Ever since I read Accidental Empires as a kid I knew that I wanted to work at a startup (or even found one) and live in Silicon Valley. That didnâ(TM)t really work out, even though I havenâ(TM)t fully given up yet (except the Silicon Valley part). I probably wouldnâ(TM)t be on Slashdot without him. Over the last decades I enjoyed his blogs, looked forward every year to his bold prediction, and was entertained by the crazy (but not successful) startups we he worked on. This year I was thrilled that he started blogging again, only to be shocked that even more terrible things have happened to him (heart attack, stroke and death of this son), and surprised that he was an ex-neighbour of and friends with Avram Miller, who writes an awesome blog I discovered to is year. RIP Bob. You will be missed.

I think you got the timeline wrong. IT work is technically easy to replace because a lot of their output can be achieved using APIs that usually already exist. The work itself may be more complex, but the integration isn't. But it's different for, say, a bookkeeper. They may have to deal with things like paper receipts, or do phone calls. You need to be able to digitize input and output for those jobs. That's the difficult and time-consuming part. But once you've done this, these jobs are far easier for a LLM to execute. That's why I think these jobs are even more at risk of being replace, but it will take years to digitize the whole pipeline.

Human customer services gets it wrong at times and someone needs to fix it :)

'merely by sending it the byte sequence "F0 0F C7 C8".' Ã am pretty sure that it wasn't enough to "send" the byte sequence. That assumes that you could trigger the bug remotely. Instead you would need to execute that code sequence, so you need permissions to install software. Still bad, but not a huge deal 20 years ago, when computers with Intel CPUs were almost always single-user machines.

Yes, Christmas is definitely still something you can celebrate when you don't believe in Christ. I celebrate Christmas without being religious at all, and I come from a family of at least three generations of atheists. Christmas trees, Santa Claus, family gatherings and gift giving don't require any religious beliefs.

But isn't wishing a Merry Christmas like wishing someone to have a great weekend? It feels odd when someone says it even though you're going to work all weekend, but it's just a custom and well intentioned.

I wonder whether it's really a lack of ideas, and or worse engineering staff. I think engineers are, on average, less passionate than they used to be. For many people in the industry it's just a career now, and not a passion. Especially in large companies like Intel.

I think they created bad press by firing him. Not only will many investors agree with the author, Google also confirmed it has a toxic work environment.

Having the truck paid off is not really an argument - if you sold your truck you could probably fund bus tickets for the rest of your life. Also, what about insurance? I'd guess that's in the same order of magnitude as the bus fare. I can fully understand not wanting to take the bus, and in your case it doesn't really sound feasible. I am driving a car to work every day even though it only saves me only about 20min - simply because public transport stresses me out while driving a car is relaxing for me. But money is usually not a good argument for doing that, at least for people living in urban areas with good public transport.

That doesn't change the fact that in most situations cars are more convenient and get you faster to your destination. Do you think that if there was only one model, and everybody could get that for free, people would drive less?

A car usually costs you several hundred dollars/euros per month. A ticket for public transportation is usually a fraction of that, maybe 100 dollar/euro. Why would you think that reducing that cost would make a significant difference?

That's a translation problem. This law allows companies to sue when competitors violate existing laws and regulations. Something like 'unfair competition' would be a better translation.

Can't speak for others, obviously, but I mostly only ready Slashdot on Google Reader these days. I just don't have the time for writing comments any more, and, frankly, I guess I am too old for flamewars and trolling by now :) Congratulations, Slashdot!

Should I really care which system is drawing the borders around my Firefox or Chrome windows? Only when I need special software, like Photoshop or Gimp or a Java IDE or a game, the OS or desktop environment still matters. Unfortunately KDE apps are not in most people's 'special software' lists.