The recording engineer only records (and maybe mixes) the audio that is generated, which is part of what I meant by "mechanical process", along with generating the audio. Dre could use AI to transform his ideas into digital audio tracks, obviating the recording engineer and the performers, and to then select and mold the results. This would still require talent and creativity, which was my point.

Caldera didn't buy SCO.

I didn't bother getting into the Novell situation or the fact that TSG didn't actually acquire the assets they'd have needed to do what they tried to do, since my goal was just to distinguish between SCO and TSG, but, yes, the details get pretty intricate.

It's almost certainly all operational expense, same as the salary paid, which means it's "written off". But "write off" doesn't mean "it's like you didn't have to pay it", it just means that it's subtracted from revenues when calculating profits. Net is that writing something off saves about 21% (the corporate tax rate) of the amount written off.

It's the same as your personal taxes, more or less. When you donate to charity, you get to subtract the donation from your adjusted gross income. If you make $100k and donate $10k, then it's as if you made $90k. Supposing (for simplicity) you pay a flat 20% tax rate, and you didn't make the donation, you'd pay $100k * 0.2 = $20k in taxes. Having made the donation, though, you only pay $90k * 0.2 = $18k in taxes. You donated $10k and basically got $2k of it back from Uncle Sam so the donation only cost you $8k out of pocket. But you still ended up $8k poorer (but the charity is $10k richer!).

The principle is the same with corporate "write-offs", though the mechanics are different.

Silicon Valley companies will pay the $100k. The positions typically pay $500k+ (base + bonus + equity + benefits) and companies are accustomed to spending tens of thousands of dollars in addition to deal with the H1B filings, and for other immigration services, including fees for green card filings, etc. An additional $100k is painful, but since it's good for 6 years, they're already paying around $3M, so it's only a ~3.5% increase.

I used it quite a bit and found it pretty decent. I never used a modem, though, so you may be right about that.

Many require you to use the phone app for MFA, even if you're using a web browser.

I guess there's the option of just doing all your banking in person, at a physical branch location... or at least an ATM.

Assuming for the sake of argument that what Dre does is creative and that he is talented, very little of making great music is about the mechanical process of executing on the generation and recording of sound. That's important, but there are a lot more people who can do that than create something that is new, and good.

Creation (in any medium) is about the ideas, and about the ability to recognize what works well and what doesn't. Given that, I could completely see AI being a useful tool for a creative, talented artist. They have to supply the ideas, in the form of prompts, and they have to recognize whether the results are good. The AI is just a time-saving device for the middle step of generating representations of the ideas.

We reached peak woke four years ago. DEI is dead. The corpse is still twitching in a few corners of academia, but that's about it.

I don't think the center left ever moved. The center left just didn't push back against the far left because why alienate them? I mean, the far left is perfectly capable of just deciding to sit out the elections. A non-trivial number did exactly that in 2024 because they were mad that Biden didn't take a hard line with Israel. And given that the GOP has turned insane...

IMO, the center left does need to push back against the far left. But I don't think the mainstream Democrats are going to get that message until they get smacked in the face with just how out of step a lot of those far left positions are. It's not going to be DEI/woke crap now, it's going to be the full on socialists.

But the only way for the voters to deliver that much-needed smack is by handing them a severe electoral loss. Which also isn't going to happen because the GOP has gone insane.

Likewise, the GOP needs to be smacked in the face with a solid loss to bring them back to reality. But that's not going to happen because DSA...

I think for the next cycle or three, we're going to be stuck with two increasingly-extremist, increasingly out-of-touch parties, and neither is going to get the kind of big loss needed to wake them up.

People don't do that. Even if they come to their senses the vast majority will just not want to talk about it... or else they're revise history and say they never actually supported what they support.

I meant restrict, of course.

They'll have the same problem with Rust, which also uses pointers all over the place (though it calls them references). The difference is that the no hopers will be unable to get the Rust code to compile, while with C they can get it to build... and then hope that valgrind can find the ways it's broken -- because it is broken. They might be able to get the Rust to compile by eschewing pointers and cloning every damned thing so the borrow checker will shut up, making their code so inefficient that they might as well just write Javascript, or else by using raw pointers in unsafe blocks -- but unsafe Rust is actually more unsafe than C, with a lot more rules you have to follow and things you have to be careful about, so their code will be far less likely to work than it would in C, even.

(For those who haven't looked into it, the rules the borrow checker enforces don't go away just because you're using raw pointers in an unsafe block. The borrow checker stops enforcing the rules but the compiler absolutely continues assuming they're properly followed. In other words, in unsafe blocks you have to be the borrow checker. C intentionally gives up some performance to be more forgiving. Rust. Does. Not.

For one example: The C compiler assumes that any pointer may be aliased and so generates extra instructions to read and write through pointers when if it could know that the pointer was the only thing in the system referencing that memory it could optimize those away. The Rust compiler assumes that if you have a non-const pointer to some memory, that pointer is the only way in the program to modify that memory, so the compiler is free to optimize away any unnecessary reads or writes, and to reorder things as convenient (you can get this behavior in C if you tag your pointers with strict). If you stay in the safe Rust pool, using references, the bounds checker ensures that the compiler's assumptions are always true. If you write unsafe, though... it's on you. Screw it up and your code will be broken in crazy-subtle ways.)

SCO, the Santa Cruz Operation, was a pretty cool company that had nothing to do with any of this crap. They sold a pretty decent x86 Unix throughout the 80s and early 90s, but ultimately were forced out of business because they found it hard to compete with the Microsoft marketing machine pushing Windows NT on one side, and free, open source Linux on the other side.

Unable to continue, they sold their Unix rights to Caldera Systems, renamed themselves Tarantella and were ultimately bought out by Sun Microsystems. It was Caldera that ultimately morphed into The SCO Group, then became a copyright troll hoping to score a settlement with deep-pockets IBM when it realized that it couldn't make UnixWare competitive either.

As we did 20 years ago, we should call the original company SCO and label the copyright troll TSG to keep them straight. They were not in any way the same company; there were no leaders or employees or buildings or anything in common.

I suppose. I find AI prose increasingly-grating. I have to read it all day while working and when I hit some web page that uses all the same obnoxious phrasing and structure I tend to just close the tab and look for a different source.

You missed a few. It's "worth being precise about" something that is "load-bearing". Don't forget to sharpen a distinction, too.

Meh, I suppose. IMO it's not worth optimizing in a car that's able to remember settings associated with a driver. In "dumb" cars, if the regular drivers are different sizes (I'm 8 inches taller than my wife) you need to be able to quickly and easily adjust the mirror positions, because you have to do it a lot. In my Tesla, I mostly find it annoying that the main rear-view mirror doesn't automatically adjust, requiring me to reach up and move it by hand. I think the best fix for that, though, is to replace it with a screen fed from a rear-view camera.

Again, this mostly seems moot with per-driver, automatically-applied settings. I have the air flow adjusted to my liking and never touch it. I never manually adjust fan speed, either, only the thermostat... and that I do by long-pressing the left thumb wheel then scrolling up or down. I have to long-press because I like the media controls to be the "primary" use of that wheel.

I think this claim is overrated, at least for me. I end up having to look quite a bit. Obviously once I've found the control I could look back at the road while I adjust it... but I often don't do that in vehicles with manual controls, like my truck. Again, I prefer to adjust the climate control by changing the thermostat rather than playing with temperature or fan volume by "feel", and I have to see the temperature display which is in the center console. I know what temperatures I prefer, though, so I look move my hand to the control, rotate it until it shows the temp I want, then return my attention to the road.

Similarly with the sound system. I know what volume I prefer and adjust until the display shows that level. On the rare occasion I listen to the radio I don't use the tuning knob, I use the "scan" button, which requires looking while I hit the button, then listening until the right station comes on, then looking while I hit the button again to stop the scan.

Different strokes, I guess. I quite like Tesla's system. I did prefer having a stalk for the turn signals rather than the buttons on the steering wheel. My wife likes the buttons... which is interesting because she prefers to drive manually a lot more than I do, so it may be that I just haven't given them a chance. She says she likes that she can signal without having to take her hand off the wheel. I use FSD pretty much all the time except when I'm driving for fun, which I basically never do in environments where I have to use turn signals.