Shooting down each other's drones because nobody is competent enough for coordination is, technically, "working together in an unprecedented fashion". So there is that.

I'd like to be more optimistic; but I'm not sure that would be the outcome. It's not like we actually expect operating under actual legal guidance (indeed, we come up with insulting nonsense like standards for 'qualified immunity' that basically let you off unless it's exceptionally obvious that you are operating against well established practice; and commonly just substitute things like 'acted according to policy and training' for questions of whether the policy and training reflect legal practice or not when it comes to even the excessive force cases that actually make it to trial.

And, if there's anything LLMs seem to be good at, it's generating results that look pretty plausible; so if you combine high plausibility narrative generation, a veneer of technological objectivity, and the downright servile deference to the official narrative, it would probably be even easier to beat the rap than it is now; when you can at least sometimes put the spotlight on someone clearly and distastefully letting their motives show or acting irrationally.

I realize that this is either some fancy-looking exercise that goes nowhere as cover for what actually happens; or a shoddy crypto con; but what possible justification would there be for coming up with a new gaza-specific stablecoin, if you thought that stablecoins were the correct answer, rather than one of the other ones that is already in wider circulation?

I'm awaiting clarification on why all their arguments about why scraping is their god-given right don't apply when they are getting scraped.

There's plenty of room to quibble about how dubious his numbers are; but that's all secondary to the fact that he's not even pretending that the comparison is anything but one between humans and his preferred replacements at this point.

So they slashed most of the existing programs and now have not-launched the shiny alleged alternative. Truly the new era of competence at work.

This seems like an extraordinarily bad sign for how this place is managed (probably not surprising; but still):

If you have to mandate use and make decisions based on use metrics that suggests that either the tool isn't actually good enough that you can just mandate productivity and let people figure out that they need to use tools to get there automatically or that you are so bad at measuring productivity that you gave up and are just measuring something because it has EZ audit logs.

Not really a consultancy I'd be excited to bring in.

"AI agents don't sit in chairs, and they don't need licences."

I wouldn't be surprised if the juiciest days of SaaS rent seeking are behind us(if nothing else, SaaS vendor numbers were starting to look less promising prior to the 'AI' craze; arguably one of the reasons why they all jumped on it like rabid animals hoping that it would salvage their growth); but this premise seems deeply and obviously flawed. Per-seat licensing has never involved chairs; and (especially when you are dealing with software contracts high value enough that you can litigate, rather than relying purely on DRM) you can make whatever you want need a license.

There's obviously no completely ironclad way to stop your customers from using a scraper to hide their activities; just as you can't entirely prevent account sharing between employees who should be licensed separately; but there's nothing about 'agents' that is any harder to require a license for.

Is anyone else vastly more concerned about the unspecified 'AI' that definitely-securely handles deciding what to hide than they are about someone shoulder surfing them?

Realistically the greatest risk to your phone's privacy lives behind the screen not in front of it.

That's why I tagged that bit as the part that Marx would not have expected; and a historical period that (while it unfortunately has the look of having been an anomaly) ran counter to his thesis. To the best of my understanding he essentially considered the sort of welfare state/regulated capitalism stuff that gets called 'socialism' as either irrelevant or antagonistic to 'Socialism' as he had it in mind(though, admittedly, he was a much more interesting critic of capitalism than theorist of what would come after it, as a fair few of the people who tried to build post-revolutionary economies found out the hard way).

As I understand it; Marx's thesis was that the market value of unskilled labor would decline to more or less match its cost of production(very orthodox position on what a commodity in a competitive market will do) and that industrialization was steadily replacing jobs that were formerly artisanal and small business that was petit bourgeoise with capital intensive operations that required only unskilled labor; and sooner or later something would have to give because having your salary reduced to your cost of production is exceptionally miserable. He was either unimpressed by the likelihood, or saw as not ameliorating the 'alienated labor' concerns, any sort of welfare state/regulated capitalism arrangement that runs more or less straight capitalist economics but skims some of the (considerable, as he noted) productivity to ameliorate the plight of the laborers.

The post-WWII period was essentially one where precisely that happened; for some mixture of genuine cultural reasons and fear that, with actual communists about, it would be a terrible value to squeeze labor to the breaking point when the (very real) productivity advantages of industrial capitalism meant that you could offer them enough to keep them happy and get still get rich; along with enough fairly rapid technological changes that the ranks of 'artisan' labor were steadily refreshed with various white collar and skilled trades jobs that were not immediately amenable to automation.

I'm certainly not an economic historian; but it seems like the post-WWII period was a genuine anomaly in terms of labor relations and distribution of wealth, at least for the US; though seemingly one that was already starting to show cracks within a generation or two(though any 'marxist' analysis of it gets complicated by the fact that some of the cracking involved the substantial removal of the US industrial base; and I don't think Marx did nearly as much writing about service-sector economies with offshored industry, since that wasn't really a thing at the time).

I suspect that he would and he wouldn't. The specifics of commodities used for popular light entertainment suddenly becoming an ultra-hot item as an ingredient in the means of production would probably come as a surprise: as though readers of penny-dreadfuls were suddenly rioting because mill owners switched to building factory equipment out of paper pulp.

The broad-strokes realization by formerly skilled laborers and petit bourgeoise that they are actually moving downward toward 'proletariat' status, rather than being the respectable junior partners of capital, though, seems very much in line with his expectations; and (depending on where you stand on what 'AI' is doing to programming and various sorts of white-ish collar data munging) may very much be what plays out.

The development that Marx didn't seem to have suspected(though, in the slightly-a-cop-out 'sufficiently long term', wouldn't necessarily view as relevant); is arguably the post-WWII period of backsliding on industrial revolution era labor relations. It certainly wasn't all roses; but out of some combination of genuine conviction and (ironically) competitive market pressure from more or less authentic capital-'C'-"Communists" there was a period where people where being GI Bill-ed into education in huge numbers, Western Europe was urgently Marshall Planned out of the ashes, state tolerated or even encouraged labor unions made industrial jobs at least steady lower middle class livings, and it was generally seen as a bad strategy, potentially even a bad thing, to say "fuck you, I've got mine" too loudly.

Wasn't really until the early '70s that the old ways reasserted themselves, wage/productivity numbers started to decouple, executive vs. worker compensation ratios started flying up, the various planned economies that had once had people running scared either collapsed into basket cases or turned into authoritarian market-capitalist operations; and so on.

So now we're really concerned about aggressive scraping without authorization...

It's a bit hard to judge this change, to the degree it is one; because both 'CS' and 'computer literacy' are both extremely vulnerable to being squished into almost anything people want them to be. Sure, in an ideal world, 'CS' is a branch of mathematics focused on complexity, computability, information, some formal logic, potentially the number theory required for hashing and cryptography; but it routinely gets slapped on everything from super hardcore academic mathematics to 'bootcamp' language-fad-of-the-week, to 'how do I excel even? 101'; and when it's a graduation requirement you need to get everyone past it's probably being softballed a bit.

'Computer literacy' is a fuzzier term to start out with; and can range from terrifyingly basic "how do I press button on android 16?" quasi-vocational stuff; to various product-focused but less trivial things (autocad or arcGIS say) to things that have much less to do with computers specifically and would historically have been taught as some sort of 'media literacy', quite possibly by the school librarian(not that most people really need to know dewey decimal in any detail; but library science programs are often excellent groundings in knowing how to sensibly deal with data sources to obtain actual knowledge).

Whether this change is good or bad seems like it hinges more or less entirely on what they meant by 'CS' previously and what they will mean by 'computer literacy' now. If the old plan was to genuinely attempt to turn high schoolers into apprentice line of business java slingers that is probably worth abandoning; but if they abandon "we'll be thinking about how to decompose a desired outcome into a series of steps, using python as an example" with "how to chat with chatbots" they will be doing the students a considerable disservice.

So it makes hiring the entry level people that historically provided the supply of experienced people less attractive and burns the experienced ones out faster? Seems like a recipe for things to go badly; though some suitably placed consultants are going to be able to get people to absolutely pay through the nose if they run into an issue their bots can't handle.

There was a period where in-game deaths were football's big problem(especially because it was an Ivy League game at the time; and the sons of people who mattered kept dying). Then-president Roosevelt personally stepped in to try to clean things up enough to avoid a ban; which gives you a sense of how long they've been at this.