My high school art teacher back in the mid-90s took night courses for programming at the local community college as she wanted to change careers.

That's the one where you learned how to make all the boring business software (positive).

That's the story.

I'm shocked.

Microsoft wants perfectly functional hardware to become e-waste. Windows 11 makes the world a worse place in service of corporate profits.

It's causing linux on the desktop to become a thing.

While I think you're on the nose that in this case it is a "people problem" rather than a technical one, and that there should be more volunteers for something that's a critical piece of global technical infrastructure, a paid entry contest is not the way to fix this. For starters, your contest idea isn't legal in California, Colorado, Maryland, Vermont, and Connecticut requires you to ask permission from the state, which is why most of the time you see it also specifically excluded on contests. And that's just the US. Good luck complying with the law in other countries. And there are still other regulatory requirements, such as submitting winner lists to some regulatory body in various states, as well as to each entrant if so requested. You've added significantly more work for an already over-burdened team of volunteers.

Of course, the situation highlights another problem, which is the people using AI have no idea what they are doing and think the AI is a magic box that makes them an authority on subjects just because it generated a wall of text that seems like it's something special and unique and worthy of the praise their mothers never gave them. Meanwhile, actual experts, who have to do actual work to gain expertise, are forced to have their own work rattled back at them after being chopped, pressed, and formed into something barely coherent rather than doing real work to solve real problems. Imagine if every day while you are driving to your office, you had to sit and read a wall of text describing the drudgery of traffic on %{marketing_profile.region.highway.bad_traffic} before you could start your morning commute.

That's why they made the official Oracle Java product as unappealing as possible. Switch to the better alternatives, or pay the stupid tax.

It's under the broad stroke of something callled tortious interference. The auditors' mere presence would cause the target of their audit to violate other contracts. They can't do that without going through the hassle of litigation and a court order allowing one contract to override any other contract.

It's just a long line of tech where the basis is "things my mom used to do for me". Mom used to drive you around? Start uber. Mom used to get your food? Doordash and instacart. Mom used to make disgusting fresh juice? Juicero. Mom used to tell you how great you are and then gave you a bedtime story? Generative AI.

Acquisitions... They're what companies do when they hit a wall and can't innovate, at least sometimes. Mostly, they're what companies do when they have to create numbers that look positive growth at first glance. See? They increased their marketshare by 38%! Oh, by acquiring another company. Nothing new was created, only destroyed.

Is that the crazies will use them in all the worst ways. Tragedy of the commons...

If this is expected and those coming to the restaurant know this, then it's okay. There's a particular level of service expected in fine dining. This elevates new customers to the same level of old time regulars.

Zaslav is going to fuck this up and the linear television / cable division will be the one that survives.

For literally six months there have been prime day newsvertisements on most major news sites. Oh, and also amazon itself has gone from a trusted vendor over the past decade to one where you can't trust that you name-brand knock-off is actually the real original Cobgxwin or if it's just one that's stealing Cobgxwin's knock-off design and will burst into flames even though it shouldn't have anything flamable inside it. And then sometimes you'll go to a product page, 14 out of 15 of the options are sold and fulfilled by Amazon, while the 15th is actually someone doing a triangulation scam and you're going to get a surprise bill from the actual company that shipped you the product (which you should have used in the first place because it was $5 cheaper). Then Prime itself keeps increasing in price while at the same time they keep killing features (though Amazon does that the right way with a year's advance notice), and then they try to trick you into an add-on music subscription like the goddamned loch ness monster trying to get tree fiddy.