1) Just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you should. Not everybody wants to install the Walmart app on their phone. 2) If you think only people who drive to Walmart shop there, and there are no Walmart's anywhere near public transport I have no idea what planet you are on, but it isn't planet Earth.

I'm sure that will comfort the grieving family. Q: "What happened? Why didn't you answer when I called 911? Why are they dead?" A: "Don't worry ma'am ... it's just a design and implementation issue. I'm sure they have the system still working in Heaven. I hear they don't have any idiots who think that blaming everything on the engineers makes sense up there"

Microsoft never follows anyone's conventions, usually reversing the standard when possible. They use "\" rather than "/" as filesystem separators, for example. In this case there is StandardCamelCase, and then there is microsoftCamelCase. Microsoft does not capitalize the first word or syllable, but they redefine the term CamelCase to "PascalCase" despite the fact that it originated in earlier languages like Smalltalk and Mesa, and just call microsoftCamelCase CamelCase, despite the fact that it can be confused easily with Hungarian Notation (staring the variable name with a type specifier.) They do all of this to try to keep market share, so that it becomes more uncomfortable to move to systems that actually follow standards. If all if this is confusing, that was Gates' intent when he began this kind of shitfuckery 4+ decades ago. His legacy of standing in the way of progress in computer technology continues into the present day. It is *never* about what is good for the customer or developers, and *always* about what generates more money and greater lock-in.

Users decide what applications they install and use, or they get a system administrator to do so. Since you said "your computer" it is fair to say that "you" are both the user and administrator. You can't explain it further because you don't even understand what you are saying. If you are running an OS that forces you to use AI then you are using the wrong OS. Furthermore, you aren't force to set up your applications to use AI running locally on your computer. Finally, you can enable and disable service, even on Windows. If you are going to try to snarky at least be right.

It would absolutely have been more accurate for me to say "even more extremely dangerous." Good point.

I'm not sure you know what a user is or what it is that a user uses.

"So by that logic your computer became a piece of crap over night because an application platform deemed it so."

What logic? I can't find any of it in your comment.

This question doesn't require multiple paragraphs to address (wrongly, I might add), because there is already a single sentence that you should have heard in a high school civics class you either never heard, forgot, or didn't understand: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety," - Benjamin Franklin

First of all, this is directly related to the threats presented by AI and AGI. It's called mass surveillance that leads to a police state. You don't think that AI is a major component in modern mass surveillance technologies? Secondly, even if I concede that global warming is the bigger threat, so what? Are you incapable of understanding more than one problem at a time? Lastly, you are so put out by the cost of having stories on this topic in the feed that you took the time to post in the comments section.

How do you propose to make an issue of US Constitutional violations a local issue? Do you propose to make the Constitution opt-in with each state, county, town and villa deciding for themselves? I understand your point, and it sounds great ... until you think about it. The Constitution protects us from exactly that problem. If it didn't then outsiders traveling to and through certain sections of this country would be very dangerous indeed.

Y'gotta stop cutting education and vaccine funding.

Freedom of speech exists exactly BECAUSE speech is dangerous, particularly to entrenched powers.

The reason why it's enshrined in constitutions is because the people that wrote those constitutions wanted the citizens to be in charge, for them to push back and reform governments when they went astray. Protesting and reporting are usually especially enshrined because we know that without those rights, the people are oppressed. The first thing that goes when authoritarians come in is an abrogation of those rights, SPECIFICALLY because authoritarians know that free speech is inherently dangerous to their grasp on power. Only by keeping people in the dark and spreading propaganda can they retain their hold on power.

We saw it happen with Trump and Fox News and all of his toadies buying up TV stations and news networks. If speech isn't powerful and dangerous, then why are so many people concerned with the ability to control it?

And yet, even in these societies with free speech, there have also been limits put on it, because there's no way to run a society with unfettered free speech. We've long since decided that libel and slander are illegal, you can't make threats of physical violence to other people, conspiracy to commit [some crime] is itself a crime.

So I dunno man, how is it that you think that there's no such thing as hate speech? A violent threat can send someone into hiding very nearly as effectively as actually attempting the violence. It was just speech, but it still had an effect. Can you really possibly believe that words have no weight? That speech has no consequence? Have you never read any history, particularly of charismatic cult leaders or politicians?

People are spurred to action by words all the time, and you can't just dust your hands of it and say, "hey, I was just saying words over here that made them believe that that guy was coming to kill their kids in the night and poison their water and salt the earth. Of COURSE I was as convincing as possible and they believed me and attacked him, but that has NOTHING to do with the things I said!"

Your claim is absurd on its face. There's literal millennia of evidence.

My company instituted it because it was too hard to compete on salary alone. I make a bit less per year, but my hourly rate is now higher.

It's been an amazing experience. 4 days a week is more than 20% better than 5 days a week. I'm excited to work on monday, I don't feel like I've been through the wringer on thursday. I would guess that averaged over a whole year, I get at least as much work done on the 4DWW, though for shorter periods of time, 5 days WILL generate more work (much like crunch will also generate a lot of work in a short amount of time, but as it goes on, productivity drops).

But 4DWWs have nothing to do with AI. We mostly don't use it (I work in games; the discussion is fraught, so we mostly just don't use it at all, and most of us at the company want very little to do with it) and our productivity is just fine.

Something that I think a lot of people miss, particularly with programming, is that when you use agents, you effectively make programmers into managers whether they want to be or are good at it or not. Making programmers outline broad tasks and review the results and iterate without writing code themselves is manager work. It's all the worst parts of programming and none of the stuff that we actually like. And not everyone wants to be a manager! I'm a programming lead, and I enjoy it, but it's hard and it uses my brain in a completely different way that I would not have been interested in when I was 25. I may not have even been ABLE when I was 25.

AI doesn't relieve you of any work, it just changes the nature of the work away from the actual job description. Of course nobody's switching to the 4DWW--you just made everyone's job harder and worse, so everyone is always behind.

I work a 4 day work week. My pay is slightly lower than at my last job, but my hourly rate is higher. My company started offering it years ago because they couldn't compete on salary, but they realized that some of us would really just like a better life, and that was something they could manage.

The 4DWW isn't as transformative to me as remote work, but it's been so good for me. I'm excited to get back to work on Monday, and I don't ever feel like any part of the week is a slog. I'm happy to occasionally sit down and fix something on the weekend quickly because my brain happened on the answer while I was relaxing.

If we all must work in this capitalist hellscape, 4 days a week is much more than 20% better than 5.

How did we get from the question of if the story was appropriate for Slashdot (which it definitely is) to how the comment section turned into a bunch of racist rants? A series of events happened. A man is dead. If people can't focus on the facts, choosing instead to assume his color is somehow the reason, that is on the racists, not the editors.

There's a reason the aphorism, "the Pen is mightier than the Sword," exists. You cannot simultaneously hold that the only power is physical power but also believe ideas or ideologies are powerful. Of course they are. It's the basis of religion and politics writ large.

People can be convinced that an ideology is correct, and then do terrible things in the service of that ideology. It's not that complicated.