Unfortunately that industry lobbiests got their hands on the politicians.

It has a *TON* of loopholes. The biggest loophole is all they need to do is start including these words in their disclosures: "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM OR BY USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA." Just make sure it is included in the webpage along with all the other terms and conditions, and they can do all they want.

Yup, collusion, price fixing, and antitrust violations are a few of the ways it is an issue. Indirectly by third parties doing the collusion, as was done with apartments, is still collusion.

The special interest groups clearly got their hands into the politicians for this version. Here's the text, pick the version of the full text in the dropdown. Even though it has loopholes you could drive a delivery truck through, it's a start.

Kinda. Yes, the US-based judge could issue a judgment that affects the .org domain, as that's managed by a US-based company. But the rest? The judge has no authority for Liechtenstein (.li), Sweden (.se), India (.in), Saint Pierre and Miquelon (.pm), Greenland (.gl), Switzerland (.ch), Pakistan (.pk), Grenada (.gd), and the British Virgin Islands (.vg).

The rant about threats, harassment, coercion, not so much.

Yup, that caught my eye too.

Security isn't "my blueprints are secret."

Security comes with: "Here are the blueprints, here is the research behind the blueprints, here are copies of the safe to practice on, here are conference papers discussing the known exploits of the safe, here are the reviews done by experts in the field, and here is the list of implementations used by governments around the world, if you discover exploits you'll make global news and companies everywhere will want your brains."

Intermissions are still a thing in concerts, plays, theater, musicals, and in many types of Indian cinema.

The break lets the audience stretch, visit a toilet, talk about what they've seen, and buy the high-priced concessions. Run for about an hour, have a break, finish it up. Or a 3-act, with two breaks.

It makes a change for the writers, with a one-act movie there is a continuous momentum from beginning to end, with breaks the writing can be more episodic. Neither is really going to be right or wrong, just different for storytelling. Many take advantage of the break with time passing or off-screen events as part of telling the story effectively.

Seems you're missing the point. The article says anyone over 133K was classified as upper middle class, and ignored the location. We agree on that bit.

They counted millions of people who are low income for their region and even potentially on welfare as being upper middle class. They said 10% of the population was upper middle class in 1979 by one metric, but then using a different metric that 31% were upper middle class in 2024. They wrongly and quite openly counted millions of households with welfare level incomes, lower class incomes, and middle class incomes and claimed they were in the upper middle class. Everything that follows from the conclusion that upper middle class has grown so much is fundamentally flawed.

A huge amount of the population are millionaires if we define a millionaire as someone with thousands of dollars. That's effectively what they did here. Count millions of household that middle, lower, and welfare-level as though they're upper middle class, and suddenly the upper middle class triples in size. The claims that follow that the lower rungs of the middle class are garbage because they just reclassified them as upper middle class, even though by the author's own admission they are not.

This. The lower end of those "upper middle class" numbers may qualify for welfare in some tech hub cities.

They do point out that it varies by location, but really their number range is terrible. "classified a family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 in 2024 dollars as upper middle class." From the HUD Section 8 income limits, expensive places the lower end of that is considered low income, like San Jose 143,600 qualifies for Section 8, versus cities like Akron where 72,250 is low enough to qualify. Location, location, location.

As this is /. lots of us live in tech hubs that even though we don't like the costs, they're very expensive places to live. In my current city despite being a full hour commute from the city center 130K is still solidly middle class. Not poverty, but not upper crust either. That income wouldn't require a trailer park, but would have a hard time affording a 3 bedroom / 2 bath home (they'd add another 45+ minutes to the commute distance), one or possibly two small vacations per year.

In tech hubs especially, those household incomes can be very middle class, not upper-middle, and in some places, lower class lifestyles.

Statistically it is not the severity of the punishment, it's the likelihood of being caught and facing consequences.

When the likelihood of facing consequences is high, even frequent offenders comply even when consequence are minimal. Even something like line jumping, it's about if they think they can get away with it, not the seriousness of consequences.

Traffic violations are similar. When "everybody knows" a curve holds a speed trap people drop to the speed limit, when they are past it they lay on the accelerator. When I see a bunch of break lights ahead frequently I will hear GPS call out "speed trap ahead" right where the others started slowing. The perceived risk of enforcement, not severity, is the biggest factor.

Scammers know the risk is minimal. In India many of the big operators include people in politics and police, it doesn't take much of a cut to bribe officials.

In general they've been on the right trend of only playing after interactions.

Most of the time they're ads, and even if they do manage to slip through my ad blocks and DNS fliters, I still don't want them playing.

Waste of bandwidth.

It's one of those issues that often are easily ignored until suddenly it's game-breaking.

For many games that stream assets and build shaders on the fly, if there's a bit of blurriness and stuttering when you first enter an area there are many players who can forgive that. Having that same experience walking into a boss's lair and suddenly the game is choking and stuttering as resources are processed, that's a fatal flaw that can make it difficult to play, or even outright kill the player while loading.

The difficulty is that usually it's an all-or-nothing experience, a tradeoff, games can choose one or the other. There are plenty of games that do build them at runtime, and others that have the long slow progress bar at startup. Different choices give different experiences. As annoying as waiting a couple minutes at program startup is, having a cutscene or a boss fight stuttering for shader compiles is far worse.

Sure, you don't want to pay full sticker price, because that's the sucker price. You have to waste a day of your life haggling with the dealer so that he can charge different prices to different customers. If you buy straight from the manufacturer under a no-haggle system, they have to offer the same price to everybody. So it's likely to be quite a lot less than the sticker price of a dealership-sold car. The manufacturer still wants to segment the market and milk more money out of less price-sensitive customers, but they have to do it by selling more luxurious trim levels.

While that's the hype, it's not going to be the reality.

Yes, what they are doing has a market.

Yes, it will absolutely allow many of the masses to do what programmers have been able to do for ages. It will change the market, the cheese will move, but it won't destroy the marketplace for programmers.

I think work in graphics design is probably the best parallel. People freaked out in the 1980s when home computers could make banners and flyers. As the software advanced, you got more and more people doing Word Art, and enormous clipart catalogs let office secretaries make good looking office flyers, creative garage sale fliers, church bingo night announcements, and much more. LLMs let people continue to create this type of thing, and print-on-demand services let them send their creations out to make custom stickers and such. But most critically, NONE OF THOSE PEOPLE were hiring graphics designers for those jobs before. It enabled the masses to do some of what graphics designers do, but when it comes to real ad campaigns and professional marketing, companies know investing a few hundred dollars will bring in a few hundred people from the community, investing many thousands or millions are essential for large regional or national campaigns, those jobs continue to get the professionals.

More people making vibe-coded websites that satisfy their specific needs? Great. They weren't hiring a team of programmers for software development before, and they're not hiring a team of programmers after. Executives that claim they'll cut costs by 90% by firing all the professional programmers are in the hype, they either don't understand the work being done or are playing the field. They may do well in their quarterly financial statements, but a couple years down the line the company won't have anything of value remaining. The CEO will be long gone, sold his options, collected his golden parachute, and moved on to the next company to be restructured. Investors will have gutted and sold everything of value from the company by that point as well, they'll take the hype bubble, milk it, then dump what remains in an asset fire sale. The companies that continue making great things and not seeking the bubbles will continue to create good value, leveraging the tools where appropriate but still hiring skilled workers to create products with lasting value.

There will always be changes in who is the winner and who is the winner this quarter. Certainly plenty of profit-seeking investors care only about those quarterly results, not the products and services on offer. There are companies that will grow and companies that will die, nothing new is there. It's good that more people will be able to have more custom program options, just like WordArt and clipart collections allowed people to easily make their own fliers. Those who want a specific vision in marketing can start with "here's my interpretation from an image generator, but I want it done better." Similarly when a small business needs a team of developers to build a program, the customer can also bring in what tried and failed and what they want to see differently, and they come back with a better bid being able to reference what the client generated using AI as a starting reference for building the professionally-built items.

I meant, you get a stream straight from the studio master, not ripped from an audio CD.

I thought the "high res" thing was to sell you music straight from the 48KHz master -- not jankily downscaled to 44.1KHz, clipped because of loudness wars, and then lossily compressed. Am I out of date?

Agreed. The ESP32 family of processors are popular for good reason. Some of the chips support RISC-V.

Unfortunately there is far more to the question than the Ask Reddit post contains, cost, processing speed, memory requirements, software needs, and much more. Even so, the ESP32 family and earlier ESP8266 have been popular in IoT devices from smart lightbulbs, watches, cameras, and even light industrial use to Arduino ecosystem and student devices for over a decade now.