I work for a company that successfully went fully remote, so I didn't experience much of what you're complaining about.

That said, you're lecturing the powerless in defense of a scam, and it is kinda gross.

There were literally months of articles and lawsuits predicting Oradance would have to make vicious labor cuts because generally (a) media consolidation plays like this always do, and specifically (b) this outfit is drowning in debt. This was as predictable as a Trump whine after a court loss. I can't tell if you're intentionally playing the fool to bang on your personal resentments or not, but Ellison isn't fooling anyone else.

And back on the WFH thing, if folks in your workplace abused things, that's a management problem. Lots of other outfits handle it just fine. We let two people go that I know of who couldn't hold it together without being in an office, early on (I think in 2021). And for several years we've been performing better than we were before[1].

If your army is fat and lazy, you replace the commander, not the grunts.

[1] To be clear, I'm not crediting WFH for all that. There are multiple reasons for our performance. But one big change we made when we went remote was instructions to hiring managers to find the best people they could and don't worry about where they are unless the job required it. And given that geographically we compete with Google and Facebook and the LLM vendors without being able to match pay, that mattered. We've picked up a lot of great talent over the last half decade, and most of it has stayed because management is also smart enough to understand the value of retaining people.

They're just thug gangs. What makes them weird is that they're government subsidized.

That means labor disputes with the government boss aren't resolved with a bullet, so you get collective action like that. (See also Dinkens & the NYPD.)

But it is a great time to clean house in that town! Get some professionals in quick, though - the former cops will figure out their extortion failed soon enough and need income, and they're not going to find anything honest that pays as well as being a badged thug.

Social media moving back to gas station bathrooms. And since there's no gas to buy, the threads are pretty sparse.

Russians are great folks, but never let them form a government.

If I amputate your mustache and affix it to myself, am I wearing a fake mustache?

It sounds like you're saying no. I disagree. If I were wearing a wig made of human hair, my hair is still fake, even if my fake hair is made of real hair.

So we have to account for multiple possibilities - the robot could be wearing a real fake mustache, a fake fake mustache, or perhaps one day we'll see them extrude their own.

That assumes (a) there's a price tag on the item, (b) that price updates happen correctly and (c) the barcode/scanner/computer registers the right item.

I will not use them, but that's because of a quirk of our legal system that leaves customers exposed when they aren't with a cashier.

People have been arrested after the fact over self-checkout mistakes that never would have happened had there been a human cashier. The reason is that the cashier signals acceptance of the deal, takes the money, and concludes the transaction. If they make a scanning mistake, or the price is wrong, or the barcode was wrong, or whatever, that's on the store - they accepted payment and concluded the transaction. If you use their robot scanner, you are representing to the machine what you claim to be purchasing, and LP can later review cameras and call the cops if they disagree.

Florida, which apparently is more enthusiastic about self-checkout than elsewhere, has defense lawyers advertising in this lane. I'll deal with humans and nope out on that whole game, thanks.

It is Apple.

Sure, but the legal mess is chaos for later.

I'm talking about the many folks who have reason kicking them when they're down, right now.

I imagine a lot of Russian businesses are very focused on the particulars of their relationship with Yandex, monitoring systems are demanding attention for everything, and technical folks are scrambling and tired by now.

I also imagine there are a lot of well-rested folks, both Russian and not, who know of an opportunity to make it worse.

Someone so wrapped up in toxic incel bullshit they're losing the ability to hold a theory of mind about other people.

They like to throw out random statistics as totems to appear somewhat tethered to reality, which betrays some remaining awareness of how far gone they are. But they're decorative facts, little different from land acknowledgements or prefatory "I'm not a racist, but..." noises, for similar purposes.

But in general, they no longer treat people as humans, with their own complicated inner lives and desires and confusions and insecurities. No, everyone is locked in to little set-piece lives governed by their looks and genes, performing deterministic dramas that just happen to highlight the incels' own insecurities. A weird, pathetic self-induced solipsism in which being miserable is more comfortable than confronting their own egos and accepting that dealing with insecurity is just part of the human condition.

It is pointless to suggest this, but I will anyway: the fix is to actually talk to humans like you're one, too. Don't run some game you think you're supposed to play, don't put on a mask, don't puff up. Have a conversation, learn how they're different, what they care about, what makes them tick. If you don't treat (at least all) your interpersonal relations as conflicts to either win or lose, you might find you actually... enjoy their company, and they might find they enjoy yours.

Tim Apple was smart enough to gift a gold plated whatever.

Sam Altman is a grifter himself and knew how to play this.

And now that we know communism is actually defined as anti-bigotry and has nothing to do with the means of production, I guess it is not communist to take ownership in Intel.

But Satya won't pucker up for Piggie. And so Microsoft gets to be the face of an attempt to gin up anti-Indian bigotry before the midterms.

Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Nobody cared about the commentary on his feelings about Apple...

Republicans cannot be elected here. Just won't happen any time soon.

So Republicans join the Democrats. Local media calls these people "moderates" - no, it doesn't make much sense, just the accepted code word. Most of the current batch are funded by more or less reactionary tech billionaires. (The older set are less, the newer ones more.)

So yeah. You have to read past the label. Democrats here are such a big tent that we let Republicans run things a lot of the time if they wear a fake mustache and mumble something vaguely progressive-sounding now and then. But they do whatever's good for AirBNB and Salesforce when they're not servicing commercial real estate.

The SF Democratic machine is all in on Flock. That might have something to do with the Flock being in the SF Democratic Party.

Mar raised another concern: Two of the committee's current members -- Lily Ho and Trevor Chandler -- work for Flock. Last month, the San Francisco Standard reported that a prior version of Mar's resolution was removed from the party's agenda by a subcommittee chaired by Ho. Neither Ho nor Chandler offered to abstain from voting on Wednesday. The committee does not have rules related to conflicts of interest for issues like this one, Tung told Mar. They then proceeded to count both Ho and Chandler's votes.

I'd like to award you "dumbest possible mix of misunderstanding the text combined with missing the point, garnished with a sprig of self-satisfaction and a dash of ignorance".

Watch for it in the mail.

This looks like the final cell-phonification of the Mac. I'm bummed.

But they're right - if you assume that a significant fraction of Mac users are going to install some sort of third-party interface with an LLM, it is either significantly extend and harden the security perimeter deeper into the OS or your customers will routinely have everything exfiled as a matter of course, and it would just be cheaper to make iCloud into an anonymous FTP site.

And given Zuckerbook's demonstrated willingness to brazenly, actively subvert OSes, I'm willing to bet they're going to go Russian on their subjects, er, customers, anyway. ("You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push.")

It will probably be what finally pushes me to a Linux laptop, though. I'm old, I spend a lot of time at the shell. I like Macs because they're great unix workstations, still. But I don't see how you can accommodate both people like me and people who need to be protected not only from themselves, but from Zuckerbook and worse.

And they're a much bigger market than people like me. And "AI is the Footure."