As long as we're throwing out unsubstantiated claims - though this is completely true - I work for a company with effectively zero on-prem non-front-line workers. And not talking about the financial services sector or some niche mom-n'-pop, it employs a few thousand people (is that less than "many thousands"? Does it matter?) in an industry we all use but isn't particularly visible; I'd call it better than 50/50 you've personally received services from my employer.

When I say "virtually all white collar work", I mean exactly that; and while I recognize your hyperbole, I have no issue with it because it's still true, at least as a proof of concept. Your own company's failure to accomplish the same is a condemnation, not a counterpoint. Sure, let's not sugar coat this - Of course there are people who can't be trusted to work remotely. That's a completely different claim, however, than saying the job itself couldn't be performed remotely.

More importantly than our respective anecdata, I'm not the one initiating this claim. I provided a cite, take it up with Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Adam Grant as published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

/ And don't think I didn't catch that context switch between your third and fourth paragraphs... Unless you happen to be a manager of professional social media astroturfers.

I agree with you overall - I work because I need income to live, not because I give the least damn about my employer.

In my opinion, that's still drastically different than working because it gives me a captive audience of people highly motivated to kiss ass. Loyalty or not, I am invested in my work (as opposed to my job) - Doing it reasonably well is directly conducive to the company remaining solvent and me continuing to draw a salary.

Am I merely deluding myself by thinking doing the job well because it's in my and my coworkers' best interest, is at least a tiny bit more noble than doing it because I like having an army of sycophants at my disposal? Maybe, Maybe not; in the context of WFH, though - I still get my work done, while the Bill Lundbergs of the world have realized to their horror they're utterly irrelevant to my productivity.

Covid showed us that far, far more of us can successfully WFH than were previously doing so.

Yeah, IT is the low-hanging fruit here; but we now know virtually all white collar work can effectively be done remotely; and going further, unless your job specifically requires direct interaction with the product or customers, there's little legitimate reason to burn an extra 20% of our waking lives commuting. And that just to hang out in a noisy and disruptive environment full of people more interested in being seen than in doing the job.

The noteworthy exception is, unsurprisingly, management itself. WFH has effectively demonstrated the problem was never us worthless lazy doers, it's been managers who consider visibility as their primary role all along (or worse, ones who "oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity."). But actually managing requires real skill. It's more palatable to leadership to conflate managing with browbeating than finding people who can actually manage.

It's much simpler than all that - Remote work proves management are exactly as useless and attention-seeking as we always suspected they were.

Leaders equating line-of-sight supervision with effectiveness found themselves without their primary management tool

having well-trained, well-motivated managers leads to massive boosts in productivity from hybrid and remote working models. The data support this argument from the flip side, too. Among companies that reported struggles with remote work, this issue was concentrated in firms in which leaders fumbled the management and coordination of their remote teams.

Remote and hybrid workers are struggling with leadership gaps that were never addressed when companies shifted out of the office. Many management habits remain rooted in on-site visibility rather than clear expectations and outcomes.

And most damning of all, The study concludes that narcissistic leaders oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity. Shandell, Elliott, and Grant write that "leader narcissism is a critical but neglected source of resistance to remote work."

This is an example of "overthinking," also known as "underthinking" or "over-concluding."

Based on your UID, you're old enough to remember when games actually worked at release and have no excuse for your ignorance. The current situation is one we allowed to happen with prebuys and a passive acceptance that all software is now effectively in beta forever.

It doesn't need to be like that and you damned well know better.

Banning teens from social media will never be widely successful - Because it doesn't need to be.

These laws have nothing to do with protecting kids, and everything to do with stripping adults of their privacy. The kids will find workarounds like VPNs or AI generated IDs, because they have no alternative; meanwhile most adults will grudgingly hand over their ID cards and subject themselves to completely untrustworthy biometric tomfoolery rather than go cold-turkey from their daily doom scrolling.

And the world gets worse for all of us.

The entire point of gaming consoles is that we can stick a game in, turn it on, and we're more-or-less instantly in the game. Absent that fundamental benefit, why exactly would anyone want yet another locked down computing appliance in their house?

I'm not sure Sony has really thought this one through - They're not just killing physical media (and more importantly, second-hand markets), they're shifting markets entirely. Rather than competing with only Microsoft and Nintendo, they're effectively making themselves nothing more than another AAA gaming studio combined with a lock-in to their walled garden of a marketplace.

Effectively, they're now competing with Steam rather than Nintendo. And unlike Sony, most customers like Valve.

That's what they're trying to claim, yes.

It's not a flawless argument, however. At it's broadest, a swap could basically refer to any financial transaction whatsoever. Courts generally frown on such promiscuous definitions, however, and the CFTC and SEC have both issued several clarifications on how they interpret that - For example, they don't consider insurance as a swap, even though by any reasonable interpretation insurance is absolutely a form of swap, and the way swaps are used in practice (prior to this gambling nonsense) is almost indistinguishable from a type of insurance.

That said, Minnesota and New York have a serious uphill battle ahead. Feds just love throwing around the "supremacy" clause, and rarely care whether or not their rules make the least bit of sense. NY does have a pocket ace, though, in that both Kalshi and Polymarket are both based in NYC; they may not be able to force the CFTC to play nice, but they can make life hell for both companies if they so choose.

It would still be encrypted at rest. This was someone opportunistically walking off with a milk-crate full of hard drives, not a sophisticated attack on their network.

Of course, you could still be right - I've grown numb to how often people fail to communicate sensitive information over alternative secure channels. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see the instructions, including the password, written on a post-it note slapped right on the drive itself.

"Persons" means not tracking and logging everyone that walks by via facial rec. "Papers" refers to your identifying documents - Like your license plate or IMEA. "Effects" refers to your possessions, explicitly including mobile ones, like say a car or phone. Every aspect of Flock's business model violates the 4th amendment...

...That said, you're not wrong because Flock is a private company and we Americans are apparently dumb enough not to make the connection between corporate mass surveillance for the government's benefit, with mass surveillance by the government itself.

The fact we've all gotten used to workarounds for laptops' abysmal battery life isn't a palliating factor, it's a condemnation.

If you need a permit from the government to criticize the government...

The limiting factor for top models is primarily hardware.

You're right that you're not going to get Kimi K3 performance, requiring roughly 600GB of VRAM to run, from a small number of 24GB consumer GPUs. You're also not going to get closed-top-model performance, because you simply don't have any way to get the weights.

If we're talking about K2.7, Deepseek R1 Distilled, Qwen 2.5, Llama 3.2 though - All of which can be run locally -The question really becomes what you expect from them. They're all strong models that know more than we (individually) do about 99% of topics. A "high-school level education" is more than enough for most humans to get by in the world. Now imagine a "high-school level" understanding across every topic. It's not doing calculus, but it can tell you what patterns to use. It's not writing Shakespeare, but it can likely recite most of his works to you from memory. It's not going to come up with a clean-room reimplementation of Windows 11, but it can check your syntax and tell you the function prototypes of every publicly-available library in every programming language without breaking a sweat.

More importantly, to the GP's point - Is a model "smart" enough to understand you're trying to abuse it necessarily better than one that just carries out your orders successfully? Case in point, lately I've found Gemini's new "watcher" blocks a good 90% of my totally legit questions before the question ever makes it to the real model. Umm... No thanks? The best AI is the one that works, not the one that gives the deepest philosophical reason for saying no.

Very much so! Unfortunately, they're still vaporware.

Or more accurately, I'd very much like a $10k BYD, but Detroit has bought DC wholesale to block any meaningful competition for Ford's Coal Roller 150.

That puts you on an iPhone 7 at the highest. iOS 15 is the oldest version installable on those, and not by coincidence, also the oldest iOS still receiving security updates. It was released five years ago as of September 20th.

So while you're 100% technically right... You might want to start planning for a new phone before October.