If you think about it? Most arguments against mergers have to do with it being bad for consumers because they lose options and prices for the service are free to go up. In this case, DoorDash can make a strong argument that grocery shopping for people was never really their focus, so they're expanding their offerings, vs creating a monopoly on food delivery. BUT, they're creating a near monopoly on the gig worker! Not that long ago, we had other players in the space like Postmates, but they were bought up since then.

I'm old enough to remember the computer bulletin board system (BBS) days fondly. I ran my own BBS for over a decade, in one form or another. At the end, I moved it to kind of a hybrid setup where I had 4 dial-in phone numbers for modems, but also a 128K ISDN circuit to the Internet. Most callers used it as a way to access some Internet resources while others started connecting to the BBS itself via the Internet.

Ultimately, BBS sysops (the jargon for system operators) realized we were at the end of an era. The Internet simply made the hobby of BBSing obsolete. Why limit oneself to using a specific bulletin board system and whatever limited options it has on its menus, when a raw Internet connection allowed hopping all over the world to content of all types -- even accessing multiple screens of it simultaneously?

Even back then though? I think many of us mourned the lack of personal connection that caused. On a BBS you used regularly, you had typically 100-500 or so somewhat regular users to interact with. Most were in your same geographic location. It wasn't uncommon to organize gatherings so people could meet the real humans behind the screen names/handles.Message topics were more relevant to where you lived. People could actually request 1 on one chats with the sysops, and most people got to know them pretty well.

The Internet doesn't "need to die", but maybe more people should make the effort to seek out and use web sites offering quality content, vs a habit of spending most of their time on big-name social media sites? I know for me, a good example for this is cars. I've always been kind of an auto enthusiast, and I used to always seek out a web message forum for any vehicle I purchased, and immediately join as as new member there. These days, I see all these enthusiast type groups popping up on Facebook -- but none of them offer the depth of information the dedicated web forums have. You just wind up with thousands of people in the Facebook group asking the same questions and wanting to show off photos of whatever they did cosmetically to their ride. The message forums always seem to have a few regulars who REALLY know the car inside and out. I'm talking master mechanics who have taken the whole vehicle apart and put it back together again, in their own garage. And they post a LOT of "how to" type message threads and more.

The thing to look for is how they go about solving a problem. That's the key. Coding is easy. Figuring out what the problem is and how to go about solving it, that's the hard part. Especially given that the problem the user says they need solved is often not the problem they actually have.

IMO, people are making too big a deal out of the touchscreen functionality. It's not really a big reason someone would buy this new Macbook Pro. It's simply something Apple said they were finally able to add to a good OLED display without adding weight or thickness to the machine.

I had a Lenovo ThinkBook 14" laptop my workplace issued me that had a touchscreen display, and I basically just forgot it existed on it. That said? It was finally useful in one situation where I had it on a docking station with dual external displays. I configured our VoIP softphone to use the laptop's own display so I could tap to call people from the directory.

This is just the latest, greatest iteration of Maxbook Pro with the latest ARM processor in it and a number of small design improvements. (EG. It has an audio profile now for listening to music with the lid closed on it. That's a feature I'd actually use sometimes and wondered why none of my other laptops ever had it.)

Honestly most pickups never tow. According to companies that make them and have a vested interest in knowing what they need to build. Less then half of pickup owners ever tow anything.

The under half that do tow are still people though and still have needs and dollars. I tow, I early tow more then about 200 miles, I mean why would I fill a dump trailer with dirt from two states away and haul it home? We have dirt here! Most of my towing is under 50 miles. Occasionally it is 400 miles (not for dirt though).

you can make a successful product that doesnâ(TM)t address the needs of every single person.

Or to be less dismissive, people that tow a lot? My EV is fantastic to drive, and gets pretty decent range, until I tow a many thousand pound and worse yet physically large travel trailer, and then my efficiency drops to about 1.7 miles per kWh, which gets me about 166 miles on a full charge (and 0% to 100% charging is slow).

Which mostly means I don’t plan on any trips to locations much over 100 miles away with a big travel trailer. Which is ok, it is a big EV, I can sleep in it if I want. Not quite as nice as an actual TT, but it works. Other people maybe actually tow enough to that they can’t just decide to “not do that”.

Well for me it is a rare problem, say 0-3 blackouts a year, and 0-1 lasting more then a few hours. So less important then say “how does it deal with a long trip I make once a year”.

On the other hand a 3 day power outage in the winter (not normal, but not unusual) is no joke. It is enough of a “no joke” the most houses around here have an external input for a generator or other 240V power source. Mine in particular will power the house’s heating (well the water circulation pumps and the furnace ignition), as well as the kitchen fridge/freezer, and the wall outlets & ceiling fixtures in a few rooms. Which is nice because it means for around 500W you get heat, lights, and a way to keep the beer cold. You don’t get the stove (electric, high draw 240V), or the microwave (I mean you could drag it over to an outlet that has power, but a microwave is pretty hard on a portable generator), or the coffee maker (again it can be dragged to a outlet, but it is hard on a generator).

I have a big ass APEX battery something like 3kWh and does 240V output. It is way happier with the coffee maker then my little generator. It is decent in general for running the house’s limited “backup power” mode. Except it will only run it for around 6 hours. On the other hand my EV does have 120V 15A out, which won’t run my home heating system, but it will power the APEX. The EV has around 100kWh in the battery, so it’ll run the APEX and indirectly the house for a very long time.

Or to be fair a really crap Harbor Freight portable generator that will last one outage and then die a horrible death could be used to feed the APEX, and the APEX can weather all the rough loads and ramp-up/down and generally make life easier for the generator.

However that is all a bit of a diversion from my main point. It may be a bit uncommon to have a 3 day winter power outage here (although the power outages tend to happen during rough weather, so -20F ice storms tend to bring the power outages, and the bad weather makes it harder to get linemen where they need to be and equipment to them, so yeah the long outages tend to be winters!)...but they aren’t even rare. Live here for a decade and you will have about three of them. Having it well below freezing and no power and no heat means whatever water you have is going to freeze and expand. A lot of heating around here uses water to transit the heat, so the normal “nothing will freeze and burst in the first day, maybe two” you get “well at least one of those pipes runs in the low insulation areas under the roof to help clear ice sheets...and that one will freeze in a few hours. Plus others will freeze pretty early as well, maybe not day one, but you arne’t getting through much of day two without many thousands of dollars of damage.

So try not to over generalize from your local power stability and lack of winter power oriented damage. This kind of feature can be worth tens of thousands of dollars every few years.

I’m less sure that there are a lot of places you can save enough from buying power at low rate times and using it from you down battery at higher rate times (I think there are clearly places with a 3x rate difference, but even so it is around 20 per kWh, and most EVs have more like 40kWh batteries, not the 98kWh battery I have, so the savings tops out around $8/day and that isn’t a lot even if it doesn’t put any noticeable extra strain on your EV’s lifetime it has a super low payback. Then again maybe some places have a much larger kWh cost and a bigger off-peak discount? I definitely don’t know any place it is a fast payback though.

I would assume places felt unsure they'd really get their data back by paying the scammers who locked their files down in the first place.

There are plenty of stories about people who paid the ransoms and never got their data unlocked afterwards.

If someone came along, pretending to be the good guy who could break the lock for you or your business? Wouldn't you prefer to pay THEM, rather than rewarding the criminal who created the problem in the first place?

It's at least notable that the plastics industry documented the possibility that microplastics were accumulating in the human body. But with there being such limited knowledge on what harm they do, if any, just by being there? I don't see why this would have sounded any alarms back as far as 1974?

Comparing this to cigarette manufacturers is a little disingenuous, IMO. That's an industry that encountered mounting evidence that smoking was doing harm and even killing people, yet they doubled-down, paying off researchers to try to find as much contrary evidence as possible to deny it.

It seems pretty logical that ANY substance we're exposed to can enter the human body, and many of those substances could stick around in a microscopic scale. The more important question is whether or not it matters from a health perspective. We developed some of our plastics BECAUSE they were inert materials, deemed fairly safe to use in the medical field (surgical tubing and so forth). Maybe that was a big mistake, but most of the concerns I hear voiced right now amount to wild guesses. "Look at the increase in things like obesity, or cancer! Maybe it's the microplastics!" There are MANY other possible causes in play, so jumping to the conclusion microplastics are the next cigarettes is .... unreasonable.

One of the things people keep overlooking with skilled trades is the physical labor required. I know quite a few people with an I.T. career they're in largely because they have physical issues or limitations (bad back, for example) and it's not realistic for them to just hop over to a skilled trade like a plumber, where they're going to have to crawl under cabinets or into crawlspaces under porches all day long.

If you're still young, absolutely. It's not a bad time to consider a skilled trade to make a good living and escape the AI threat. But for the middle aged and older folks? Not always realistic.

Grade homework on completion and be done with it. Then schedule in-class quizzes and exams, where students are expected to show their work as well as the results and do it hand-written. That makes it hard to access chatbots, and even if students do the drudgery of transcribing the chatbot's output will discourage them (if they were willing to do that much work, they wouldn't be trying to skip the work using a chatbot). They may skate by on the homework, but the exam scores will show whether they actually learned the material or not.

This has always been the thing of science fiction (Star Trek universe being a great example). There's this idea that humanity will automate and invent so much technology that nobody has any work left to do.

In realty? Nobody on the planet has ever reached this point before in history, to prove it really happens.

All I *do* know is that in my own life experience, EVERY time I use a new tool or gadget that promises to save me time and make my life easier? Whatever time it saves is immediately claimed someplace else. In many instances, the claimed labor and time savings turns out to be artificial. (EG. I've owned several Roomba type robot vacuums. Even though each one I tried was an improvement over the old one? None have ever truly eliminated the time and labor I would have spent vacuuming by hand otherwise. What inevitably happens is they don't get certain areas clean enough, so I have to go back and deal with those myself. Then, they need maintenance and cleaning themselves, which requires a lot of time taking them apart and getting lint and hair unwound from places it wasn't supposed to be. Next, something wears out or breaks, costing me more money AND time to repair it or replace the worn part.)

I think all we might really see is some temporary pain around unemployment as we collectively re-think what kind of labor/work we still want to pay people to do.

AI clearly can't do ANYTHING physical, so that severely limits what jobs it can take from humans. Robotics can do physical tasks but we're still FAR from it handling random tasks that humans do easily. Our robots tend to be purpose-built. One may be able to scan inventory on store shelves, but it can't go clean up a spill in an aisle. Another may claim to do security duty but probably has to call in to humans if anything bad happens to it.

Geez people.... Regardless of who is President, the issue here is worth taking a good look at. $2 billion is a LOT of money to burn through each year! And this is a program that arguably went FAR beyond what people expected it to do (ensuring libraries and schools had an afford Internet connection). Handing out free hotspots to people? Yeah ... I'd rather not fund THAT with my tax money. Just use free public wifi like the rest of us do.

I’m in the awkward position of being a long time proponent of “hire experts and retain them, software isn’t a one and done it is a lifecycle and having someone with deep knowledge is a competitatave advantage”, and yet also after a lay-off at the big G a software consultant.

Which makes my opinion of this maybe a bit self serving, but it is appropriate to hire outside help for “OMG we have to fix this right away, no time to get approval for a permanent staffing increase, or to find someone who works for just the right amount of money to not upset all the employees who would want a raise if the new guy gets more...and we can put up with someone outside the normal corp culture for a few months as long as they aren’t too far outside of it...but never take a permian hire that doesn’t wear just the right tie and use the perfect tone to suck up”.

So: need a security fix before billions leak out of your company? Hire a contractor that can get the job done, unless you luck into a new employee that can.

Need to copy another companies feature before you lose all the market share? Hire a contractor, but keep “contract to employee” conversion in your back pocket.

Have an idea for a killer new feature nobody else has: develop that in house. If you really can’t get the resources allocated long term for that, a contractor is better then nothing, but you really want in house knowledge of how the feature works, and how many other departments it touches and all the technical and interdepartmental entanglements. So doing that with a outside expert makes it hard to support long term.

Plus the except from the article already says:

It is unclear if the 1000 contractors “remain here today” because they were hired on year long contracts for four months of work, or if they are now a roving hit squad for tough bugs and the contract is “long term”. Also it doens’t say if the 3000 people already “in that area” are employees or other contractors. So I’m not really sure if we are seeing a company not willing to invest in operations, or if they are investing money rather then time (contractors are fast to hire but tend to cost more over time then internal hires -- even if you retain them).

Really, I think most of the hate comes from the way the self-checkout kiosks were handled and deployed. The systems themselves aren't so awful.

Hindsight is 20-20 and all that... but I think they should have only deployed them for the "12 items or less" type of express checkout. That would have helped acceptance and adoption. The people only trying to buy a few items are the ones prioritizing getting in and out quickly, even if it takes doing something differently than before.

Self-checkout gets exponentially frustrating when you have a lot of groceries like fresh foods where you can't just scan them. You've got to look them up on the touchscreen. That and purchases like alcohol where a human still has to check your ID before the process can complete.

Customers start feeling like they're doing a job that cashiers get hired for, so why aren't they getting a discount for it?