No, it isn't. It's the fucking spaceship from WALL-E. Don't pretend they are powerless.

Almost everybody in the states (and to a certain extent in other developed countries) is just way too comfortable to get up off their ass and do something about anything. It's not as if they will be gunned down like Iranian protesters if they take to the streets. Still they mostly just lie there, bent over and taking the abuse up the ass without lube.

Yeah, it is very much a question if they will be successful in their attempts. But we all know they'll going to try as hard as they can.

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It was. The problem Democracy was not designed to address is a completely different one. To trust Democracy, you have to feel you benefit of it. For a long time, living in a democratic country meant improving your standard of living, slowly but steadily. Respect for the current system of government comes from the system of government benefiting you. It's aligned with the Golden Rule: Don't do unto others what you don't want to be done to you. The system of government sets boundaries of things you can do, and you respect them because you don't want the same things happening to you. You respect Democracy, because if the current government does something you don't want, you can always publicly complain, elect different officials or run for office until your grievances are addressed.

Several decades without real improvement of the standard of living for the average citizen has shaken the support for Democracy, because people feel Democracy has failed them. They no longer insists on upholding the rule of Law, because there is the impression that the Law benefits the wrong people. Decades of sentiment, reiterated in countless movies, novels, documentations and opinion pieces, have consolidated to the general view that government officials and politicians are either incompetent, grifters or blocked by countless laws and regulations to do something for you -- and this view is now so ingrained that people don't expect anything anymore from Democracy and are ready to try something else. The U.S. has broken the promise of your pursuit of happiness, and the pundits explain to you it's your fault. Throw out the rule of Law, throw out the balances of power, throw out elections in general when all they apparently do is benefiting the wrong persons.

Actually, it was. The whole point of a democracy is to have non-bloody rules to get rid of an unpopular government. The more hoops you have to go through, the less democratic a system is. At the end of Dashiell Hammett's "Glass Key" (the novel, not the movies), Paul Madvig comments that this time, the other side will win the election, and he will lie low for four years until the next vote. And yes, Paul Madvig is a self-serving grifter.

"United States of America" has been a confusing and unwieldy name for a country for a while now.

I suggest we just call it "Trumpistan".

Ed Zitron is a moron who has predicted the past nine out of zero AI crashes, who simultaneously gets paid to hate on AI while also getting paid to promote AI (DoNotPay).

The funny thing is that he openly acknowledges that inference is very profitable (~40% margins) for all parties - he just argues that you should count training. But that argument makes no sense, because if capital tightens across the AI industry, then everyone will cut back on training and scaleup, and... then what? Where's the implosion? Everyone is profitable then. You may lose certain players in competition against others (their as-mentioned profitable assets being gobbled up by others), but the industry remains healthy.

There are more dramatic types of possible contagion risk, but they all end up with *someone* holding onto the high-profit-generating inference assets, even if it's high-seniority investors, leaving the the low seniority investoors high and dry.

The enshittification of Cursor continues.

Maybe this will force them to support more open models.

No, it is siloization happening. We've seen it before and it has been predicted for this market as well. It's just capitalism in action, as much as people want it to be salacious drama.

I guess, it's the first one. It's the strong man he is posing at. "We'll take your precious Lake Ontario as punishment!" And many of his voters like the strong man punching holes in the walls the establishment has erected - even if it is only an established name. And his voters like symbol politics, so he gives them symbolism.

What the fuck are you doing on a tech forum like Slashdot?

Yeah, this is kind of an outdated article and this is most certainly misleading: "And in recent years, established brands like Mazda and Mercedes-Benz have moved more and more functions to touchscreens."

In actual recent years, the backlash against touchscreens has caused "established brands" (including Mercedes) to move _back_ to physical buttons:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

The interview mainly shows a CEO out of touch with his consumers and reasoning based on shiny looking designs and his own 'vision' of how the world 'is evolving'. So par for the CEO course. Notably this guy is also the CEO of BMW _Australia_, who pretty certainly doesn't influence BMW interior design significantly.

Apparently not. Otherwise, consumers would not buy all those additional features. Some people calling themselves car guys have claimed for a long time that too much technology in a car is a bad thing. But that's not what consumer demand tells the car companies. And if you look at statistics, car break downs per mile driven are in a constant decline. A 1970ies car at 100,000 miles was ridden down. A 2020ies car at 100,000 miles is just well driven in. Yes, people could fix the 1970ies car themselves. Just buy the manual and the spare part, and off you go. But that was a necessity, not a feature. Today, people want their Apple Carplay and their Android Auto. And that means you need a computer as your head unit. People want cruise control and good mileage, and that means electronic injection. Lambda catalysts have reduced car emissions, and unleaded fuel has severally brought down violent crime numbers 20 years later. This also required electronic injection. People don't want to crank down their windows, and that means electric window controls. People like their stability control, so the car does not go off the road uncontrolled if you make a steering mistake. People like anti lock brakes. Airbags and pretensioners have brought down road fatalities from their heights in the 1970ies.

Yes, you now need to be a learned car specialist to service a car. But you need service far less often, and your car is a better car in all other aspects.

Patriarchy? What does that have to do with anything?

This is about bad greedy people profiting off the vulnerabilities of humans and civilizations. There are lot of women in studies like psychology and marketing, so it is an interesting question whether they also participate in the aforementioned behavior (in which case we need a better term than the gender-specific "tech bro") or whether they somehow act more morally in these spaces (and then following that why and how we can structure society so that everybody behaves more morally).

Meanwhile, what those evil liberals think should happen to YOU is... that you be given healthcare and a general social safety net.