we give them limitless power
That statement has no relation to how human society works.
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.
Moderators are a special kind of special.
I got banned from the entire site for "circumventing" subreddit bans, which was because some of my alts were fed subreddits by the algorithm that I was not supposed to be on.
Your best engineers will be AuDHD, and AuDHD folk don't do well in these sorts of synthetic tests.
I can code in 20+ languages for over 12 different OS', write code that's good enough for CERN to run for particle accelerator data collection for a decade, have accelerated systems by an order of magnitude by understanding the poem space better than their previous engineers, but I am abysmal at exam style settings.
The software industry is riddled with SEs who write abysmal code but can pass a coding test easily. They're the folk that you have always needed to reject but didn't because they ticked a box.
"Point us to an post about a guy given a job he is clearly unqualified"
That's literally my point -- the post isn't about the person in charge of the ministry! It's about them testing Collabora and the users just having too many issues with it. I guarantee if it was the same exact story and the minister had a male name none of you would have done this deep dive and criticism.
And why do you think she is unqualified? The Minister of Digitization doesn't need to be an expert on digitization, they need to be competent at high-level management and understanding how laws and policies work. Did she do something wrong? Would someone else have somehow convinced the 37 or however many employees who tested it not to hate it?
Yeah but for some reason Slashdot commenters jump to targeting people mentioned in the stories when they have a female first name.
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.
He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.
How long before we start deploying remotely piloted and full autonomous drones to fly escort missions for cargo runs? There have been numerous instances of cargo theft from trailers, or hijacked full loads when drivers were doing their mandated federal rest stop. I would assume things would eventually escalate to wifi and anti-drone jamming for higher value loads, but those are extremely visible attacks (the signals equivalent of taking bolt cutters to your power line). At that point, you'd have actual armed security (possibly being provided by insurers) guarding high-value convoys against hijackers...
The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.
It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.
I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.
I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.
But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.
To the landlord belongs the doorknobs.
