Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.
Statism creates billionaires.
Think about when Trump activated the National Guard and ordered them into action in California. The courts ruled against him after the fact, but the courts refused to block the action because the governments claim was imminent harm could occur.
Which was the wrong call. The Republicans ordered the National Guard into California as a political act, Trump happened to be the stooge with the button. This was all obvious from the start.
It still has no teeth. You get to make a presentation to The Overlords, and then they get to ignore it.
Didn't get me wrong, it's better than nothing, but there's no obligation for the government to do anything as far as I can tell.
If you're a conventionally attractive person, you wouldn't be caught dead with these massive, chunky frames sitting on your face, unless it becomes a status symbol for your conspicuous consumption. The reason you're conventionally attractive is because you know how to groom and dress yourself, and to not buy shit like this.
If you're not a conventionally attractive person but somehow can afford to spend the money on these, believe me when I say that if you wear these, everyone within a 100-yard radius can see you're a creepy tech nerd, and everyone within a 200-yard radius can smell that you're a creepy tech nerd. You may as well be wearing a giant sandwich board saying "I install peephole cameras in public restrooms."
Countries that welcome immigrants are able to increase the tax base, and supply critical labor that locals don't want to do, including taking care of the elderly.
But you take in too many, too fast, AND if you allow those that are diametrically opposed to your values and way of life.....YOU LOSE YOUR COUNTRY.
and that's what we're seeing now across EU and trying to combat in the US.
That's why everything running in the cloud runs in containers on a cluster (Kubernetes or similar). If a physical server dies, the cluster control software just drops that server from the cluster. Load management then automatically moves the containers to the remaining servers in the pool. When enough servers are dead they send a tech and a truckload of replacements out. Same for storage: everything's on RAID arrays and as physical SSDs die the array drops that drive and keeps on going with no data loss. Once enough drives in the bay are dead they send someone to swap them out and the RAID controller takes care of initializing them and restoring data from the existing drives as required. It's not uncommon for 30% of the capacity to be out-of-service before replacements are ordered.
They still have to catch up to IBM's old mainframes though. Those you could go in during peak business hours and start pulling and replacing CPUs and memory modules and I/O controllers while everything was live and not disrupt anything.
AI has done nothing of the sort, and in fact, has done the opposite. Individuals in creative industries have lost their jobs and income because consumers have chosen to either generate their own slop or purchase slop because it's cheaper than real, human-made work. And there is no reason to believe nor any evidence to support the notion that AI will lead to this post-scarcity paradise you claim will come into being. Simply legislating it will not make it happen. As much as I respect Sanders for the attempt, it fundamentally fails to address the core, underlying problem with generative AI, which is that it can only thrive by stealing the collective output of actual humans, and in doing so, suppresses the desire to be creative.
Nobody will WANT to be free to do what they want if everything they do is watched, tracked, datamined, analyzed, and repackaged for consumption. The problem is not even about the economics of labor. It's about what the quality of life means for a society in which every thought and action is being analyzed. I don't want to live like that. I don't know anyone who does, and if you do, then YOU go and do it. I don't want any part of your dystopian panoptic bullshit.
The language part, true. The problem is dependencies. Any time you upgrade, especially if you're jumping a large number of versions, you're going to have packages your code uses needing upgrades too. Those package upgrades will usually require code changes to accommodate. Some of those changes will require refactoring to handle structural changes needed for things to work right. That is usually where you end up down a rabbit-hole.
I'd prioritize updating Java 8 applications to Java 11 first. Those are going to be the hardest to bring up-to-date with Java 25 (latest LTS), bringing them up to Java 11 buys the most time. Then upgrade to Java 25 starting with Java 17 applications, then Java 21, then Java 11.
Remember that Java 25 will end support in 2033, so plan on starting your upgrade from Java 25 to the next LTS version basically as soon as your last upgrades to Java 25 are done.
I don't think that's a meaningful question to ask, since it seems to be based on the flawed premise that there should only be a limited market for creative work, and that the forces of supply and demand ought to dictate how we as a society should value such work.
And what the developments in generative AI have shown us is that those same market forces have no problem trying to replace the underappreciated, underpaid work of countless artists and creative industry employees with a neverending firehose of AI slop.
The human desire to create and the desire for imaginative self-expression is extremely deep seated. To be told that this is economically worthless, easily replaceable, and undeserving of recognition, while at the same time the very means for automated generation of AI slop are stolen from and built upon centuries of handcrafted, human-imagined labor, is the height of hypocrisy.
So, to answer your useless question, no. The world does NOT need more starving artists. What the world needs is to properly recognize the value of human art and creative expression. And to the extent that technology is being used to suppress the worth of others, I say artists have every right to reject it. I hate the panoptic, uneducated society we have become. I detest how creative people are being forced to choose between bringing something new into this world, versus preventing some tech oligarch from training a LLM model on it. I despise the fact that mega-corporations routinely wield their vast financial and legal resources to protect the enormously profitable intellectual property that they pay slave wages to artists to create.
I don't know this Eggers guy. I haven't read his books. Whatever he wants to do with his time and money is up to him. But wanting to give more people a pathway to create, and to do it without having it stolen by the Zuckerbergs and Musks and Altmans and Bezoses of this world so that they can turn around and claim that the same things they've stolen are not really worth anything after all, is, in my opinion, better than sitting behind a computer asking whether the market for art is saturated.
Yes. The construction jobs are very short-term, and once built the data centers bring huge costs (financial and otherwise) while contributing only a handful of permanent jobs. Remember, these are lights-out hands-off facilities. They'll employ a handful of security guards and maintenance workers, the rest will all be handled remotely from Malaysia or the like.
To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.