And the "AI Slop" button is already being used to silence voices someone doesn't agree with. You see, when you click the button, it's removed from your feed and sent off for human review (yeah right, more likely it's an AI reviewing it and then, maybe, a human). While it's in review, it won't appear anywhere else.

If you see something you disagree with, mark it as AI Slop. Extra bonus points if you can get your bot farm to all do the same thing. Suddenly the post you dislike will be held up in review so long that no humans will ever see it - and the poster will never know, they just won't see any "engagement" and wonder why.

Linkedin was never a fair an equitable social network, but this just makes things even worse. Ironically, it won't help them identify what's human and what's AI either.

LI is the only social network I still use. I persevere with it like I do with slashdot, mainly for the nostalgia and occasionally for the comments. What I can say with certainty is though, like slashdot, the quality of LI has declined sharply. The value of it is much diminished, as evidenced by "promoted" being marked on every second post. It's actually a terrible place to get a job too, so one wonders just how much longer it can really survive.

Yes, and they've doubtless spent some proper money getting this far - but they're only at the prototype stage (well, we assume so). Had they gone to production, then yes, that would have been royally stupid. You'd have thought after Google's product was named "glasshole" that Meta and Apple would know better, but perhaps not.

FWIW, there is some benefit in giving a department or group some "latitude" with regards to experimenting with products or whatever. That freedom can mean some really great new products, but it does also come with a risk that the money is wasted from time to time. Ultimately, nothing can kill innovation like a CFO only authorising spend on things they think are worth it - this was the opposite of that.

My suggestion is they just take the camera off and let us have a developer AR product. If someone could make a version of iTerm2 to go on it, I'd probably buy a pair (admittedly, they'd stay in my office and likely never leave the house, which isn't really what was intended).

You do wonder what the young will do when they're even just a bit older, if all they can lay claim to is being "an influencer". The smart ones will re-invent themselves numerous times I guess. Right now, I'm told, the ideal influencer is a late 20s, early 30s good looking female. That's a pretty small demographic from which to choose, and of course you don't stay in that age range for long, even if you are good looking.

As for making money, there's money from Youtube and the like - but that's just pocket change. The real money comes from sponsorships - you find a business somewhere, it could even be the local coffee shop, or maybe the local engineering company, a makeup company, a supermarket or whatever. They pay you some amount of money to include them in your next video/podcast/whatever. You either do a whole section on how you just can't get through a morning without some Buzz Coffee, or do a whole 'demo' of using their makeup products, or maybe you just mention them in passing, or flash their logo or whatever - I guess it all depends on what you contract with them.

Of course, the really "smart" influencers sell you stuff they own - dodgy business training courses or whatever, which are largely just a series of online videos, with some sort of in-person or video conference fluff every once in a while. They make it all up once, sell it dozens of times over for some decent money (and minimum ongoing effort), all promising that you could end up with their lifestyle if only you sit this course.

Then of course there's the 'manosphere' type blokes who buy agencies that find and promote (say) OnlyFans models. Then they feature those models in their videos, either directly interviewing them or perhaps just mentioning them as part of something else. Thus, those models do better, the agency takes their cut and you collect from the agency.

Ultimately, it always falls down to some sort of advertising and not traditional "honest" TV commercial or billboard style - much more like product placement or paid-for recommendation. In some countries (like mine), they have to display #ad if they're being paid to do or say anything in the video to try and make it a bit less deceptive.

But this story is about the smaller players - the ones with a relatively small following (what you might describe as an "achievable following"). They're arguably more "authentic" because they're not selling their entire lives like the "big" players. Hiring 100 smaller players could arguably be more effective because it's a form of astroturfing. It means the audience might hear about your product in one place, completely ignore it, but then gradually become interested because they hear about it again somewhere else and mistakenly believe "everyone" is talking about it now, "so it must be good".

This new trend suggests to me that the "big" influencers are losing their effectiveness. They've only really been at it for a few years and it's already coming to an end. The smaller players will likely end up with the same fate, but they've got a bit of time before that happens to collect some money. Sadly, they're unlikely to "rake it in" and become sufficiently wealthy through other means to carry on when the decline inevitably comes.

Yeah, kind of. Slack's good because it's well designed, looks good and works well. You won't move to a 'clone' of it because you'll lose all the integrations and apps you've got. Most shops I've worked at have loads of them - and that's hard to replicate somewhere else. Github's a bit the same - you can get git anywhere, but they've put some value-adds over the top. There are alternatives of course, but once you've started doing things like Github Actions, you're "sticky" on github.com.

So in fact then, we see that the clones have no particular use, but the integrators do. You start to wonder if instead of making this thing, Dorsey would have been better making a UI for a git/slack/ticketing type of tool. Behind the scenes, just ask for API tokens and connect to the tools the user already has.

As for the paying for software thing... There's still value in having someone _run_ the thing for you. For hosted software that's obviously servers, databases and deployments. For desktop apps, that's updates and new integrations. Someone's got to do those things, so either you pay to do them yourself, or you pay someone else to do them for you.

I can see his point though.

One place I worked, you have 2 weeks to fix any 'high' severity issues anywhere on your estate (and a 'high' CVE was a 'high' issue unless you could prove it really wasn't). You could get exceptions to the 2 weeks thing, but it was a lot of paperwork, and was always "we'll get to it in a month or so", not "we don't need to fix this one, so it'll get wrapped into the next bi-annual systems refresh". Patching can cause significant disruption, if not to end users, then to the schedule of work being done on the systems (some of which might be for things equally as important as security).

When you've got maybe a half dozen new CVEs a week, you can at least triage them. If they send you 100 a week, then you've got a lot of triage work on your hands. You've got to research each one, figure out the attack vectors, likelihood, how it fits in your environment - and then get suitable sign off that you triaged it right, and so prioritised it right.

So I can see his point, even if it wasn't made very well. Right now though, I'd say there's no point triaging, just patch as soon as humanly possible. AI's finding these issues, and AI will exploit them if you don't patch - so get 'em done. Once we're past this 'glut' you can maybe go back to being a bit more targeted.

I think you'd be surprised. On this very site there were a few people saying they would pay a heated seats subscription because they live somewhere cold (way back when BMW announced their ingeniousness: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... - which they later u-turned on, btw).

Personally, I won't pay a subscription for something that's not costing *them* something per month. There's not much I want from my car manufacturer that costs them per-month. It was once that GPS maps was an annual purchase, but now we have phone integration, that's not a thing any more. If they'd made their car infotainment systems better, perhaps we wouldn't need phone integration quite so much, but they didn't and so here we are.

However, I'm also aware that "da kids" aren't as principled about such things as me. They just want it how they want it and don't see the problem with paying monthly, probably with money they don't really have. They'll probably be the suckers that do this sort of thing.

This is a great idea, straight from the department of "why didn't we think of that?"

Hosties have to do this sort of training from time to time (for new aircraft). They have to get a plane full of people empty within X seconds with half the doors shut. Where those people come from I don't know - maybe they're other staffers from the airline or whatever. Apparently it can take a few goes to do it, but it's part of the CAA certs, so they keep going until its done right.

Back to your point - a small section of aeroplane mock up, perhaps with glass front and back, maybe 10-20 people inside it and one working door chosen after the task starts. The super advanced levels can have smoke, the whole thing on a weird tilt angle, add in a couple of actors to be dicks about it, all that. What a great idea - I'll bet you could get people to pay a few bucks to have a turn. I know I'd put my family in there, for sure.

I'm a bit mixed about this, but mostly I think this is essentially .biz all over again - ie. a waste of everyone's time, and predominantly inhabited by spammers. I'd imagine most buyers of this domain will just use it for 'brand protection' and just redirect anything to it to their .com domain.

However... as the .ai domain, and even .io domains show us, there are uses for different TLDs. Can .web be one of them? Personally, I doubt it, but we'll see...

True, but even Airbus can't get a lot of sway from Amazon, Google, etc. They're going to be Scaleway's biggest customer, and so inevitably, they're going to use that position to get precisely what they want out of Scaleway. I'd imagine at first it'll just be support, but on-going you can expect "airbus private zones" and features and whatnot.

Honestly, if it makes Scaleway actually turn into an AWS competitor in a half decent sort of way, then it sounds like good news for everyone. Love 'em or hate 'em, but AWS makes a cloud that is good for developers, good for the CFO and good for the CTO. Even Google can't fully match that, theirs definitely is no fun for the developers, and Microsoft, well, less said about that, the better.

So ultimately, there's room in the world for an AWS competitor. Maybe this is the 'bunk up' Scaleway needs to become such a thing. Or maybe they'll just layer crap over crap and be more like Azure... time will tell.

Oh for sure - all my stuff is either Pico, or more recently Grav - simple, much less hackable and also a lot faster.

However, there are *oodles* of WP sites out there. Every tom, dick and harry has one - and those need something doing that those people can understand. Improving WP bit by bit just isn't cutting it, they're just one update away from a hack, so the only solution I can see there is a re-architecture.

^^ this!

Honestly, if your WP isn't managed, you've got headache after headache. It's such an enormous target and a variable code base that unless you keep on top of every update, you'll end up getting hacked at some point. It'll just be some script kiddie defacing your site, and you'll probably get it all back again real quick, but it's a hassle you don't need.

I'd like to see Wordpress broken in half so the admin and clever bits are in one place and the actual hosted stuff is somewhere else. The server part of it needs to be as dumb as possible, and definitely not allow any sort of logins. That would probably cut the crap pretty much to zero, and who knows, the rest of us might not see as much traffic to the '/wp-admin/' URLs we don't even host (some of the bots are still really stupid - they get a 404 but think it's worth it to keep trying). Never gonna happen of course, but hey, now we've got AI, maybe they could do it?

As noted elsewhere, everything is recyclable - it just depends how much effort you want to put into doing so. That ranges from "just clean it up and use it again" to "pop it into the nearest star to be broken down into constituent sub-atomic particles".

Here in Europeland, they put "widely recycled" on the parts that are, well, widely recycled (or else they put "not recyclable"). It doesn't mean you local refuse depot will definitely recycle it, but it means that most people across most of the country can recycle it. For those that can't, yes, perhaps your local depot should step up and do it.

However, what this very simple system does not do is mislead anyone, nor does it force the municipalities to dream up magical recycling solutions to weird combinations of materials that manufacturers put together because it's easy for them. In fact, it does the opposite, manufacturers find it is advantageous to keep their packaging and even products simple and of certain material classes precisely so they can say "widely recycled" on the list of materials they use.

Rust also makes quite a good target for AI-powered Spec Driven Development - if that's "fun" or not is a whole debate of its own, mind you.

Rust is compiled, and it's pretty picky about what you can and can't do, so AI agents are quite easily able to iterate a couple of goes until they get something that actually compiles and runs. At that point, in a lot of cases they have /something/ to show for their efforts, very much v0.1, but it's usually a decent place from which to iterate.

From then on, sure, it gets murky, but the agent can mostly concentrate on the 'features' you asked for, be they functional or non-functional. There's very much a garbage in, garbage out thing going on with SDD, and it's also pretty early days for the discipline, so it's not clear yet if it'll really work in all cases long term (likely it won't, but exactly what the boundaries are isn't clear yet). I know you can do stupid things if you try hard enough, and I'm sure AI will definitely try hard enough so there are no guarantees anywhere, but as I say, it seems a reasonable enough place to start.

It seems like there are decent enough unit testing frameworks too. I've not done enough to know for sure, but the little projects I've tried seem to be able be reasonably well tested relatively easily. Personally, once the unit tests are in, I'd switch the testing framework to Python to do more functional tests and whatnot, but that's just me.

> Sony is a big company with many divisions that do their own things and operate with their customers in their own ways

True, but I struggle to believe the really nice people of the world grow up to be directors and other influential people in any sony divisions. Whilst "your" division might be one of the nicer ones, you can bet that the others pressure the nice ones to 'conform'. It's hard to be the one nice person in a room full of dicks.

Personally, I've long since had enough of Sony. They arguably make some of the best TVs, so I bought a Phillips (although actually we do have a second hand Sony TV in the house). That they're removing things people have 'bought' comes as no surprise because (a) they're shitheads and (b) all the streamers will eventually have to do this for exactly the same reasons. Sony perhaps moreso, probably because they're shitheads to the media companies who decide to walk away rather than deal with them.

> but it's the PaaS and DMaaS nature of their offerings which is the issue, IMHO.

They used to rely on shipping buggy crap that would "inspire" users to pay upgrade to get the less bug riddled versions, and thus had created an income stream for years after the initial sale. That particular ship has sailed, and with things being online all the time, they have to fix bugs, not just in the new stuff, but in the existing stuff too. They can't rely on the "pay to upgrade" money tree any more, so they came up with this.