It seems to me they could redirect the 10 figures a year they are spending on building a VR world no one wants or will use. Or did they cannibalize that already?

My guess is you don't use Cursor very much if a $20 monthly subscription is enough for your needs. I still run into limits with Anthropic's $200 per month (I have 13% of my weekly allotment left with 13 hours left in the week), and I just use it as a hobbyist. Even though I am a very active hobbyist, I still can't imagine someone using these tools even 10 hours a week on just a $20 per month plan.

Who do you know that was trained on stuff that will happen in the future?

We get it. You don't like Beyonce. Neither do I, but I'm not making a scene over that fact.

Around 1990, I worked for a couple months on an embedded device that had an 80186 and a megabyte of RAM. At one point, I had access to a huge pile of 1MB SIMMs and took a stack home for the evening and using memory boards that allowed you to stack up to 8 of them into one SIMM slot in your computer to figure out just how little RAM Windows NT 3.5 really needed to boot. It booted successfully with 12MB of RAM. It really wasn't usable, but it did boot up. Nowadays, Windows is probably only marginally usable with 12GB of RAM.

They work for Meta. I would expect them to be miserable.

The company has been dumping 10 figures a year into trying to build a VR world no one wants, with nothing to show for it after the better part of a decade. At some point, you expect morale to decrease.

They'll use the same excuse when AI perfects the Torment Nexus, I'm sure.

It is insane that the EU hasn't done more to create local tech companies to reduce their reliance on the US. They need their own version of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (among others), just like China does. It's fine to leverage allies for certain parts of your economy, but the tech sector is right up their with military when it comes to industries where the EU shouldn't be depending on external allies so strongly. It's not like the EU has the same religious devotion to free markets that the US has which would make them hesitant to prop up their local tech companies for 10+ years until they could survive on their own.

I found an EU report from 2025 that suggested it would take $5 trillion to do this, which would be about 5% of the government revenue of all EU countries combined if done over a decade. Just like efforts to become less reliant on the US military complex, the EU should really get started.

In 1998, 1 Mbps of bandwidth cost $1200 per month. Today it is about 10 cents. The past never perfectly predicts the future, but I wouldn't be on the side who thinks AI won't be significantly cheaper in the near future. My Claude subscription costs be $200 per month today and gives me $2500-3000 worth of tokens per month. But in 5 years that same amount of usage will probably be a few hundred, and in ten years it will probably be $50.

You obviously weren't around for the petrified with hot grits era of Slashdot.

Oops. I thought I was responding to the story about the grossly insecure White House app.

Still, it's incompetence all the way down.

Although I'm not as big a fan of Hanlon's Razor as I used to be, I'd be willing to chalk this up to typical government incompetence, farming this work out to the cheapest bidder in a way where no one involved in any decision-making has any technical expertise whatsoever.

Nothing is going to get better as long as the U.S. education system is captured by ideologues whose priorities are _not_ an educated, literate and thinking populace.

It went to the same place that Winamp 4 went to.

I loved Hack 1.0.3. At some point between then and now NetHack got unreasonably difficult for me.