It's not surprising that when there is a lot of misinformed claims (or worse, self-serving lies) circulating around, some people will end up misinformed and because of that, make bad decisions that lead to bad consequences. It's worthwhile to try to correlate the misinformed claims and the bad consequences, so that when trying to figure out what to do about misinformed claims (or self-serving lies), the "stakes" will be able to be kept in mind: i.e. these things lead to serious real-world consequences. This doesn't make the always difficult problem of what to do about misinformed claims (or self-serving lies) any easier, it just helps illustrate the importance of solving it. Put another way, stopping misinformed claims (or self-serving lies) has some genuine real-world benefits. But how exactly to do that is still a tricky problem that needs to be figured out.

Private equity seeks to maximize profit in the companies they acquire, and that's easily done by reducing headcount. However reducing headcount reduces the ability to do things such as provide good service. That's where monopolization comes in: if the company is a monopoly or close to it, it can provide poor service at a high price and customers have to buy it anyway because monopoly.

Remote work is better for some things, in-office work is better for other things. Here we have an author writing about all the things in-office work is better for. That's true as far as it goes, but if is only part of the story. I suspect this author thinks office is better than remote, or perhaps it's more remunerative to take a strong position on the issue and maybe sell more books. I personally do a bit of both (more in-office and a bit less remote). It's hugely beneficial to me to have the flexibility to schedule work that works best when remote on my remote days, and work that works best in-office on my in-office days. In my view, both working fully remote (did that during the height of the pandemic) or fully in the office (did that for decades) are actually worse than the hybrid approach I'm currently taking. I do have some freedom about which days are which: I typically schedule in-office days to facilitate in-person meetings. I am grateful that online meetings have been normalized enough that not all meetings have to be in-person. So long as that remains the case, I think carefully-thought-through hybrid approaches may permit the "best of both worlds".

I work at a major Canadian University. We had an intermediate web developer position that we were recruiting for since the beginning of the year. Nothing fancy, not really AI, just straightforward web development (python/ruby/javascript on front end, databases in behind). We finally found someone in late August, after multiple recruitment attempts. The main problem was that anyone good who applied was being snapped up, either before we could get them an offer, or because they preferred another offer to ours. So we weren't seeing evidence of a Canadian tech jobs slowdown in our recruitment, quite the contrary. If there is a Canadian tech jobs slowdown (and I'm not saying there isn't) it may be in more "legacy" tech areas, or perhaps management as the original article suggested. Note that the article points out that the alleged tech jobs slowdown is worse in other western countries such as the US than in Canada, so people who have been using this article as a reason to denigrate Canada vs the US, you might want to read the article a bit more carefully first. Not that you don't have a right to your views and preferences, you certainly do, but anyone who does read the article can easily tell that your views may not be particularly well founded on evidence, and thus not particularly persuasive.

From the paper: ... we employ a decoder-only language model GPT- 2 (Radford et al., 2019) with a configuration of 4 layers, 32 hidden dimensions, and 4 attention heads. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.011...

Nvidia is charging what the market will bear, which leaves plenty of room for slower but cheaper AI hardware. Intel could be (part of) that competition, but not with this attitude.

If you entrust your data to a company, they may be forced to disclose that data to someone they would rather not disclose it to. One example is a court case: when a claim is made, the court has to examine the facts (the data) to decide the claim, and as part of the process (called discovery), the opposing claimant's lawyers will get access to the data. They're not supposed to use that data for anything unrelated to the case, though. It's not supposed to be unreasonable: obviously there's no way to decide a case without access to the facts, and so discovery is intended to ensure that the court has that access. There's nothing special about AI here, this holds in general. In the case of AI, it's a good idea (if you're concerned about privacy) to bring the model to the data rather than the data to the model, by using an open-weights model on your own machines, rather than sending your data to some site in a cloud somewhere controlled by another company, where it may be subject to something like this if e.g. the other company ends up in court.

Has anyone considered the possibility that Amazon actually wants people to work in the office for real actual working reasons, for example so that they can communicate with each other in person rather than only online? Amazon management is allowed to try to create the sort of working environment they think is the best for the company: that's the job of management. It seems quite plausible to me that Amazon sees people quitting as a result of return-to-office as undesirable attrition, and their main motivation is the actual benefits of in-person working. I don't see why it's necessary to conclude that the quitting is the goal.

Bezos addresses this Blue Origin meeting in his article. Worth a read. My impression is that Bezos, as he says, is worried about the lack of trust that many people (especially on the right) have of mainstream media, and is trying to shift the Post into being something that can speak to more than one political side. I'm not sure how possible it is to transform the Post into something that could do this. I can't think of very many examples of major news media that hasn't picked a political side, and the Post most certainly has, for many years now. It will take more than this non-endorsement decision to transform the Post in the way Bezos says he has in mind. A shift to the political center will be costly, as the Post will hemorrhage readers who like where it is now on the political spectrum. In fact, this decision itself has started the hemorrhage.

I don't find it hard to believe that standing always at your desk might not be good for you. Standing sometimes, however, is unlikely to be a problem. I use a Sit/Stand desk at work and while I usually use it sitting, I occasionally use it standing. I find standing is better when I am using the whiteboard, so I can move back and forth without switching from standing to sitting and vice versa.

ARM requires translation to run x86 software (especially games) so it isn't going to work well in all cases. Qualcomm's latest snapdragon X ARM cpu offers better performance per watt than most x86 offerings at the moment, so that pays off in laptops as better battery life. A laptop with fantastic battery life that can run most software but not a lot of games? Sounds great for some people. Not so fine for others. Just know what you're buying and it'll be fine. It's not as if you can't buy x86 laptops anymore if you want excellent software compatibility at the expense of a bit of battery life. My recent Thinkpad T14 has a fast eight-core AMD CPU and surprisingly good graphics. The battery life is fine, as good as I need, though not quite as good as these new Snapdragon laptops. I don't see the snapdragon option as a problem, just as a choice that doesn't work for me but maybe works for others. If x86 laptops go away entirely, that'll be a different story, but I suspect that won't happen unless ARM gets quite a bit better than it is now.

I rarely regret not having mod points but I wish I could mod this up.

The trackpoint, the little red thing in the middle of the keyboard, is the reason that all my laptops over the years have been thinkpads. I still have and use a Thinkpad 600X made in 2000, and have had many thinkpads since. Various people say that they don't use it and why shouldn't Lenovo get rid of it? Well, because some people (like me) use it all the time and love it. I even bought lenovo USB keyboards that have trackpoints: I am typing this on one right now. The few years when my main machine was an iMac, I used a lenovo USB keyboard with trackpoint on my Mac.Yes, I realize not everyone loves the trackpoint. That's why modern thinkpads have touchpads too, and they're good touchpads, I'm told, if that's what you like. I like the trackpoint and don't want to ever have to give it up.

Mainframes are useful, expensive, powerful I/O machines. They were doing visualization properly before it was a thing anywhere else. They are superb for running old, working code for many decades. IBM has been busy adding new features so keep their existing customers, and it seems to be working: most of their existing customers are probably not going to get rid of them, despite the ongoing expense. The real question is whether IBM can attract new customers. What is the value proposition to get a mainframe for a customer who does not already have one? Unfortunately this story doesn't really answer the question. If IBM wants to preserve their mainframe business in the long term, this question will need a good answer.

Model collapse when using AI-synthesized data is a thing, but model collapse is not necessarily inevitable. Work is being done on how to prevent it. Here's something current: https://x.com/KempeLab/status/...