From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

...Nothing on them but cranky bastards contributing to climate change while moving between ticky-tacky, 40+ hours of indentured servitude, and temples to Mammon.

I largely agree with most of Klee's points, but there's a serious bias issue with his conclusion: "The internet" is just the road we use to get somewhere. Where we go is up to us most of the time. And in this case, the "old internet" is still mostly there - Case in point, I still have a crappy static personal website up that hasn't been updated since the 1990s.

Problem is, nobody wants to read my ramblings from 30 years ago any more than they did 30 years ago. People want FAANGs, even while they may openly resent those same platforms. Sure, Amazon is evil... But the alternative is leaving the house and going to a store, eew! NetFlix kills everything good after two seasons, but two seasons on-demand beats a 30-second stick-figure animation that takes six weeks per "episode" and depends on the unpaid hobbyist creator not getting bored with the project. TikTok is measurably destroying the attention spans of our youth, but we can't risk missing the next big "hold my beer and watch this" moment.

The problem isn't "the internet". The problem is us as a collective whole. When there's demand for trash, sanitation engineers flip to supply side.

The primary reason companies advertise with Google is to drive search results to their site.

If AI summaries become good enough that nobody needs to click the links anymore - What are advertisers paying for? "Brand recognition" only takes things so far, at some point they need real customers to drop in and throw money at them or they won't have anything to advertise.

My company ships data dumps like this to multiple vendors on a monthly (sometimes weekly) basis.

My side of that equation takes security very seriously. The recipients... Well... When someone offers to send you credentials out-of-channel, the right response is never "Just email it, this isn't a shared account" followed by getting cranky at being told that ain't happening.

There is M-x vi-mode. So you are wrong.

Google "Dark pools". Currently they account for slightly over half of all US transaction volume. Yes, they're still regulated; no, we do not have visibility inside them.

I can already, completely above-board, sell someone a block of DRS'd IBM shares for crypto if I want to. Let's all be clear this isn't about denominating stocks in Bitcoin.

Rather, this is effectively about recording stock transactions on a blockchain. Nothing more and nothing less than swapping a distributed transaction log for a traditional ledger.

The implication is clear, the SEC is at least considering the idea of creating shares as a token cryptocurrency. In this case, the tokens are backed by real shares. That's not a technical requirement, though, and a future company might someday skip the major exchanges entirely to list only as a token. To be clear, there's nothing sacred about the exchanges and their "house rules"; there's nothing inherently wrong with using a blockchain vs a ledger; and to reiterate, this has nothing to do with "buying stocks with Bitcoin".

On that last point, I consider OKXICE's decision to accept payment in some nondescript "stablecoins" as extremely unfortunate. Not because I'm a cryptophobe, but because it muddies the waters as to the viability of the core concept of tokenized equity itself - Though that's a bit of a tautology, given stocks are already "tokenized equity". Whether we denominate them in USD or BTC or cowrie shells is an entirely separate issue.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

How dare the people who create your revenue streams demand reasonable working conditions?

Of course employers are welcome to set the terms under which they'll give us money. And similarly, we're free to set the terms under which we'll accept their money. That's how it works.

Personally, I love companies announcing draconian new RTO policies - There aren't many better indicators their stock price is going to spike short-term then tank a few quarters later. But that has nothing to do with working for those companies. On that front, it's just a hard "no", to the point I'm seriously considering becoming a professional "interview troll" once I retire!

I hate ads more than the average bear, but I have to admit, I have no idea where people are seeing these either. Are "ads" someone intentionally loads and watches really ads, or are they merely short-form content?

That said, if these are everywhere and the very fact I'm using FF with uBlock Origin is the exact reason I haven't seen these... That is the sort of viral advertising most companies dream of.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

There's a fuckton of cigarettes manufactured every year. "If all your friends jumped off a bridge"... Good riddance!

LPT: You can also turn your phone to watch the content. I know, mind blown, right? Pass it along!

I'm not saying I would or wouldn't take this particular buyout, but as you point out, it's not a safe assumption the default severance would be the same absent this artificially sweetened offer. At a quick glance, New Jersey is the only US state that requires any severance at all, beyond making employees whole for time worked and paying out accrued PTO. Many do have additional requirements around mass layoffs, but nothing comes anywhere near two weeks per year of service. Even NJ, as the best-of-the-best (honestly surprised it's not CA or MA, but not in this case), only requires one week per year of employment.

That said, I see the GP's argument come up quite often in any online discussion of layoffs, and it took me years to finally figure out, this topic basically comes down to a simple class issue: If someone is a moderately well-paid salaried employee, a severance offer is almost always going to beat UI by miles (and as you also pointed out, that's not a mutually exclusive choice, UI just picks up after severance ends). If someone is a low-paid nonexempt worker, by contrast, severance is usually nonexistent and employers playing games around UI claim appeals are a lot more common.

There's also other benefits to consider, most importantly health insurance. Severance offers usually allow employees to keep their group health insurance during the severance period, while COBRA is eye-wateringly expensive even for someone formerly paid well.

The highest UI check in the country is in Washington state, and only comes out to $1208/week, for a maximum of 26 weeks (barring certain exceptional circumstances). A Principal Engineer (level 65) at Microsoft averages just shy of $246k/year and this buyout is offering up to 39 weeks total.

Weekly, that's $4.7k vs $1.2k. Total, that's $184k vs 31k.

I can guarantee nobody smart enough to be an engineer at Microsoft (as much as we might make fun of their culture and products) is dumb enough to fail that one-question math exam.