If this is what they put so much energy into - internal presentations! - then the company must have a pretty poor culture. The companies who will beat Uber put their effort into engineering, with CEOs smart enough to know who's actually doing the good work by talking to employees in unstructured settings, not sitting through presentations. The whole thing has the whiff of "at Uber we work really hard at convincing our bosses that we're being productive."

I don't hate Trump. I pity him. No matter how much shit he slaps his name on, it won't fill the hole is daddy left in him. But people that damaged shouldn't be let anywhere near power.

Should a boxer be able to wager the he/she wins a fight? I would think so, they are wagering on their skill, putting it on the line.

You're just asking the boxer to collude with the person they're fighting.

Imagine thinking "improvement" has any value.

What's the point of testing an AI model in a non-prod environment anyway? What does that tell you other than on a particular day at a particular time, it didn't wreck anything? How do you know it's going to behave like that tomorrow or the day after?

Well, no. It's true you can't buy books for the purposes of scanning them *and then making them available online* (Hachette v. Internet Archive). Scanning them for AI training is not settled law in every Federal District, although in at least one that has been ruled transformative and therefore allowable (Bartz v Anthropic, Northern District of California).

It is the Microsoft way.

There's a difference between not using AI tools at all and not using code generated by AIs.

The latter involves a lot of risks that aren't well understood yet -- some technical, some legal, some ethical -- and it's entirely possibly that some of those risks are going to blow up in the face of the gung-ho adopters with existential consequences for their businesses.

I mostly work with clients in industries where quality matters. Think engineering applications where equipment going wrong destroys things or kills people and where security vulnerabilities are a proxy for equipment going wrong.

I know plenty of smart, capable people working in this part of the industry who are totally fine with blanket banning the use of AI-generated code on these jobs. A lot of that code simply isn't up to the required standards anyway, but even if it does produce something you could actually use, there are still all the same costs for review and certification that any other code incurs. That includes the need for at least one human reviewer to work out why the AI wrote what it did, which may or may not have any better answer than "statistically, it seemed like a good idea at the time".

Anthropic famously bought a lot of copyrighted books and scanned them to ingest into its model training corpus. Arguably they aren't violating copyright because what they are doing is *transformative* -- turning words into a statistical map of word associations.

But what China is doing by inferring the structure of that map doesn't touch on *any* kind of intellectual property of Anthropics. Sure, the map is a trade secret, but they've exposed that trade secret through their public interface. It's not human created so it's not copyrightable. Even if that map were patentable, which it probably isn't, it's not patented.

The worst you can say is that China is violating the service's terms of service, which may have no legal force there.

As a lifelong cyclist, I agree in principle. The problem is over the last seventy-five years we have rearchitected the very geographic fabric of society to make *solving* our transportation problems with bike and public transit impossible.

Before WW2, Dad would leave the apartment and walk or take a trolley to work (usually in the same city neighborhood) while Ma "kept house" -- managed cooking, clearning, childcare, and the family's community and social engagement. In the 1950s and 60s, instead of an apartment, it'd be a suburban house. Ma would drop Pa off at the kiss and ride.

Today Mom and Dad both have jobs they have to get to, usually in *different* suburban employment areas; they can locate to make the commute easy for one, but they keep changing jobs every couple of years while their long-term wealth is being put into a geographically fixed asset: their house. They are financially anchored to their house as their jobs move around the region.

Car-dependency is baked into the very fabric of society, in a way you can't fix with transportation policy or projects--not without decades of projects. But we have reached the limits of the car-dependency model; we can't fix traffic by adding marginal car capacity as has been repeatedly demonstrated by freeway projects that fail to fix traffic because we're in an equillibrium between commute times and job selection.

Transit and bike infrastructure won't fix this, but they *can* make marginal improvements in the traffic situation by taking cars off the road for the minority of people who can use these alternatives at this particular point in their lives. I think e-bikes are going to be key. I personally wouldn't consider a ten mile commute by bike on roads shared with cars a barrier to commuting by bike, but most people wouldn't attempt it. E-bikes on bike infrastructure can make a ten mile commute practical for *normal* people, and take a significant number of cars off congested roads. Public transit could help, but again in a marginal, opportunistic way. In Europe or the US Northeast where car-dependency was overlaid on existing dense urban fabrics, there's a lot of opportunity for major transit projects. But for American cities in the West which have *no* center of mass to build around, solving car-dependency is likely a Moon-shot level project.

The claims also seem a bit sus. "Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week." Is this the same statistic someone was debunking recently where anyone who had done something really basic (it might have been using the search facility?) was counted as "using Copilot"? A lot of organisations seem to be cautious about using code generated by AIs, or even imposing a blanket ban, so things must be very different in other parts of the industry if that 80% is also representative of professional developers using Copilot significantly for real work.

Well, that's one hypothesis. However since they saw a significant difference in the population where the social media apps were removed, then if your hypothesis is true, the data would suggest that delivering the service as a native app rather than a web app must have some harmful effect in itself. An alternative hypothesis is that their application usage patterns changed when the apps were removed.

It's not altogether far fetched that web-delivered apps have a different psychological effect than native smartphone apps, because native smartphone apps have greater access to the system for tracking and notifications. Native apps also offer different features than their web versions. This is why I use Facebook via a browser, because the Facebook native app is insufferably intrusive, constantly trying to get your attention. It means, however, I can't use Facebook's chat function.

Joe has always been an amateur programmer. Spreadsheets are functional programming. Joe has been writing complex macros, wrestling databases and refining OLAPs for decades, as Joe built a mini-IT system inside his department, much to the chagrin of the actual IT dept. Now Joe has a powerful clanker to write scads of code.

That's another one of Joe's days that end in "y". Joe doesn't care. Joe's bosses don't care.

Now the company has clankers to wade through the mess Joe made. So that's not the problem is has always been.

What else should one expect from all these red states?

beauty