As long as we're throwing out unsubstantiated claims - though this is completely true - I work for a company with effectively zero on-prem non-front-line workers. And not talking about the financial services sector or some niche mom-n'-pop, it employs a few thousand people (is that less than "many thousands"? Does it matter?) in an industry we all use but isn't particularly visible; I'd call it better than 50/50 you've personally received services from my employer.

When I say "virtually all white collar work", I mean exactly that; and while I recognize your hyperbole, I have no issue with it because it's still true, at least as a proof of concept. Your own company's failure to accomplish the same is a condemnation, not a counterpoint. Sure, let's not sugar coat this - Of course there are people who can't be trusted to work remotely. That's a completely different claim, however, than saying the job itself couldn't be performed remotely.

More importantly than our respective anecdata, I'm not the one initiating this claim. I provided a cite, take it up with Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Adam Grant as published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

/ And don't think I didn't catch that context switch between your third and fourth paragraphs... Unless you happen to be a manager of professional social media astroturfers.

I agree with you overall - I work because I need income to live, not because I give the least damn about my employer.

In my opinion, that's still drastically different than working because it gives me a captive audience of people highly motivated to kiss ass. Loyalty or not, I am invested in my work (as opposed to my job) - Doing it reasonably well is directly conducive to the company remaining solvent and me continuing to draw a salary.

Am I merely deluding myself by thinking doing the job well because it's in my and my coworkers' best interest, is at least a tiny bit more noble than doing it because I like having an army of sycophants at my disposal? Maybe, Maybe not; in the context of WFH, though - I still get my work done, while the Bill Lundbergs of the world have realized to their horror they're utterly irrelevant to my productivity.

Adoption is a function of existing adoption and existing availability of resources.

Extremely good OS' and truly amazing computers have failed, not because they were too expensive or had issues, but because they were perceived to be unpopular OR simply lacked enough software that could run on them.

Extremely bad OS' and truly awful computers have succeeded for the opposite reason.

Linux has an extremely good architecture, at least for machines that are mostly operating with CPUs. When most of the work is done by the GPU, it's less obvious that Linux provides the necessary mechanisms to manage resources and abstract away the hardware specifics. That doesn't mean I expect Linux to start fading, but I don't think a centralised OS is necessarily where things will go. However, the reason it hasn't done better so far is simply because potential users and potential software houses had a negative view of it (even though actual users were almost invariably loving the system).

Windows is crashing now not because it is a slow, bug-ridden piece of spyware (which it is, but users have never cared about that in the past), but because it is perceived in increasingly negative light.

They can get vertical samples from space and the ground. What they can't get from space or the ground is how the internals of a system evolve.

The problem with "models" in the abstract is that there are a lot of them and some of the time the thing you want is to know the same point relative to the system and not to the mudball.

Lots of people have gut feelings about AI, positive or negative.

Most of the AI research I can see people doing is focusing on single-element problems (such as finding counter-examples to a mathematics hypothesis) or solving very simple engineering systems (at most a dozen or so components). Most of the benchmarks are even simpler (write a short story at the level generally asked in English classes of primary school kids).

As a result, I think that people have developed either a very cynical outlook or a very optimistic look. Neither of these is entirely realistic, for the simple reason that no actual useful problem fits any of those descriptions.

Digging much deeper, I'm finding that when problems get into the hundreds or thousands of elements, even ChatGPT Sol 5.6 and Claude Fable 5 struggle badly to keep track of accurate relationships, let alone any level of detail.

If you want to solve a relatively simple coupled system (whether to use solar panels or direct solar heating, and which side of the house to place them), I'm sure AI is fine. If you want AI to write a five hundred word story detailing a conversation between Kim Possible, Rufus, and a smoked herring, I'm sure it could cope. Just.

If you want it to do anything hard enough that a human could do with an assistant, the tests I've been using (meaningful rather than synthetic problems) suggest you've developed a fantastically expensive blue smoke generator. We are going to need to see the inference engines developed for previous generations of AI, and the reasoners developed for the semantic web, and perhaps tools that haven't begun to be imagined yet, before AI can do anything non-trivial.

Covid showed us that far, far more of us can successfully WFH than were previously doing so.

Yeah, IT is the low-hanging fruit here; but we now know virtually all white collar work can effectively be done remotely; and going further, unless your job specifically requires direct interaction with the product or customers, there's little legitimate reason to burn an extra 20% of our waking lives commuting. And that just to hang out in a noisy and disruptive environment full of people more interested in being seen than in doing the job.

The noteworthy exception is, unsurprisingly, management itself. WFH has effectively demonstrated the problem was never us worthless lazy doers, it's been managers who consider visibility as their primary role all along (or worse, ones who "oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity."). But actually managing requires real skill. It's more palatable to leadership to conflate managing with browbeating than finding people who can actually manage.

It's much simpler than all that - Remote work proves management are exactly as useless and attention-seeking as we always suspected they were.

Leaders equating line-of-sight supervision with effectiveness found themselves without their primary management tool

having well-trained, well-motivated managers leads to massive boosts in productivity from hybrid and remote working models. The data support this argument from the flip side, too. Among companies that reported struggles with remote work, this issue was concentrated in firms in which leaders fumbled the management and coordination of their remote teams.

Remote and hybrid workers are struggling with leadership gaps that were never addressed when companies shifted out of the office. Many management habits remain rooted in on-site visibility rather than clear expectations and outcomes.

And most damning of all, The study concludes that narcissistic leaders oppose virtual work primarily because it threatens their access to power and status, rather than out of concern for organizational productivity. Shandell, Elliott, and Grant write that "leader narcissism is a critical but neglected source of resistance to remote work."

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.

This is an example of "overthinking," also known as "underthinking" or "over-concluding."

Based on your UID, you're old enough to remember when games actually worked at release and have no excuse for your ignorance. The current situation is one we allowed to happen with prebuys and a passive acceptance that all software is now effectively in beta forever.

It doesn't need to be like that and you damned well know better.

Banning teens from social media will never be widely successful - Because it doesn't need to be.

These laws have nothing to do with protecting kids, and everything to do with stripping adults of their privacy. The kids will find workarounds like VPNs or AI generated IDs, because they have no alternative; meanwhile most adults will grudgingly hand over their ID cards and subject themselves to completely untrustworthy biometric tomfoolery rather than go cold-turkey from their daily doom scrolling.

And the world gets worse for all of us.

The entire point of gaming consoles is that we can stick a game in, turn it on, and we're more-or-less instantly in the game. Absent that fundamental benefit, why exactly would anyone want yet another locked down computing appliance in their house?

I'm not sure Sony has really thought this one through - They're not just killing physical media (and more importantly, second-hand markets), they're shifting markets entirely. Rather than competing with only Microsoft and Nintendo, they're effectively making themselves nothing more than another AAA gaming studio combined with a lock-in to their walled garden of a marketplace.

Effectively, they're now competing with Steam rather than Nintendo. And unlike Sony, most customers like Valve.

That's what they're trying to claim, yes.

It's not a flawless argument, however. At it's broadest, a swap could basically refer to any financial transaction whatsoever. Courts generally frown on such promiscuous definitions, however, and the CFTC and SEC have both issued several clarifications on how they interpret that - For example, they don't consider insurance as a swap, even though by any reasonable interpretation insurance is absolutely a form of swap, and the way swaps are used in practice (prior to this gambling nonsense) is almost indistinguishable from a type of insurance.

That said, Minnesota and New York have a serious uphill battle ahead. Feds just love throwing around the "supremacy" clause, and rarely care whether or not their rules make the least bit of sense. NY does have a pocket ace, though, in that both Kalshi and Polymarket are both based in NYC; they may not be able to force the CFTC to play nice, but they can make life hell for both companies if they so choose.

It obviously gives us guarantees in terms of what the source will do and what the compiled code should need.

These do not provide memory safety, so memory bugs would not be solved by these. They will find unexpected behavioural issues, though.

The precondition and postcondition statements are not cunningly-disguised assert statements because they're not asserted at runtime. They're enforced at static check and/or compile time.

The policy hints mean that if the kernel is doing something you're not expecting, you find this when testing the code. Equally, though, it means that users cannot cause the software to venture into realms unknown through many of the usual attack vectors because those will require permissions that aren't there.

It would still be encrypted at rest. This was someone opportunistically walking off with a milk-crate full of hard drives, not a sophisticated attack on their network.

Of course, you could still be right - I've grown numb to how often people fail to communicate sensitive information over alternative secure channels. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see the instructions, including the password, written on a post-it note slapped right on the drive itself.