That's the great thing (for AWS)... they get to charge the crawlers AND the web site owners. And also sell infra for "AI" training, hosting, etc

Affinity's stuff is awesome, and I whole-heartedly suggest it for anyone using Windows or macOS. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on Linux, even under WINE.

The Bayesian spam analysis we've been using for decades would be called "AI" now. Then regular expression pattern matching used in ad blockers would probably also be called "AI".

The current AI hype bubble is LLMs; the actually useful "AI" bits have been chugging along doing useful things for ages, without burning down the planet.

So if you didn't understand enough SQL to write the query, how do you know what you got from Copilot is correct? How do you write tests for it? How do you modify it? How do you document it?

Current GenAI coding assistants seem intended to replace entry-level developer positions. Which means nobody will be working entry-level developer positions, so nobody will be learning how to be a more senior developer.

There is literally no amount of money the AI companies can charge to pay for the costs of the GPUs/CPUs/RAM/storage they've used. The only (short-term) winners here will be the cloud companies renting them resources... they'll have to jump onto the next fad ASAP once this bubble bursts.

You're assuming those failures weren't the desired outcomes. They were planned like that; the people responsible made tons of money at the expense of the employees of those companies, and their customers.

At my previous job, I used to get "vulnerability reports" about our corporate website having http on port 80 open. Of course we did, and of course it just redirected to https.

These wasted a minute of my time, but I could see it wasting lots of time depending on the amount of knowledge and process involved in the people getting the email.

Here in Canada, we have the CRTC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Radio-television_and_Telecommunications_Commission), the poster-child for regulatory capture. Our ISPs don't even have to pretend.

That's hilarious, nobody learns C in computer science.

NewEgg at least has a toggle to keep the "Marketplace" garbage/scams out of your results. I'm sure they're working hard to make their search as terrible as Amazon's, but for now it seems to work still.

Is this worse, or better, than the brain damage caused by repeated COVID infections?

This feature of COVID has even made it to pop sci like Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican...

I wonder how long they could go with no additional revenue if they canned the C-suite entirely and used that money for something useful.

You might notice that the MBAs are in charge now, at least at the big cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft). For an MBA, if you don't have constant, double-digit growth, you're a failed business. Numbers must go up, every quarter. The only customer they're obsessed with is the shareholder.

Cloud costs are just going to keep increasing. You're locked in, what are you going to do, go to a competitor who's also co-incidentally (wink wink) raising their prices constantly as well?

See also streaming services, cellular services, and Internet providers, at least the ones I'm subject to in Canada.

If I could stand constantly selling myself, I'd run a consultancy for setting up "on-premises cloud" (ie, servers) for small and medium businesses. Ah well.

Arguably, Nintendo's wildly successful Switch is an ARM Steam Deck, and that CPU/GPU combo was obsolete when the Switch was released. Works great for the purpose it was designed for.

Sure you can't run general desktop programs or Windows games from 1995 on it, but that's not the point of the device.

Recently?

Mozilla's been over-paying their executives for ages, while their decisions are tanking the company. Focusing on chasing useless fads and trying desperately to clone Chrome's UI, for example.

Nobody left Firefox for Chrome because of the UI.