Even the summary mentions that this is different to the "shark skin" effect. People have no attention span these days.

We've had code-generation technology for decades. Are you saying no one can read HTML because we have tools for that as well?

Your theory is only valid if they want to do last year's output and 1/20th of the cost. In nearly all historical examples of productivity gains, unless they were hiring large masses of the mindless, the productivity gains were used increase output more than cut costs. As many have pointed out, this is AI-washing. They were already going to lay off these employees.

Why would Oracle lay everyone off vs use these tools to overwhelm and crush all their competitors? Is there really no room to expand? No new projects to try? Are all these tech companies happy with last year's revenue and have they saturated their markets? Their investors are HAPPY with market stagnation at lower costs? NO!!!! That's not how publicly traded companies work. They want growth growth growth until there is no more to be had.

AI is a complex topic. It definitely boosts some productivity, but far less than advertised. It will cause job loss, but far less than feared. Most of the hype is bullshit, but there's real substance as well. Some of the layoffs were AI related...but most were just CEOs using it as an excuse to hide economic headwinds and their mistakes.

I am on /. because I fucking hate sports. Some are kinda fun to play...in the same way Brussel sprouts CAN be tasty, but they will never match a good burger or donut. I don't enjoy watching them. I'm a nerd. I don't give a rat's ass. Watching the game swilling beer and chomping fried foods waiting for the heart attack to take you isn't my idea of a good time. That's what the bullies who beat me up as a child did.

But my perspective aside, I am neutral on performance enhancing drugs. You know that probably every Marvel actor who took his shirt off was on them, right? Sure, Tom Holland wasn't juicing to the level Dave Bautista was, but there have been many leaks that major movie studios hire trainers to give them P.E.D.s. It's not a secret, the execs knew and encouraged it. They want Tom Holland to be ripped with a below 5% bodyfat and nice physique. And whatever they say is bullshit...yoga and running alone won't get you there. That wasn't a really good personal trainer alone and eating protein and vegetables that got them to 3% bodyfat with 16" arms. Ever notice how actors today look better than actual Olympic athletes with their shirt off? They're more toned and lean....and most are older.

Someone natural working out to look like a B-tier Marvel hero?...their body would be DEVASTATED. Until a few years ago, I didn't realize that every jacked bodybuilder and hollywood star was max juicing. I just figured they were so much better at working out than the rest of us. They absolutely are working hard. But if you worked out like John Cena for 6 months, you wouldn't be able to walk or get out of bed.

So...I don't care much. I don't care about sports, but I know I'm in the minority...let those people decide with their wallets and eyeballs. I know that I enjoy watching movies with big buff heroes injecting super-physiological doses of drugs into their body so they look amazing. Or even just normal actors who are good at their craft looking like Ben Affleck or Matt Damon looked in the early 2000s instead of how Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson looked in the 70s...or going the Antony Starr route and wearing a padded suit...which I don't mind because...FUUUUUCK is that guy good!!!!....really a testament to the craft...but it might be interesting to one day see Homelander out of his costume (which they never do because Anthony Starr is like 150 pounds, soaking wet). I enjoy watching movies with men with unrealistic bodies, ESPECIALLY at their age, since the acting talent and opportunities tend to surface WELL beyond their athletic physical prime.

Boeing has a mechanical linkage between the pilot's and first officer's controls. It's designed so that you can break it in an emergency by forcing the controls. The audible "dual inputs" warning is an Airbus thing where they use sidesticks with no mechanical linkage.

Not only they crave it, but also, the job itself demands it.
And part of the attention is the severity of the Bug, with security bugs with working exploit code being the "best-est".

So, In the same address, Torvads asked security researchers to not publish exploit code, but this goes against the incentive structure of security research including payment.

Luckily, fixing that problem is easy. Linux is taling about a (current) private security mailing list, and a (future) Public list.

Well, if you are a security researcher, subbmit your bug to both lists, first to the private mailing list, with the example exploit code, then to the public list, sans the exploit code, but with an adendum that says "exploit code avaialable in the private security list under security bug report # xx.yy.zz". When the security hole you reported is patched, and the details of the private mailing list become public, and the exploit code is shown to work, the infosec researcher (if s/he responded and did follow-up work) will be dully cretited, which is nice and works for everyone.

JM2C YMMV

You think 1,393 miles is impressive? I did 7,950 kilometres last year - half marathon distance every day. Almost made 8,000, but not quite. I'm taking it a bit easier this year, though.

The synology i bought in 2016 had no hardware media codecs or GPU. So the plex pass had no inherent advabtage.

Also, it came with VideoStation. At the time plex did some things that videostation did not, and videostation did things that plex did not (in particular, folder view, and android app at no extra cost), so they complemented each other nicely. I used both.

Now, if you re-introduce video station, it is half-broken, and plex has deviated from local media streaming to streaming a la carte + live tv + games + rentals...

I'll keep using Plex becuase i am familiar with it (warts and all) until 2028 when my NAS is due for a change... Then, jellyfin it is.

To save vertical space. But bigger and more pixel rich monitors took care of that.

My funniest use of a vertical taskbar was for a cousin who broke the upper left corner of his laptop's LCD. Vertical taskbar + Wider taskbar saved that laptop from the scrap heap, as the crack only obscured the start button and some pinned crap.

I did not caught on to Sysadmins moving the taskbars around so that when they remoted into machines, they knew, at a glance, exactly where were they (taskbar on the left: My machine, taskbar on the bottom, user machine, taskbar on the right: server, taskbar on the top, VERY SPECIAL MACHINE HANDLE WITH CARE).

But these are niche uses of a movable taskbar. For office drones (which is the bread and butter of Windows client editions), the best way to go is to have the taskbar in a fixed location, ease of training, ease of documentation, ease of support, ease for two people huddled in front of one screen.

I understand why microsoft did it. And I understand why they are backpedaling.

Wavetable synths gave you a different set of trade-offs due to limited sample memory. You ended up with low effective sample rate at low pitches. If you compare Super Famicom and Mega Drive soundtracks, you can see the composers tailored them to the systems' strengths. For example, Mega Drive games could do a more convincing rendition of saxophones and brass. The Roland Sound Canvas was what most PC games with MIDI soundtracks were developed against. It was the first proper General MIDI synth module, and did a pretty decent job. Everything else was a fallback mode. The next big step forward was Yamaha's AWM.

I think this may be because in the 60s there was far less violent crime, so the only murders out there were domestics which are trivial to solve. It would interesting to test the idea.

This isn't true. After peaking in the '90s, violent crime is basically back down to '60s levels now. The generally accepted hypothesis is that the rise in violent crime was mostly due to burning fuel containing tetraethyl lead, and the subsequent drop is mostly due to reducing exposure to lead (and other heavy metals).

So I'm using GPT 5.5 on a $200 a month plan, and it works great. I haven't hit my limits yet, but I'm using it actively with multiple agents running in multiple windows on multiple projects. I've gotten down to about 40% left in a week. It uses much less tokens than Claude, and it's much more efficient.

"AI" proponents keep touting language translation as something LLMs do well, yet they're absolutely dreadful at it for pairs of languages I'm familiar with. "AI" translation cannot get pronouns right when translating to/from languages where pronouns depend on the relationship between the speaker and listener (e.g. Korean and Viet). Admittedly it can be ambiguous if you only have a single sentence, but "AI" doesn't get better with more context. Give it enough material that it's unambiguous to any human, and the "AI" won't even be consistent between sentences in a paragraph. For another example, it can't deal with implicit topic when translating from Japanese. Someone recently posted an "AI" translation of a Japanese video game that never had an English release, and this was really obvious right from the intro. There's a guy telling you what you need to do, but the "AI" translated it as him saying what he needs to do. Once again, it's basic stuff that no human would screw up. You're trying to claim it works at "a super-human level" when out here in the real world, it screws up stuff that any kid who's been to a few language classes can get right. It makes the rest of your enthusiasm for "AI" seem completely misplaced.

the US is not trying to make the rest of the world dependent on US manufacturing by undercutting everyone and putting them out of business

That's exactly what the Bretton-Woods agreement was supposed to do - make US exports artificially cheap to try and put everyone else out of business.

"One time" is far from reassuring. Sometimes the AIs get it right. However, if I am sending an AI to it, it's too complex for me to figure out at first glance. I am typically sending it complex projects with a lot of steps to figure out. AI is a nice upgrade from Stack Overflow and a powerful tool. However, in order to justify the AI-washing layoffs, it has to be a lot more reliable than "one time." I get failures daily.

I have not been impressed with Claude's unit tests. They're usually stupidly verbose. I've thrown away entire batches of code when I see they take a simple function and start unit-testing the Java getters and setters...even worse, they don't clearly indicate they're doing so...and it looks like actual business logic until you look closely. I would love to have Claude write acceptable unit tests. That would save me time and help me make more robust releases. It just fails pretty reliably on those.

AI is not useless, we just have to be realistic. It's like self-driving cars. Someday I am sure they will be great, but they're not really great now. They are still an experiment to play with, not something changing our lives.