Hell, back in the mid-90s software companies were poaching first-year students ("to get them before education ruins them"). And the O&G companies had to be bullied to stop taking kids at 16 who figured "hey, why finish high school when I can go straight to a six-figure oil rig job!" What they didn't tell the kids was "yeah, in a few years we'll punt you for the new up-and-comers, so hope you like being 25 with no education!"

Wasn't the whole problem that this *wasn't* a Google project (or any business support at all)?

Well, there was that whole global pandemic, and turns out keeping the economy from imploding costs a few bucks. Unless you wanted mass unemployment, followed by homelessness, followed by deaths?

There's a few restaurants in town that have those little robot waiters. And they *all* have a human following them around.

And every decade or two there's a new scare-story of the new thing being bad for kids. Before YT was video games. Before that was TV. Before that was radio. Before that was newspapers. And so on...

Difference is a college kid has a degree - they owe a bunch of money, but they have paper that will be recognized at other businesses.

A Palantir Pal will get used like a rented car for a few years until they get worn out (or decide they'd like more than entry-level wage), get punted to the curb, and will now be 22 with a high-school diploma and "experience" no-one else cares about.

I thought the plan was "Don't use that Chinese product - the Chinese government has backdoors in it! Use Good ol' American products, with good ol' American backdoors!"

Just compare how America treats Middle-East countries they know don't have nukes to North Korea (who either does or is bluffing extremely well).

I would hope that the last two decades of cyclical hiring + layoffs has disabused programmers of any seniority of the notion that their employers consider them anything other than a fungible product. "We hire rockstar dev" is just company code for "we shall blow smoke up your ass, force you to give us unpaid overtime until either the project is done or you burn out, and then fire you to save costs and get our management bonuses. Sure you're jaded now, but that's OK - there's a whole new graduating class of suckers we can hire instead."

I'm still a daily-driver VBA programmer. Ain't saying I'm fond of it, but Excel as a stealth UI can't be beat. People who will flail and gnash because they can't understand a Salesforce or web form will happily fill out cells that are quietly uploading values to server, because they didn't have to "learn" anything. It's just Excel.

Hell, I'm no guru but I know the answer for this - it's so you can run long tasks without having to tie up a limited terminal in the lab. Log in, start your task, log out and go for beer while someone else gets use.

Now, in this world of "everyone has their own computer and terminal", it's not as necessary a feature as it used to be. But that hardly seems a reason to arbitrarily flip the default.

No clue. But the threshold is a lot lower, because presumably it's sharing a lot of infrastructure with the existing solar panel. So as long as the incremental gain outweighs the incremental cost, this is a good thing.

It's a prototype, which means we're still at "hey, neat trick", not at "this will allow us to make our third-quarter projections".

That defeats the purpose for them. Keep in mind that Uber and Lyft are based in San Francisco. They don't operate in other cities. They just operate a web service, and leave it to the drivers to hold the bag when the authorities come calling. Right now they've got it great - they're getting their cut, and they've muddied the waters enough to make it politically unpalatable to go after the drivers for running illegal businesses. (Guess what - in most places your driver's license does *not* cover carrying passengers for hire. And neither does your regular car insurance.) So it's literally costing them *nothing* to be in as many cities as possible.

Because next time someone else might pick up. Or they'll be selling a different line. Or you might be in a different mood. Or the company just doesn't want to cross off a number.

Even legit telemarketers (like university fundraisers, where I did a stint 15-20 years ago) are *loath* to actually remove a name and number from the file. And with robocalls, it costs them effectively nothing to ring that phone again, so why would they remove it?

Honestly, it should be trivial to require that the number displayed connects to the source number. I get that large organizations and such want everyone's CID to be the front desk and that's a legit use - but the fact that the phone company will merrily show CID for a number that it knows full well has nothing to do with the actual caller is just extending the money grab.

That said, you do have to respect the telecoms for playing arms dealer to both sides. They'll charge me for caller ID to see who the number is, and then charge you to not send the number, and then charge me again to block numbers that don't display it...