state and municipal police forces.

The private brokers should reconsider their client base if certain ones destroy their business model.

This is how you fight circumvention of the 4th Amendment. And how you bankrupt these entities clearly targeting government sales of their salacious, shitty products and services. Because all these services selling superior recon information to millionaires are entirely dependent on government contracts for survival. The millionaires and billionaires don't cover their salaries, because the millionaires and billionaires would just contract private PIs on a case by case basis.

The better argument is that as soon as a government agency uses such systems, the data they access belongs to the people and is subject to public review -- immediately. We The People have a superior right as codified by Federal > State > Corporate legal rights. So regardless of contracts which limit publication, all data from private parties the government touches belong with the people.

Let's ignore how they perform CYA, and instead say sure, you can do that, but internal consistency must be maintained, and that data immediately becomes public record and available. It's a great double edged sword, because then that vendor of information becomes a subject of the public, with no privacy for their data which they peddle to sociopaths like themselves.

While Kickstarter *should* start to eat losses for everything that is clearly pre-sales and fails, they are plenty profitable as is as middlemen. It's how eBay and PayPal got people like Elon Musk rich - middlemen providing the minimal or no added value (luckily Musk wanted wealth to do interesting things with positive social effects, unlike say Jeff Bezos who just wanted his choice among wealthy neighbors to bang).

Kickstarter is just like Uber though. The lack of profitability is only because of massive marketing expenditures to establish market dominance. Those people all *should* be fired at the earliest opportunity as they are non-contributors, to the company or society. Firing marketing and advertising people along with directly related support is a nothing of value lost scenario once market presence is built.

Now I have a really evil idea.
Digital Millennium Antitrust Act:
Split up companies with a significant amount of intellectual property, everything gets open sourced and placed in the public domain (and I don't much like the F/OSS community). Child companies of such an antitrust split may of course expand the code internally with proprietary bits, but the snapshot of the "today" code goes public.

Would be really useful for when someone wakes up to breaking Disney as well.

Boycotts are ineffective at the current population scale unfortunately. Amazon is a good case for anti-trust. Break AWS and retail sales up regionally like Ma Bell and make them compete for business. Plus in the increased costs for competition across geographic regions of the US would put them on more fair ground with local retailers and grocers.