If this is what they put so much energy into - internal presentations! - then the company must have a pretty poor culture. The companies who will beat Uber put their effort into engineering, with CEOs smart enough to know who's actually doing the good work by talking to employees in unstructured settings, not sitting through presentations. The whole thing has the whiff of "at Uber we work really hard at convincing our bosses that we're being productive."

Is that really true? Many of the layoffs I've seen over the past year have been legitimately "removing layers", purging loads of fat in middle management.

Companies constantly go through cycles where they stretch to a very vertical structure with a manager for every three employees (exaggerating, but only slightly), and then there's the periodic flattening where they prune it out.

Chinese models are open source and open weights, so even if they put in all kinds of ideological filters into their models, these filters are easy to remove if you run the models on your own hardware. If Slashdot stands for anything, it is to root for open source alternatives, which now - weirdly - means rooting for China's AI projects. If the CCP get spooked and ruins this good thing, that would be bad for all the people, not just for the Chinese people.

Let's go Slashdot oldsters, with our low-six-figure account numbers, making Monty Python jokes! Maybe 37 is not old, but we are! Hahahaa! Has it been The Year of Lunux on the Desktop yet? Maybe 2026 will be it!

What these groups need to do to protect vulnerable people is to make sure we build new powerplants soon. It's so sleazy of them to act like they're trying to protect customers from paying high prices for energy when for decades they basically caused energy prices to get so high by having a problem with basically every possible way of generating energy.

Right now, we're noticing that Chinese companies are offering us exploitative deals, and we don't like it, and think that tariffs will fix it. But with tariffs in place, we will find that now it's American companies that are offering us the exploitative deals, but they can charge more now, because they're insulated from outside competition. What I'm saying is that intranational capitalism is just as sleazy and brutal as international capitalism - only less efficient, because it's less competitive.

I agree with you about NATO states paying for mercenaries to defend Ukraine. There are many experienced fighters in Africa and the Middle East, and it's likely that their services could be bought at a reasonable price. Without more soldiers in the field, Ukraine's front is doomed to collapse.

I love AI and I would and could pay for it if I had to, but why would I pick OpenAI to pay? Their product is not really better than their competitors' products, and sometimes it's clearly worse. They have the advantage of being the first mover in their field, and that gives them inertia with low-information customers - the new AOL.com. But apart from that, they have huge debts and not much else to distinguish them. Their best employees had left, and their former partners have become wary of the way they operate. Projections of their future profitability must be based on the expectation that their AI will figure out some better business plan than what the OpenAI humans have come up with!

So now China is making too many electric cars and solar panels, compared to domestic demand. Their solution was to export that stuff. Now we want to impose tariffs on those things, so that global demand for Chinese stuff is artificially depressed. But when China loses markets for their stuff, what will they make with their comically overbuilt production capacity? Not solar panels or clean cars, but weapons. It turns out tariffs don't stop the "export" of bombs and missiles and attack drones to Taiwan.

Really good comment. I think I basicallly already thought this, but the way you put it is clearer than how I was thinking about it, so thanks!

Wow, I haven't seen that name for quite a while. I remember as a kid really rooting for BeOS and hoping they would challenge Windows. I'm still a bit nostalgic for those days!

That's incredibly hypocritical that this hosting site wants money for "their" when they never paid a cent for the data that helpful users posted there. If they're ready to take money for the data, they should pay money for the data.

I think it would be awesome if the scientists in this town would get together and talk, and then they make some CAD files and start building stuff. If you sped up the world at like 1000x speed, maybe they'd actually make something useful!

Dammit, I want underpaid serfs to do all my labor. I tell you, civilization started collapsing when technological contrivances started doing the jobs of the underclass. Can you believe that dishwashers are now appliances and not some repressed laborers? How am I supposed to feel posh when I'm not lording it over someone who's beneath me? This idea of machines animating the backgrounds of my anime is just another step down the slippery slope. That's a job for poor kids in an Asian sweatshop, not an usuffering AI! In the end, when commercial machines replace even my butler, driver and maids, being in the ruling class will come to mean nothing at all!

I have, without any teaching assistants, organized and administered high-stakes examination interviews. Each meeting used up about 30 minutes of my time in my office, which is not too different from how long it takes me to read and grade a written test or term paper. This was in a large-ish US university, where students get nervous about that sort of thing. I can confidently report that due to my careful use of follow-up questions, I can get a very clear sense of the depth of each student's knowledge.