Companies agree on the jurisdiction any claims of breach will be handled as part of the contract process. I guarantee you that jurisdiction was dictated by VMware (prior to their Broadcom acquisition).

I'm willing to bet this has nothing to do with their actual contract with Broadcom. It is probably a claim that Broadcom's actions have caused damages under some civil tort and it actually relies on the fact there is a valid contract in place to use their software, rather than this being any type of breach-of-contract claim. This might be a very novel legal approach here, and I don't see any mention in the article Tesco is claiming the contract was breached here.

It's actually near impossible to believe that a suit related to their contract would be allowed to be filed in the UK. I've negotiated licensing agreements with many software companies inside a company even larger than Tesco. Most contracts are created as a bunch of back and forth between two companies to agree on a long list of Terms & Conditions (T&Cs) which define the actual contract. Software companies stand alone in typically handing you their list of T&Cs and refusing any negotiation at all. I promise you VMware would've said "agree to these terms or go somewhere else" - and there is no other supplier.

A very clear and key term of these and any contract is agreeing on the jurisdiction in which claims of breach will be resolved. This is such a key term for software companies they would never allow it to be changed. Especially since customers are worldwide, there's no way they want to understand the intricacies of court systems in any country/locale but their own. I'd actually say that jurisdiction, along with liability, are the two most non-negotiable of all the non-negotiable terms.

You are right, my mistype. About 45M in Canada to 450M in EU. The point still stands - in comparable population sizes that would mean Canada is roughly equivalent to Connecticut compared to California in the US. If electoral college votes translated to parliamentary seats, how much say would Connecticut think they had relative to California? At least the US allows for some legislative methods of equal representation and state rights.

Generally, I think my point is that while I still strongly advocate for democracy and some type of federal/union approach, I've evolved that to firmly believe sometimes the scope of a democratic union is simply too large and ineffective, and breaks under it's own weight. See provincial separatism in Canada and Brexit in EU. I mean, do we stop somewhere or keep moving towards a single world state with one vote per person for one world leader?

Yep, they are all the same. Mass hire bodies off the street to meet contract commitments, who were all clearly quickly trained on one very specific skill and thrown into the blender. A very true and typical example: replacing an in-house DB admin with someone who's never turned on a computer before but completed a one-week crash course in writing basic SQL queries. Turned out as expected. The top 5% you mention is about accurate, and those were the 1/20 who (by luck maybe?) turned out to have either some real education or aptitude. The problem with them being capable, is they were always smart enough to see it, and quickly refused to settle working with the rest and accepting same wages. They would (rightfully) demand the same pay as their NA counterparts, which required immigration.

Unpopular opinion here though... I thought this outsourcing cycle was actually very beneficial and valuable. I went through many instances of it, and ended up consulting (even recommending!) "outsourcing" programs. I never lost a job to it (all I'll say is it seemed easy to shift what I did to be out of scope, as I would do with AI now). The ultimate problem was pushing through outsourcing before a company had an expertise on how to do it effectively and make it valuable.

It was seen and often implemented as a resource replacement strategy for cost savings: replace expensive onshore coder/admin/etc. with cheap offshore coder/admin/etc. Every instance of doing that at every company ever failed miserably. What some of us figured out early, and most eventually, is that it is a spectacular workload replacement strategy. Most in-house IT staff are very skilled, and without doubt most of them had huge chunks of mindless and repetitive, low-value tasks on their plate. This was huge value creation for onshore people - I'd never outsource to an Indian company ever again, but every new organization I come to and find one of my Tier 2 NOC technicians spending half his day fixing server backup errors that I could actually train one of those Indians to do in a week? Yep, he's not doing that anymore. Shift that work to a junior, or soon enough, AI. You don't fire the tech, you get him to do things much more worthy of his skill and experience. So, I "outsource" regularly now by finding masses of work I can train anyone to do, and either contract it out cheap, hire a new in-house junior employee to train using it, or pretty soon, hand it to AI.

AI (LLMs) will result in a huge amount of job losses... in India. If you've ever worked with Accenture/TCS/Wipro/etc. resources and now an LLM in a programming context, it's hardly even comparable. Every single model now exceeds the capabilities of an outsourced programmer in terms of cost, speed, and quality. Once agents are perfected, and we can string their similarly sized and scoped actions together, exactly nothing stands in the way of starting to replace massive outsourcing contracts with AI systems. I can't even imagine that an offshore resource is already no more than a pass through of your organization's task to an LLM engine. The big outsourcers no doubt are looking to develop those systems and replace their workers with AI to maintain their contracts, but smart companies here will but them out.

It is truly amazing actually, even a bit funny and ironic, is that a valid way of looking at LLMs is: American IT staff have written a program that does the same tasks we shuffled offshore for decades, effectively making them redundant. The empire strikes back.

Agreed. Another instance of finding myself shaking my head a bit at the prevailing Slashdot negativity on AI. I don't even need to try having it create/maintain large or complex codebases to know current LLMs are going to choke on such a task. As a programmer though I still find it astounding in it's capabilities, including taking rambling natural language prompts and generating impressively functional chunks of code or scripts. I guarantee 90% of Slashdotters know the size and intended usage of a technical task it can hand to AI and have it been successful. I'm pretty sure most throw massively unreasonable tasks at it just to smugly watch it fail. This is no different from outsourcing - just replace random Indian with AI on what is expected to do all your work for a fraction of the cost. And AI is way better than the countless Indian programmers I met.

But as you mention, the true value of the technology we call AI is definitely outside of highly technical areas, or at best as an assistant in them. It's what I use it for, and if I only had a wish, it's that we'd focus more on discussing the progression of impressive technology and where it works well.

"Nobody is asking for" - care to qualify what you mean there? A quick search says ChatGPT has 50 million paying subscribers and a billion (!) monthly active users. I think there's interesting debate on the ultimate potential profitability of it given the infrastructure and power costs. However it is simply detached from reality to think a service that hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people worldwide use on a monthly basis does not constitute demand. And that's just a single provider.

My guess here is your belief that no one is asking for it (including those oft-related anti-CEO, anti-VC, generally cynical views) are the prevailing common opinion on Slashdot but just another reflection of it's techno-corporate audience and how it's opinions diverge from the much larger world, corporate or not. I mean, everyone here 25 years ago would've said MS is a horrible investment, the year of Linux on the desktop is right around the corner. Seems valid from a highly technical corporate worker perspective, but clearly not actual reality. Ditto the anti-CEO/capitalist bent here, we all know how that same viewpoint has been tinted by treatment of corporate IT over the last couple decades.

On AI I find a bit louder opposition, cynicism, or even outright disbelief than normal, and I gotta believe it's the additional fear of job losses from AI in their space. Guys, you should be smart enough to stop worrying now. Your use-case of writing perfect, advanced codebases is tiny in the big world picture of what AI is being used for. Yes, you will once again have to deal with upper management who believes it can cut costs of you very expensive tech resources. No different from outsourcing. You may lose your job, but you will not lose your career. I've worked in corp IT for 25 years and none of outsourcing, PHB viewpoints, and now AI has ever made me worried I will be out of a good position in IT, although I've seen clearly how some will change what I do. The greybeards this forum is mostly comprised of now should know how to work within this system by now.

The perception of being anti-democratic is not that far off base, in practice, with the EU and other large democratic structures.

The best comparable example to help you understand might be the plight of smaller states in the US or western provinces in Canada. Yes, you can claim they do get a vote within their federal unions and smugly claim it is perfectly democratic, but when their votes are (and always will be) effectively a rounding error when lumped together with those of far-larger and far-off population centers, it sure doesn't feel like a full democracy to those in the smaller jurisdictions.

With the EU, I never saw just how true this is until recently with the crazy discussion that keeps coming up that Canada join the EU. Yes, Canada would get a proportionate number of reps in the European Parliament, but they would be so insignificant (Canada has about 1% pop. of EU) the end effect is Canada would lose all sovereignty in many policy areas they have today. Some would argue all the "benefits" of operating in the union, but based on just a couple relevant areas, handing over our ability to set our own immigration and trade policies to the EU would be a huuuuuge no.

I read that as "Beer can use tools to solve problems..." and rather than thinking that was nonsensical, my first thought was "Wow, is there anything beer can't do?"

Canadian here. Wow amazing where your brain took this - I don’t really care about any culture differences in what I watch on Netflix and this is just cranking up the cost. What you think of as “preserving culture” is actually creating a slush fund to fund the government preferred political, not cultural, friends. The CRTC and this decision is led by lifetime bureaucrats, none who have any industry experience, and it shows. The CRTC is the most incompetent and out of touch govt agency here and this only proves it.

And yet, as this comment will demonstrate, the very discussion of whether we perhaps did more harm to this age group with COVID lockdowns is verboten. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Agree I loved my Oculus VR back in the day. I imagine soon enough AI will advance to the point they can create a true "Holodeck" type app where you just describe environment you want to be in and it generates it on the fly. I'll buy another one the day they do.

Not sure about the US, but in Canada such a transfer-in-kind transaction would surely be done to avoid capital gains tax. That tax is not paid on a primary residence, and perhaps that's why him not residing in it is mentioned as a factor.

A massive amount of people who support wealth taxes, in California or otherwise, think that when someone is a millionaire or billionaire that means one thing only: they have a bank account with that amount of money just sitting there. Being used to buy stuff in the way they use their bank account. Of course that is in 0% of the cases.

Slow 56k lolnot after moving up from 14.4!!