It was probably the other O'Neil, with one L. He has no sense of humour at all.

I could understand bots and mailing lists. The thing I never understood with LinkedIn was how many real people (usually recruitment agents) had apparently spent the time to read my profile and send me a personalised message, yet still thought I'd be interested in a job paying half the market rate for someone with my skills and experience.

Claude Cowork natively has a Chrome plugin. If you hit a captcha,.cloudflare turnstile etc it can take over your Chrome and get right past it indistinguishable from a human.

I don't know what you mean. Look at the improvement in hiring when you can advertise an open position on LinkedIn and get maybe 100x as many applicants as before! OK, probably 99% of them will be completely unqualified for the role and barely capable of pushing the instant application button, but how is that a problem, really? Surely hiring managers can easily filter them out and no qualified applicant will ever get lost in the noise?

It's like a video I saw on YouTube the other week. Someone was talking all about "skills" for their AI agents and how they'd automated so much of their workflow using them. They started the video by kicking off four different tasks for separate agents to show how productive it was to have all this stuff happening in parallel and how it was so quick and easy to organise.

One of the tasks involved producing an infographic about a certain topic, and the AI duly produced one based on a one-liner prompt, taking only a few seconds of the presenter's time and with no further input from them about the content. The infographic had exactly the level of quality you'd expect from this: a load of boxes and arrows (with some of those arrows starting or finishing floating in space without connecting anything) and some words (a few of which might have been related to the topic mentioned in the prompt).

That infographic was the only substantial output from the whole exercise. It was the worst kind of AI slop imaginable, generated with literally no thought or oversight from the presenter beyond a couple of words about the topic as part of that one-liner prompt. This was probably about the average level of the LinkedIn posts I used to see before I left as well. As you said, I'm not sure you can be a "thought leader" without doing any thinking.

I stopped using LinkedIn when they seemingly decided my account wasn't about me (despite having obvious and publicly verifiable details right there in the description) and wanted me to verify my ID using one of the US-based services with a questionable reputation to get my access back. That's not going to happen, so I just don't use the site any longer.

As far as I can tell, that has made zero difference to my career, and it's one fewer drain on my time. The only thing I have missed is seeing the occasional good news story where a past colleague has been promoted or the like, but I'm not giving up my government-issued credentials to the US-based data harvesting industry for that.

I agree. I am a "lib" and don't agree with much the Trump administration does. H1B has been abused for decades. Tech companies use it to hire workers at low rates and then abuse them as they become "indentured servants," afraid of getting fired in which case they have to beg for new employment and sponsorship to stay in the country. The system has been gamed for years. Want to hire an H1B and get a lawyer? The lawyer will tell you two things: Make a job ad which basically asks for the exact resume of your H1B candidate. Exact versions of VMWare, Python, etc you name it...be precise. Then post it in a print newspaper, not online on any job boards or a place a normal person would look. Voila! No American applicants. If you do interview Americans, all you have to do is say "candidate did not have required skills" with no real justification. No one checks. I once consulted at a bank and they literally had an entire floor of Indians on H1B with one white person in the corner office supervising them. I had plenty of friends that would have been qualified to work those jobs. The H1B system has been terrible for some time and needs dismantling. That said, all this will do is cause these companies to hire people in other countries to stay there and work remotely, for even less money than H1B. There also needs to be restrictions on outsourcing labor that can be done in America by Americans.

You're jumping to completely incorrect conclusion about me. No, I don't believe that subspace will be used for FTL communications Star Trek style anytime soon. I however, did have a longtime interest in radio. I have an EXTRA license for HAM radio, although I don't do much with it anymore. Obviously, that means I know morse code. I visit the KPH maritime radio station in Marin County about once a year and have some knowledge on how to use the extremely old equipment, including the old longwave Marconi and shortwave Zepp antennas.

As you should know, longwave transmissions (which use AM) are far superior in reach to the medium-wave commercial AM frequencies. Cars sold in the US with AM radios don't even support the longwave frequencies! Also, jamming the medium wave frequencies using electronic warfare equipment is easier than the longwave ones.

So that said, the commercial AM bands on radios sold in cars are a crappy solution to the problem you posit of internet being disabled and a conflict zone erupting.

It also has nothing to do with my comment about how commercial radio radio has been enshittified for generations.

Do you even radio, bro?

A ticket, or a fix-it ticket? I don't know how the fix-it tickets work in Florida - if they're anything like California, it's a matter of fixing the issue and then paying an admin fee: ~$25 for a replacement plate, ~$25 admin fee, plus your time getting an officer at a local office to sign off. Based on the number of issues around my home (Los Angeles area) I doubt fix it tickets are very common... it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Then again, I also wonder how often tickets are more liberally given to those who appear to have the means to pay....

I park my full size sedan all the time in SF. There's usually a parking garage of some kind. Street parking can often be found. There are a couple neighborhoods like the Mission where parking can be tight, but, most neighborhoods it's pretty easy. Back in NYC years ago, we used to joke the C suite paid more for parking than they paid us techies. It wasn't even a joke, they actually did. Parking in SF is a breeze compared to NYC and other east coast cities. Just have to know how to pair on hills and which way to turn your wheels.

What is more, the infected ground squirrels in the Western US are surrounded - and naturally contained - by healthy squirrels. It was interesting to study this in the Santa Monica Mountains during my university days.

This is absolutely correct. As someone in their 40s (so not even a younger generation), I never listened to AM growing up but did listen to FM a lot. I ditched it for mp3s, Napster etc and burned CDs to listen on my discman in high school rather than have a radio. I got the iPod first gen and never looked back to radio. FM radio was so corporately enshittified by the 90s, even the "alternative" radio stations they kept pushing pop rock and the Backstreet Boys nonstop. Despite hating them, I still know the lyrics to too many backstreet boys songs as a result. This is around the same time they enshittified MTV. AM radio back then still consisted mostly of dry news like listing stock value movements, narration of sports games you could just watch on TV, and right wing opinion nonsense going on about how awful having gays in the military was and how Clinton was going to destroy America. Not much has changed on AM since then.

I'm still impressed that the Teams web client can't edit a message with an emoji in it without messing up the keyboard controls and often corrupting the message and losing data. It's had this bug for years. It's literally a messaging app where you can't reliably send messages.

>That puts the effort somewhere between direct static decompilation of a game's source code and more complete emulation of the entire PS5 environment.

Decompile source code? Is that like ROT26 encryption?

if McD put near that much effort into their app, I might go there more often. Even as much as once a month! As is, the app is high friction, it's easier to go inside or through the drivethrough.

Uhm, automatic cars absolutely will roll backwards on a steep hill. The idle force isn't enough when releasing the brake to keep it in place, let's say at a stop sign on the crest of a steep hill. If you don't hit the accelerator extremely quickly after releasing the brake, you will roll back. Heck, I have a Mercedes with "hill assist" for this reason, you hit the brake twice and it displays HOLD, so when you take your foot of the brake it stays in brake until you hit the accelerator. This is to prevent rolling back. So Europeans do know about this....