Miss forecast? Announce layoffs and hopefully the stock recovers. That's a CFO playbook. I don't think they've been building their agent-centric architecture for long enough to know how many engineers are needed. I suspect they just needed a bump in the numbers, and let that weight fall on workers as usual.
Edge networks/CDN/firewall providers seem to be companies where they have dozens of engineers on call 24/7 to put out fires and apply fixes for tickets created by hundreds of thousands of clients. Automating some of that or all of that means less engineers are needed to manage resources, firewall rules etc. I don't know if they have a core dev team working on traffic pattern analysis/bot detection/network and infra tools, but I'm guessing all those engineers are safe.

I had an overwhelming feeling that a prostitute was in love with me. I didn't have any money to pay her though. I got an overwhelming feeling that she did not in fact love me at all. This somehow relates to the Chinese Room thing.

Nobody uses xAI except maybe X bots. I doubt X employees use X to do infra/code tasks. Companies are throwing $$ at anthropic for Claude Code (mainly) and I think Anthropic will lease compute power from anyone as long as it keeps their frontier models humming along.

LOL yeah that's terrible. Ads + content are not the thing I'm after with a fitness tracker. I want accurate tracking that is useful. My Garmin watch does a good job of GPS tracking, so I haven't given up on it even thought its not accurate in HR monitoring. I don't think the LED-based pulse meters are accurate in general.
But it does tell me if I set a new speed record, and I don't care so much about how much my "Body Battery" is charged or not. The Garmin app is thankfully ad free still I think.

No, and no. The speed doesn't change the pitch, like a tape player or record player would. It just condenses things until it becomes a stream of syllables. The corporate training forces you to watch the videos all the way through before answering the old trick questions that prevent you from ever getting better than 80%. It doesn't say you can't bump the speed up to the max though.

"..things like data synchronization and high availability are things I need to build into application logic. The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity."
Most IBM customers have been running the same system for 40 years or more and don't need to migrate to a new platform that has none of that mainframe goodness.

It all seems to stem from Peter Thiel and Y-Combinator. Everyone who went to school with or worked with Thiel is turning out to be Dr. Eldon Tyrell or Peter Weyland etc.

"The government exists for the benefit of the people,"
Well, it does, sometimes. That's the intent anyway.

Vinyl is making a comeback, man! Again! The podcast content is not important. Neither is 90% of the music out there. It's the 10% or 1% of music that makes people feel something that matters.
I'm really surprised the platforms (spotify etc) haven't collapsed due to the chaos. If LLM based agents became efficient at agency, there'd be a real big problem. With OpenClaw and things like that, it's a real problem. If someone makes that infinite loop actually efficient at getting things done, whoopsies. I don't know if Github's current availability problems are all due to the immense amount of generated code being pushed all the time, or the billions of tokens Copilot burns through per hour (trillions?) but it's a sign of what's coming for platforms. Bots have been around for a long time, but bots are finding more ways around their own limitations and being given access to things they shouldn't have.

I think a lot of people already did that with social media. Really, any time I start connecting with other people through platforms, I end up losing interest in whatever creative pursuit brought me there in the first place. Music platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud etc just ruin the experience of making music. And listening to music IMO. The internet was already on a pretty shit trajectory before the LLMs came along.

I'd rather listen to an audio book or music. The podcast to me has always been 99.999% trash. I don't want to listen to a person talking. Or 2 people talking. When people are having a conversation near me I usually move away. I don't want to hear it.
  I'm a sort of quasi-speed reader, but listening to speech compressed into 3 or 5x speed bothers me. If I have to watch corporate training videos.. then yeah 5x is fine.
I like fiction at its original speed, especially if the human doing the reading is a great voice actor. Simon Prebble for example. It's like watching a play in your mind. Podcasts are like overhearing someone's asinine conversations at the diner that you wish you could tune out.

It's artificial pseudo-intelligent turtles all the way down!

Look, we programmers work for corporations who make money selling access to the software we write. Billions of money. Smart companies know that more code faster doesn't mean software they sell is working. If software stops working a lot, customers go somewhere else. Nobody has a monopoly on software, but some companies have built the trust of customers or business partners in such a way that customers know they're getting the best the industry has to offer. LLMs can do the 80 part of the 80/20 split. You can't throw LLM generated code over the wall and trust that it's going to work; the execs are saying "Use AI responsibly" as in, Claude wrote it, but you're responsible for Claude's mistakes. If the tools/skills are built to handle the throwing shit over the wall, as i expect they are at Github to some degree, you get stuff like frequent outages of important systems, 84% uptime instead of 99%. Lose customer's trust, customers leave, money not big enough, company die. That said, Microsoft really lowered the bar on quality, so that the rest of us can get away with some pretty shitty stuff. Thanks MS!

AKA expert systems. There was a lot of optimism about what could be achieved by expert systems before the early 70's.
"Many researchers were caught up in a web of increasing exaggeration"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Not goblins or gremlins. You are more likely to be eaten by a grue in the dark. I don't see any mention of grues.