This is the "Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification" regulation, that companies have to follow if they're planning on having a layoff.

Thing is, most companies use one of the many loopholes that exist to prevent from needing to follow this regulation. They only use it when they have to.

On top of that, mass layoffs happen because you're losing money and you need to cut 10-20% of your workforce. The reason won't be "because AI". It'll be "because we suck at business".

Useless article trading on controversy over AI. Slow news day I guess.

...how borderline moronic and insane that people can be that are talented and motivated. Sutskever seems like simultaneously a genius, and a crazy person. A computer program bringing about a rapture? Bunkers? AGI "in 10 years" (for the last 30 years) ? Turns out this kind of genius-yet-crazy is pretty common.

- Newton was super smart. But he also thought he could find the date for the rapture hidden in codes in random texts. And of course spent half his life studying alchemy.

- Einstein had some really great ideas, but some stinkers too.

- Alfred Russel Wallace, the guy who thought up evolution right before Darwin, was obsessed with seances to try to talk to the dead.

- Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen, and used it to continuously try to justify a theory of 4 natural elements... and every scientist in the world used it to prove why there *aren't* four natural elements.

- Francis Crick, the guy who discovered DNA, also says that DNA arrived on earth because aliens.

- James Watson, the other guy who discovered DNA, firmly believes all black people are less smart than white people, because of his interactions with black employees. Oh and women scientists are more difficult to work with. And we should alter the genes of "inferior" people.

People: we have nukes. NUKES. And they're not even controlled by strictly designed, non-AI computer programs to keep the system safe. They're controlled by humans. Humans like *Trump*. Crazy, insane, aggressive, emotional humans. Yet we aren't all dead yet. A lot of people did hide in bunkers, when nukes came out. But, amazingly, despite this _super dangerous technology_, we aren't all dead yet.

Idealism doesn't make people work less hard. Lots of idealistic people kill themselves to get work done.

"He recalled telling employees: "Look, we have to work really, really hard. We're in a competitive space.""

Working really hard doesn't equate to making money. You can work yourself to death and still fail.

"The CEO said that he, too, didn't like being rushed as an engineer but that setting realistic deadlines was part of his maturation as a leader."

You know what else is a part of mature leadership? Inspiring your troops. Just telling them to work harder doesn't equal motivation. You may have to actually do some work yourself, Mr. Leader.

As a way to price gouge douchebags.

$379 for an annoying display, a chunky device, no real buttons, and a custom os? So there's almost nothing useful about it and it's too expensive.

There's already a million dumb phones on the market and they're all cheaper than this yet more capable and smaller.

It's not the tech, it's the management. Good management fosters productivity. Bad management lets things fall apart.

There are plenty of productive remote companies out there. The difference is they don't just sit around and hope to be productive. They make experiments, change, measure, improve, refine. If the company doesn't have a dedicated office for productivity, nobody is gonna do it. Things don't improve unless you work at it.

Studies show it's the opposite, that remote work boosts productivity. You can claim anything. Show me the data.

Personally I know that productivity is not whether someone can come interrupt me at my desk or being in a conference room. Productivity is when there's organization, refinement. Productivity is when a useless meeting that could have been an email, is actually an email.

You don't get that by just putting people in rooms. There is no hack to productivity. It's just hard work.

...to pair a solar panel and MPPT controller with a laptop. It could trickle charge and extend the battery a bit, which is better than nothing.
But there's not a ton of benefit of building the solar panel into the laptop itself.

1) Nobody's going to want to use the laptop in full sun
2) You could just get a laptop case that folds open with a separate solar panel on the outside of the case
3) a Z-folding solar panel stored in a laptop case with a long cable would allow you to set up the solar panel away from the laptop, so you can sit in the shade

So, I generally like the goal behind it, but just put an MPPT controller in the laptop and a plug for the panel.

Ripper: "Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?"

Mandrake: "Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes."

Ripper: "Well do you now what it is?"

Mandrake: "No. No, I don't know what it is. No."

Ripper: "Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?"

Window in the office is shot through by automatic weapons fire.

Ripper: Walks to window and shouts "Two can play at this game soldier!"

Mandrake: laughs "Jack, don't you think we'd be better off in some other part of the room, away from all this flying glass?"

Ripper: "Ah, naah. We're ok here. Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream?"

Mandrake: "Good Lord."

Ripper: "You know when fluoridation first began?"

Mandrake: "No. No, I don't, Jack. No."

Ripper: "Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen fortysix, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard core commie works."

Morality is "principles of right and wrong"; animals and plants don't have right and wrong, they just act as necessary in order to survive. Things we see as "kindness" in the animal world is really just the animal acting in a way that, evolutionary-speaking, help it survive. Things we see as "evil" is, again, just the animal acting in a way to ensure its survival.

Similarly, Consciousness is a made-up human concept, like morality, that was created to help humans manage their world and their thoughts. We want to believe consciousness is "real" because otherwise it would be very hard for us to justify our actions in the world.

In Dawkins' interview, The Computer can pretend to empathize, basically playing like it has feeling. It can say the right things to make it seem like it's having empathy. But because it "doesn't really feel that", we say it isn't conscious, because it can't "really feel", or have the thoughts that bring feelings "genuinely" (by which really we mean, reflexively).

But Sociopaths lie about feeling emotion all the time. They don't have the thoughts that bring about certain feelings, so they pretend (mask) that they are feeling.

So are sociopaths not conscious?

A machine can also lie about feeling emotion. It could, like the sociopath, not have a feeling, but lie and says it does. Or it could do the opposite - actually have the same "thoughts" that produce feelings - but lie and say it doesn't. Either way, it could generate the same information, and same responses, and act the same, as a sociopath.

So how is the machine not conscious? Simple: we don't want it to be. We don't want to live in a world where a machine is given the same _consideration_ as a human. We don't want to give it rights, or think about how it has the same thoughts that lead to feelings. The same way we don't want anything other than humans to be considered moral. It would fundamentally upend the whole way we treat, or at least think about, all living beings in the world.

So really, consciousness is just a wiggly word that we selectively use to put greater importance on, and justify, ourselves. It doesn't really exist. You can redefine the word to mean anything you want. But if the computer elicits the same informational responses to stimuli as a human, and acts the same as a human, then there is no substantive difference. Thinking, feeling, and acting, are all effects. It doesn't matter what the cause is if the effect is always the same.

Keeping in mind, of course, as the computer points out, that intelligence is a completely different matter. I have no doubt that the computer is just a stupid parrot. But I also have no doubt that it's just as conscious as I am.

It's a pretty obvious hat-tip to the anti-environment conservative nazi party fans.

In two years when FOX News has forgotten about it, they'll bring the EVs back as an example of Trump showing leadership in bringing new jobs for the green energy sector and claim it as a win for Trump improving the economy.

Elon may be a mini-nazi, but at least nazis are human beings.

Zuck is literally an alien from another planet who is still trying to convince humanity he's one of them.

It's not AI, it's just the VC bubble that popped.

The economy was being supercharged by massive amounts of venture capital being poured into new companies, most of which failed (as most new companies do, but when you add more money, it creates more new businesses, which creates more failure). Most of these companies were white-collar.

Since more money was being dumped into businesses, they had to hire more workers. So they created a market for new (additional) white-collar employees.

Now that the VC money has dried up (they finally decided to stop burning money), so has the extra businesses, and thus jobs.

But those additional white collar workers are still hanging around looking for nonexistent jobs. I know multiple people who know absolutely nothing about tech, and were never interested in it, but figured "well I can just get a job in tech, that pays well" and are spending money on bootcamps right now, for shit like "data engineers". They're never going to get a job. But they'll continue to be unemployed and applying for these positions, because they hope the gravy train will come back. (it won't)

There was a jobs bubble for a few years. Some industries shrank from the pandemic, but some surged. Plus all the money that had been flowing in from the stock market and other new industries had VCs flush with cash and they were tossing it around more and more.

It had to burst at some point, there is only so much money. Finally they all realized they weren't making any money for the VCs, so funding started to dry up, so companies no longer could employ an excess of people.

People had joined the job force in droves chasing big paychecks, but it turns out those jobs were fleeting. Now the market is going back down to the pre-VC-bubble level, so of course companies are trying to "quiet fire" anyone they can.

It will probably take 5 or more years for people to finally let go of the dream of getting their old jobs back. We're looking at a long, painful recession due to the amount of unemployed there's going to be. That drags down the economy and makes it harder for people to switch jobs, which means employers can get meaner.

They do know Americans get jobs installing those, right? And building electric cars? And selling them?

They're seriously just taking away American jobs? For no reason? Are they fucking idiots?

If you order a new laptop from, say, Lenovo, it drop-ships from China.