Its probably due to AI, but not why you might think. The datacenter construction projects are having overruns and schedule delays, so there just isn't enough AI capacity for them to build and sell the AI solutions these 5000 people would work on, and they don't expect the problem to be solved for at least 5 years.

good luck digitizing an image and transferring it to a 30 year old embroidery machine on linux. Even if you use something like inkstitch you still need to export the file and run it thru the windows based HMI or find a way to copy the file to a 3.5 inch floppy disk.

Google is already tracking everything I do online. Data breaches happen all the time. Privacy is already dead for regular users. Scammers will continue to enjoy anonymity via gray market api proxies. Nobody can stop them.

A slashdot comment advocating for windows. Now I've seen everything.

Whats wild to me is think of the whole process that led to this. All of the meetings to decide to do it. Gather metrics for making the decision. Getting it on the backlog. Developing it. Testing it. Crafting the press release. Thousands of total man hours and probably a quarter million dollars. And nobody in that whole process was like "wait, is this worth it? Is this going to bring in more customers to the amazon ecosystem? Is this going to keep people on the platform?" Or if anyone did ask those tough questions.. they were ignored.

Wait.. you think vehicles with taller hood heights have more gadgets than ones that don't? What an interesting reality you live in!

If you want a good middle class job, the solution is easy. Simply don't tell prospective employers you are a citizen. You can do that, right?

You were buying that specific copy of the game, actually, just like movies and music.

Na, these are professional lobbyists. They love superpacs.

Can someone tell me what "grassroots" means? Just because grassroots funding is one way you try to get money, does that make your whole thing "grassroots"? I just googled the founders and I guess it says right in the summary, they are not an everyday tech worker. They are political operatives. I thought grassroots meant it was organized by the people in the trenches, so in this case, that would mean it was organized by everyday tech workers. If they are going to gaslight me about the group's origins, I have to wonder what else they are gaslighting me about. Maybe its not their fault, maybe TechCrunch is bad.... Either way, this sounds like astroturf to me. I'd be curious where they got $5 million dollars already, and how much of that goes to PAC administrative costs.

Sure, but this whole line of reasoning is irrelevant to what I'm saying. The problem isn't that China is influencing us. Just look at TFA itself. Its obviously part of an influence campaign to discredit objectors at local government zoning hearings by dismissing them as chinese sympathizers. If you think that influencing people so that they form opinions that are counter to their interests is bad, you shouldn't worry about ten thousand dollars worth of social media posts. You should worry about the US based company that makes 50 billion dollars a year doing it.

Whats more is that fundamentally it is reasonable for people to be influenced by ideas counter to their interests and without it society would cease to function.

I don't buy some things I see ads for, so yes, there are ads that don't affect me.

Do you buy everything you see an ad for?

Being able to entertain a thought without believing it is one of the things that separates us from the animals.

Controlling an entry in the blockchain ledger is not the same thing as controlling a banknote in physical reality. The control of the blockchain entry relies on others attesting that I have control over it, but for a physical banknote, I merely need to physically control it and don't need any 3rd party attestations. Note that this does not rely on any kind of mumbo jumbo about the economic value of either one represents.