They had one job, many years ago, and at the time, they did it rather well. Now they can't do anything well: they've turned their search into AI slop (use DuckDuckGo or StartPage instead), Gmail is one of the world's top spam sources, Google Groups is garbage, their cloud outages keep increasing in severity and frequency, they've killed off too many projects/services to count, and their CEO is a fascist thug who kneels before Trump and obeys his every command.

If any part of your computing practice or operation depends on Google, it's time to move somewhere else.

"Why though? These aren't elected officials, they aren't political positions. Why should their information be any more public than who your employer is (assuming you don't work for yourself in a small family owned business)?"

Because those of us who work for governments (which I've done, twice) are public servants. We are accountable to our supervisors and their supervisors and so on, but that chain of accountability ultimately ends with the citizens of the city/county/state/province/country that pays us. We are required, by basic professional ethics, to always keep their best interests in mind, and -- in my view -- to put their interests ahead of our own.

In both the cases I mentioned above, not only was my basic personal information available to everyone -- name, address, position, etc., -- but so was my salary. As it should be: the people paying me have the right to know what they're paying me, and what they're paying me for.

You are incompetent... at AI. You've never even made a good faith attempt to utilize it productively. That is the definition of willful ignorance.

By definition, because it's vibe-journalism pandering to the fad-trend of the moment.

That article is in production for next week, I'm sure.

If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.

This reminds me of a segment I saw about 15 or 20 years ago on a show called "How It's Made" that played on a channel like the Discovery Channel (before all cable became reality TV).

The segment was "How CRTs are Made". I was kind of surprised that CRTs were still being made, but I was especially surprised by the fact that they appeared to be American workers in the factory. They were doing everything pretty much by hand with no automation, and they were making some rather skinny looking CRTs. The show never elaborated on what the CRTs were for, but they sure didn't look like TVs.

I dug into it a bit after that using some clues I noticed in the show, and found out that these were cockpit displays for F15s or similar military aircraft. It's probably an item that you just don't go changing the specs on, and they understandably aren't going to farm out to TCL. I can't imagine how much each one cost, though. And I certainly wouldn't try to rack it up as a "win" for any of GWB's or Obama's trade policies.

This helium crisis is nothing new. It's now 20 years since I wrote a column titled The looming helium crisis and little has changed.

It's interesting that you quoted that line, because Koenig delivered it with quiet menace. I've always wondered -- and maybe someone reading this knows -- whether JMS wrote it or Koenig himself added it, because it comes from another, much older sci-fi series: The Prisoner. My guess is that both of them saw it at one point or another, and thus were aware of the (repeated) line and its meaning.

However it found its way into B5's dialogue, it was an excellent choice -- another of the many fine bits of writing, along with "...because I have poisoned your drink" and "He is behind me; you are in front of me." and of course: "Nobody listen to Zathras".

It's not the devil; it's just garbage and is only used by inferior people who don't know any better -- and are too lazy to learn. In that sense it's useful: it allows us to easily identify the incompetent and stupid, which is why I use it as an interview question. (Seriously. It's just one in a list, and it's not the first or last, so there's no particular indication that it's a key. Of course I permanently reject any applicant who answers it incorrectly, but one thing I've noticed is that these people also tend to be seriously lacking in other areas as well. For example, a couple of months I interviewed someone who considered themselves a senior Linux expert but couldn't write a single line of awk(1) -- which is pathetic. I didn't hire them but I did recommend some remedial reading to them in the hopes that they might invest some minimal effort in self-improvement.)

The solution to that is AI. Finally, one-on-one tutoring becomes feasible.

AI to me is kind of like a self driving car... it would be one thing if the car actually drove itself and didn't require a licensed driver to sit behind the wheel and dedicate their full undivided attention to making sure the car doesn't do something stupid... yet no such thing at present exists.

You can take an Waymo in any of these cities:

• Phoenix metro, Arizona
• San Francisco Bay Area, California
• Los Angeles, California
• San Diego, California
• Denver, Colorado
• Las Vegas, Nevada
• Dallas, Texas
• Houston, Texas
• San Antonio, Texas
• Austin, Texas
• Atlanta, Georgia
• Miami, Florida
• Orlando, Florida
• Tampa, Florida
• Nashville, Tennessee