my bet is some "manager" has a fucking bee in their bonnet about these damn freeloaders.

no. Gsuite was their business product. Its now called Google Workspace. It originally started as "gmail for domains"

So you can have your own domain, manage users within your business etc.

But people who were on at the start were given free access for life (I was a beta tester for "gmail for domains")

But they keep trying to take it away and make us move to a paid version.

Sure, you can use them for that.

But just go click on Kalshi's homepage and tell me what you see. Its sports betting.

So while sure you can bet.... er I mean trade... on market outcomes, you can also bet on sports. How is this different to what DraftKing or BetUS or whatever do?

These are gambling websites walking around in the mask of financial instruments.

And if the difference is the people betting have a stake in the outcome beyond that any other gambler would have, well we have a term for that, and that term is "rigged".

Victory.

Dominion is going to need to add nuclear capacity in the next 15-20 years and having a larger demand base and cash reserves makes that practical. Adding renewables doesn't have that scale requirement though. I just wonder how they will try to structure utility rates to pay for capacity commitments.

They still have those? I would have thought that everything was sent electronically by now, and nobody hand-entered anything except for bank tellers and other people who are dealing face-to-face with customers.

Then again, I remember how hard it was to do an international wire transfer a few months back, and how my bank faxed paperwork back and forth to their back office, so I guess that's plausible.

The unfortunate thing, though, is that for the most part, any use of AI to do that stuff is a mistake, because you should be shifting the burden of data entry (and thus the burden of correctness) to the customer by doing everything electronically to the maximum extent possible. The fact that banks use paper forms in the first place is the flaw, and replacing the person who types the contents of the form with AI is just replacing one error-prone, bank-at-fault process with another, when they should be shifting the liability for error to the customer. This also has the advantage of reducing the likelihood of error, because the customer had to fill all that info in on the form in the first place, so you have one opportunity for error instead of two. This also has the advantage of usually making it easier for the customer, because the customer doesn't have to do stuff in person. And so on.

Show me this software that you consider usable enough to replace more than about 5% of what a software engineer does.

Depends on what you mean by AI. If you mean specialized trained models that do very specific things (e.g. optimizing just-in-time component purchases or using computer vision to make robots work more effectively, making stock picks, spotting tumors on scans, and optimizing ad spend to get the best results), then yes. If you mean LLMs, I think you missed the mark with your list (except maybe ad creation; that's plausible).

LLMs are great for automating trivial work as long as there's no high financial cost for mistakes. Chat bots to help you search for products on a website better are a great example. Or LLMs to help you write the skeleton for new code or help you write unit tests (as long as you check the results). Or LLMs to help you look for bugs in code or review code before submission. Or LLMs to help you create prototypes of new software while deciding what approach you want to take. Or LLMs to quickly create artwork for fun, where you don't care if there are extra fingers.

LLMs are not great when there is high risk. Chat bots for airline customer service are a great example. Turning LLMs loose writing code without a competent programmer looking over its shoulder is another good example.

In between are the use cases where it functions adequately, but may not save much time, because the overhead of reviewing its work adequately is a sizable percentage of the time required to do the work by hand. Writing real-world production code is a great example.

Presumably it will get better over time. But whether it will ever reach a level of trust where we can turn it loose to write code and not carefully scrutinize that work, I couldn't say. Right now, there's too much risk of it saying that tests pass when they actually haven't been run, or worse, when the AI has decided to delete the tests so that they won't fail. There's too much risk of gaslighting across the board. There's too much risk of AI subtly misinterpreting prompts in extremely creative ways to give you results that look like they are correct but are actually wrong. And so on.

I'm going to assume for the moment that the C-suite at Meta are not complete and utter morons. So from this, we can conclude that Meta is firing people not because they actually believe AI will do their jobs, but rather because they don't have enough revenue to pay for their AI hardware costs, and they're hoping that they can get away with counting on their near-monopoly on social media to let them safely unstaff large parts of Facebook, Instagram, and other services in the short term so that they can build their data centers.

And while that might be true (because the DOJ let Facebook get way, way too big), that's a stock price disaster waiting to happen. It's risking throwing away the whole company to spend more money on Facebook's LLM technology, which might still never be good enough for them to actually make money at it. It made sense to do that work up to a point, because they could benefit from it internally for things like abuse detection. But trying to productize it without adequate rounds of funding is a mistake. If they truly think their tech is up to snuff, they should spin it off into a separate subsidiary and do rounds of financing to pay for the cost, with separate stock offerings.

Wrong answer. It's the anti-circumventino part of IP law, and that's *not* France's fault - US corporations pushed it into law, in the DCMA, and then the US trade reps pushed other countries.

Great stuff! I'll have my AI agents listen to them so I don't need to waste my time.

All they're doing is moving up the frequency from Ghz to Thz.

Of course. The problem was, Sony thought they were doing Microsoft dirty by buying up Bungie. After all, Bungie propelled Microsoft big into the console market with Halo, and what a coup it would be for Sony to buy Bungie out from Microsoft.

The problem is Sony was trying to get them into a market they themselves have saturated - the Games as a Service - or the market of online team shooters along the gist of Fortnite, Destiny and others. If you look at them, most of them were done by Sony - they had practically all their first party studios working on games like this. And they really should've taken note of Concord which they scrapped after it was released on the market a few months due to poor sales. As in, the market is saturated with those gamese

And now you have Bungie trying to create the same genre of game in an over saturated market - it's not going to do well. The people interested in these kinds of games already have heavily invested in other games. And the people not interested aren't going to start playing because "hey it's from the Halo guys".

The appeal of games with microtransactions is huge, but when the market is tapped out, releasing more won't produce more money.

The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In which alternate reality?

Iran is not "a", but "the" supporter and financier behind Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and a bunch of other militias and trouble sources in the region. So no, they were absolutely not playing nice, even if you ignore all the atrocities inside Iran.

Again, your asserting something in the absense of a justification. Then pointing back at it to justify it. Its tautological.

More to the point, your making the descartian fallacy by assuming that body and mind are separate things. The human consciousness is not necessarily some aetheric essence that sits on top of the brain, its perfectly capable of being a *state* of the brain. Translated to computer, consciousness COULD be simply a specific arangement of software states. Trying to separate it out and say its something different without asserting why is fallicious.