Tariffs create uncertainty and hesitation to invest....especially since they're applied unpredictably. Nearly all programming jobs are investments in future growth. When the economy is in the shitter and the president of the world's largest economy is unreliable and unpredictable, it makes businesses and investors hold off on major investments. Even if you love the guy, if you can't predict the cost of materials for a 2 year project, it makes it very hard to find financing. The same with software...if you need 50 professionals and you don't know if 20 of them are going to get their green card revoked, it makes you nervous. Even without Trump's chaos, we have a LOT of economic headwinds: deglobalization, COVID aftermath, wars in Europe/Middle-East....as well as no real growth opportunity in the tech sector.

We got really lucky in the past. As soon as one technology was introduced, another arrived shortly afterwards to give the illusion that endless growth is possible with innovation. However, we created multiple new markets back-to-back: In the late 90s, everyone had to get connected to the internet. In the early 2000s, all business process had to be moved from client/server to web-based applications. Then the iPhone was introduced and now every business needed a mobile presence. Afterwards, we had economic expansion from the big data craze as well as some crypto jackassery....then we had ML and AI. OK...well now we don't have anything new and exciting for businesses to spend money on beyond LLMs which aren't really providing the return on investment promised. Once we find the next useful business innovation, we'll see more familiar growth patterns. However, now...everything is on the web, architecture is largely web-scale, if a mobile app is needed, it's written already, if ML is useful, it has been applied...big data systems are now in production.

I've said it here many times before, but historically, no business wants to do just do the same amount of volume at slightly less cost. Nearly all of them want to crush their rivals and expand their market share. Wall Street loves growth MUCH more than cost savings. It's just bullshit to say we've stopped hiring because of AI. If AI was really helping, they'd keep the headcount the same and increase workload/volume....and lay everyone off much later after they've grown as much as they can.

Look the economy is shitty, it's harder to predict costs than it has been in modern history.largely due to the stupidity going on in the US gov right now. A CEO can either say "we overestimated our demand and need in previous years and need to correct our headcount"....or "hey, we're going all in on the future...AI, baby!!!!!"

Trump is going to be like Brexit. You can make some calculations, and the numbers are eye watering, but the true cost is much higher. The decline of a nation, the loss of soft power, the social problems and the lives permanently blighted by it.

Which is still useful. I was trying to fix an issue with a web app I made (I'm not a web developer, this is just a hobby project) and a bit of googling didn't turn up the answer. ChatGPT knew what the solution was from my description. So as a glorified search engine, it did better than Google and DDG.

Wind and solar don't suddenly stop producing. It's extremely predictable.

And despite government at all levels opposing renewable technology. In the end, economics win out. People wanting energy independence, seeing one of the best investments they can make.

The point of S230 is that platforms like twitter don't have to pre-approve comments before publication. It would be impossible for them to do at that scale, even in the Musk era, without a very inaccurate automated system.

Responding to reports of another thing and not protected.

Are the kind of people who are upset that they can't use the n-word in public and who knowingly voted for Trump the rapist because they think it should be legal to fuck kids. So really I don't pay much mind to those people because they're weird little fuckers and best case scenario they will become irrelevant and worst case scenario we're all going to die in a global Firestorm of nuclear fire caused by those idiots handing the launch codes to religious lunatics because they're upset somebody said happy holidays...

It's not a product it's there to replace wages. The potential payoff is in the trillions so a little bit of short-term expenditure is fine, most of which you will pay for it because there are only a handful of companies left after decades of mega mergers and illegal antitrust violations that were not enforced.

The billionaires have had it with capitalism. Mark my words. They are done with capitalism and they are done with consumers and they are done with us.

I get it you want to say the n word and you want to do it without getting banned or modded down. And you know the way things are going if your side wins you'll get the Say the n-word as much as you want.

But they're going to take your house and the pills to keep you alive. They're not just going to let you be a racist piece of shit on the internet they're going to take your property away from you. And they're going to do worse to your kids and your grandkids not that you care...

I'm not telling you this because I think it'll change your mind. You are too poisoned in the brain to do anything but be an asshole anymore.

I'm telling you this because I want to put it in your head like a worm that's going to eat your brain alive like a certain Health and human services head. You know what you're doing and you know it's eventually going to backfire and you know that unless you're at least 65 years old you're not going to drop dead before it does.

So you know damn well that the internet is nothing like a mother fucking newspaper. But your troll and a racist so this is all about you getting to be your worst possible person as much as possible. And I'm telling you you're not going to get away with that. The billionaires will take all your property just to take it. Good luck dying before that happens because that's literally the only thing that can save your fat stinking ass

Also could you please stop putting rapists in the White House? Thanks

And the rest of the world follows. If the United States does the way with free speech on the Internet by killing section 230 then Europe will follow. And it's Europe that you're talking about because China does not have free speech on the internet and in many African countries they will literally kill you if you're gay.. although in their defense Americans went over there and lobbied for the laws that give death penalties for being gay...

The United States falling to fascism is going to take the rest of the world with it. Eventually we will hand nuclear launch codes to the religious lunatics and Chisto fascists and then that's game over for the human race...

You can see all the content of Slashdot *if* you choose to. Just filter at -1.

You cannot do that on Meta or X. And it is difficult to do on Google properties.

The speech is not free if it is selected by algorithms to keep that each particular user based on previous use engaged.

It's manipulated speech designed to provide greater profit to the platform, rather than better info to the user.

Get rid of the algorithms to get truly free speech. Like how it was back in 2007.

It's not a product it's capital. It's not something they sell even to businesses it's something you own and use for your own purposes. AKA capital.

AI exists to solve the problem of paying wages. Because of that it doesn't need to be profitable it just needs to serve the needs of the people who own it, billionaires.

I think this is a difficult idea for people to wrap their heads around because what's happening here is capitalism is going away and since we all grew up being told that capitalism is immutable and the only viable economic system the idea that it would be dismantled and replaced with something else is nonsensical.

25% unemployment got us World War II. AI is going to cause at least that much. If you think there are going to be new jobs sit down and try to list them. You can't. The economy can't adapt this fast.

The reason I bring it up is there is a lot of old people who think they are going to get away from this mess unscathed. So they think they can sit back and watch everything collapse around them.

It's painfully obvious billionaires have had enough of capitalism. But socialism is absolutely not on the table. So with capitalism collapsing and socialism not an option what now?

And we better figure it out fast because the billionaires already have their solution which is techno feudal dystopia.

Good luck getting medical Care in that collapsing economy and civilization. The pills keeping you alive or going to become unavailable. You'll be lucky if you have food and enough heating oil to get through a winter

When it comes to gun rights, I'm personally in favor of a strict originalist interpretation of the second amendment based on how someone in that time would interpret it, just like the right end of the Supreme Court claims to believe in.

You have the right to own and bear as many muskets and flintlock pistols as you want, so long as they are for use as part of a militia to defend the country.

Wait, what? You think the right to bear arms grants you the right to a fully automatic assault rifle of the sort that wasn't even invented until almost two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution? Sorry, but no. You want to buy a firearm so you can threaten your ex? Also no. You want to open carry your pistol so everyone knows not to mess with you? Still no.

The second amendment doesn't say what you think it does. It never did. It says that because a well-trained militia is essential to the safety and security of the country, the right of the people (as a whole) to bear arms (of some kind) shall not be infringed. A logical reading of those words does not prohibit taking away guns from specific people (e.g. those with a history of violent crime). Nor does it preclude restricting specific types of weapons to people who have been more thoroughly vetted (e.g. high-power semi-automatic or automatic rifles).

Strictly speaking, you could allow people who have never been convicted of a crime the use of only non-lethal weapons, and so long as learning on those weapons would qualify you to be able to use more powerful weapons if we ever get attacked, such a highly restrictive legal environment would still at least arguably meet the rather low bar for what must be allowed by the second amendment.

So no, gun laws do not inherently violate the second amendment. To violate the second amendment, they would have to make it substantially more difficult for an average person to obtain or use a typical firearm. Until a law crosses that threshold, it likely isn't a violation of 2a.

By contrast, executive orders that exceed authority specifically granted by Congress and exceed the constitutional authority of the executive branch to interpret and execute existing laws are per se unconstitutional. And those are highly scrutinized regardless of which party is in the oval office. The Republican presidents just have a tendency to wipe their a**es with the constitution a lot more often than the Democrat presidents, so their orders get overturned more often.