Your argument all rests on absolute average wages ($7 vs $30) and ignores that the overall purchasing power for Americans hasn't increased for decades (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/).

A big part of this is that core essentials haven't gotten that much cheaper overall (and some are rising rapidly). Food is more expensive and energy and water costs are growing and have largely kept pace with inflation. The cost savings in other goods just is not enough to meet the increasing size of a down payment to secure a home.

Housing has been outpacing inflation for quite sometime. This is includes rent as well as home costs. As the overall cost of housing becomes a larger precents of wages, it takes longer and longer to get a house and fewer and fewer households have the ability to save enough to meet those rising costs. Especially as rent is outpacing inflation and wages as well. (https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/rent-house-prices-and-demographics).

There is the trend of more and more single family housing being acquired by private equity to then rent out that puts additional pressure on costs and inventory and again, causing housing to outpace inflation even considering amenities. (https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/09/09/g-s1-87699/private-equity-corporate-landlords).

Garages are cheap, A/C is an affordable add on to central heating and since central heating is often demanded by code, it makes little sense not to install it.

Add things like the costs of childcare growing in costs as availability is going down. (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/01/rising-child-care-cost.html)

There are ton of headwinds in this economy that makes delaying or not having a family make more and more sense for an ever growing set of our population.

I personally think a lot of these need to be addressed with programs to increase the supply of affordable housing, eliminating corporate ownership of single family houses and additional controls to prevent rent and landlord abuses.

I also think universal health care and subsidized child-care would reduce the risk of accumulating crippling debt while put more money in people's pockets and giving them to ability to shift positions and increase wages without the threat of losing critical benefits for their family.

So, yea, just a woke snowflake here. Sorry if you made it this far.

Just so long as they can accumulate all the actual money and control for resources and dole them out to us as they see fit, because, governments, who needs that hassle, right.

There are great reasons for labor reform that have zero to with AI. Four day work week, mandatory overtime pay, the list is long. But, less billionaires, can't have that.

One issue with the overall architecture (which is just statistical prediction) is that it can't really provide useful insights on why it did what it did. Which was requirement of expert systems back in the day.

Honestly, it seem like building better static analysis tools for finding these kind of problems is a better way to go overall. The tools could be more relaxed on reporting potential issues and allow more false positive versus focusing on reporting things that are certainly bugs, but still be based on a set of rules and patterns that can be used to explain the error in a consistent way.

If the study reported on how much time was spent using Windows overall versus Macs. Because that makes a big difference. If there was, say, ten times the usage of Windows than MacOS, then affects the overall uptime.

Without this, the numbers don't have the context to really make a lot of conclusion. Not to mention that this probably all self-reported numbers as well.

If this is what they put so much energy into - internal presentations! - then the company must have a pretty poor culture. The companies who will beat Uber put their effort into engineering, with CEOs smart enough to know who's actually doing the good work by talking to employees in unstructured settings, not sitting through presentations. The whole thing has the whiff of "at Uber we work really hard at convincing our bosses that we're being productive."

Nothing like being a junior developer at a company whose business relies on getting rid of roles *exactly* like yours.

Then again, there's completely useless stock options that you can pretend will pay off big time.

So, this argument all pivots on this theory of extended mind by two philosophers, a theory that (looks around) isn't widely accepted at all in their specialized field of studies.

Let's compare this to the growing body of negative effects of constant access social media on children and the related ethical concerns.

If Gen Z decides to learn how to use maps more, keep written journals and do basic math with a calculator and make friends in real life that's a overall win for everybody.

They will still have access to computing when they need to use it. Again turning computers back to their roots as a tool, not as a gateway for serving constant distraction and near-zero-quality media is fine by me.

Yes, those are the arguments that some are making about AI. Frankly, they are more credible than a CEO essentially saying that they are hurt some people don't just trust companies like them to do the right thing. With the numbers being thrown around, skepticism is required here. It's bad enough when our government throws massive money at military projects with very dubious actual value. But the potential labor disruption and further accumulation of wealth at the very top that is possible with AI, it is irresponsible not to have the highest level of oversight and regulation in this case.

Oh, and some of the people you are making unhappy are the very demographic that brought NVidia to where they are. If AI is so important, NVidia should just commit 100%. Announce you are leaving the consumer and low-end workstation GPU market entirely.

It's a trending topic that's easy to get quite a few clicks from, so I expect a lot more articles and content to continue for quite some time.

The biggest advocates of Linux don't want the "year of the Linux Desktop" and the homogeneity that it would bring. It's the choices that they have that makes the platform interesting to them.

Of course, that means most users have to make choices they don't want or even understand.

Won't create a demand for highly memory optimized versions of applications. The costs for rewriting that code in desktop specific environments is very high and the inertia behind web frameworks and applications is so large that nobody wants to move to something better, despite how bad the current frameworks can be.

Most users expect more out of all their applications. Application frameworks have to deal with monitor scaling, use very high quality font and vector rendering and stay highly responsive. They use more animations to provide a better visual experience. This means you have to cache more complex visual assets and have more memory overhead. Older X11 and Win32 applications just look bad in comparison.

This is all due to a irrational land grab for computing resources that just happens to make it more expensive to build or even own your own computer.

Developers aren't the problem here, it's the out of control economic forces that want to consolidate even more wealth and resources in fewer and fewer places on the backs of increasingly strained labor.

Chinese models are open source and open weights, so even if they put in all kinds of ideological filters into their models, these filters are easy to remove if you run the models on your own hardware. If Slashdot stands for anything, it is to root for open source alternatives, which now - weirdly - means rooting for China's AI projects. If the CCP get spooked and ruins this good thing, that would be bad for all the people, not just for the Chinese people.

Let's go Slashdot oldsters, with our low-six-figure account numbers, making Monty Python jokes! Maybe 37 is not old, but we are! Hahahaa! Has it been The Year of Lunux on the Desktop yet? Maybe 2026 will be it!

What these groups need to do to protect vulnerable people is to make sure we build new powerplants soon. It's so sleazy of them to act like they're trying to protect customers from paying high prices for energy when for decades they basically caused energy prices to get so high by having a problem with basically every possible way of generating energy.

To potentially be in a worse place than you started. But, hey, sunk costs and all that. Honestly, what is the savings really going to be after Google cranks up your per-user costs when they have captured enough of your data so that you can't switch back?

Microsoft makes money on Windows and Office because it is good enough for the job and has a decent ROI. It's their core business. Sure, they want you on Azure. But, hey, you want on-premise? Happy to sell it to you as well.

Google Workspace could be left to languish in the dust and it wouldn't affect the bottom line that much. Bonus, all your documents are strung around on their servers.

And no, you aren't getting rid of those spreadsheets anytime soon. They can take full advantage of a local machine and they make sense to the people that use them. It costs less to just keep the machines and licenses up to date versus trying to make an application that is essentially a specific spreadsheet, but has to run on pretty expensive computing resources for no actual gain.

Being able to run a local client on a local copy of a document is a good thing.

 

Right now, we're noticing that Chinese companies are offering us exploitative deals, and we don't like it, and think that tariffs will fix it. But with tariffs in place, we will find that now it's American companies that are offering us the exploitative deals, but they can charge more now, because they're insulated from outside competition. What I'm saying is that intranational capitalism is just as sleazy and brutal as international capitalism - only less efficient, because it's less competitive.