Google "Dark pools". Currently they account for slightly over half of all US transaction volume. Yes, they're still regulated; no, we do not have visibility inside them.

You missed the point.

A friend of mine made a tea-timer app for the iPhone. Where you enter what tea you are making and it sets the correct number of minutes. Today, people would ask ChatGPT before they go on the App Store to search for something like that. That's the point. Not what YOU would do, but what the general public does. And for Jane Doe, ChatGPT has replaced a lot of these specialty apps.

Skills are great until they aren't. The problem is exactly what you say: You can literally create a skill by telling the LLM to create a skill. Which is... why the f do I need to make a skill if the AI already knows how to do it?

Properly created skills, that include reference material, specific instructions, and expert knowledge the LLM doesn't have or that's buried somewhere under 10 layers of reddit posts is genuinely useful. But most skills aren't. I'm constantly underwhelmed by hyped-up skills that, when I look at them, turn out to be bland, basic instructions.

I can already, completely above-board, sell someone a block of DRS'd IBM shares for crypto if I want to. Let's all be clear this isn't about denominating stocks in Bitcoin.

Rather, this is effectively about recording stock transactions on a blockchain. Nothing more and nothing less than swapping a distributed transaction log for a traditional ledger.

The implication is clear, the SEC is at least considering the idea of creating shares as a token cryptocurrency. In this case, the tokens are backed by real shares. That's not a technical requirement, though, and a future company might someday skip the major exchanges entirely to list only as a token. To be clear, there's nothing sacred about the exchanges and their "house rules"; there's nothing inherently wrong with using a blockchain vs a ledger; and to reiterate, this has nothing to do with "buying stocks with Bitcoin".

On that last point, I consider OKXICE's decision to accept payment in some nondescript "stablecoins" as extremely unfortunate. Not because I'm a cryptophobe, but because it muddies the waters as to the viability of the core concept of tokenized equity itself - Though that's a bit of a tautology, given stocks are already "tokenized equity". Whether we denominate them in USD or BTC or cowrie shells is an entirely separate issue.

How dare the people who create your revenue streams demand reasonable working conditions?

Of course employers are welcome to set the terms under which they'll give us money. And similarly, we're free to set the terms under which we'll accept their money. That's how it works.

Personally, I love companies announcing draconian new RTO policies - There aren't many better indicators their stock price is going to spike short-term then tank a few quarters later. But that has nothing to do with working for those companies. On that front, it's just a hard "no", to the point I'm seriously considering becoming a professional "interview troll" once I retire!

I hate ads more than the average bear, but I have to admit, I have no idea where people are seeing these either. Are "ads" someone intentionally loads and watches really ads, or are they merely short-form content?

That said, if these are everywhere and the very fact I'm using FF with uBlock Origin is the exact reason I haven't seen these... That is the sort of viral advertising most companies dream of.

There's a fuckton of cigarettes manufactured every year. "If all your friends jumped off a bridge"... Good riddance!

LPT: You can also turn your phone to watch the content. I know, mind blown, right? Pass it along!

I'm not saying I would or wouldn't take this particular buyout, but as you point out, it's not a safe assumption the default severance would be the same absent this artificially sweetened offer. At a quick glance, New Jersey is the only US state that requires any severance at all, beyond making employees whole for time worked and paying out accrued PTO. Many do have additional requirements around mass layoffs, but nothing comes anywhere near two weeks per year of service. Even NJ, as the best-of-the-best (honestly surprised it's not CA or MA, but not in this case), only requires one week per year of employment.

That said, I see the GP's argument come up quite often in any online discussion of layoffs, and it took me years to finally figure out, this topic basically comes down to a simple class issue: If someone is a moderately well-paid salaried employee, a severance offer is almost always going to beat UI by miles (and as you also pointed out, that's not a mutually exclusive choice, UI just picks up after severance ends). If someone is a low-paid nonexempt worker, by contrast, severance is usually nonexistent and employers playing games around UI claim appeals are a lot more common.

There's also other benefits to consider, most importantly health insurance. Severance offers usually allow employees to keep their group health insurance during the severance period, while COBRA is eye-wateringly expensive even for someone formerly paid well.

The highest UI check in the country is in Washington state, and only comes out to $1208/week, for a maximum of 26 weeks (barring certain exceptional circumstances). A Principal Engineer (level 65) at Microsoft averages just shy of $246k/year and this buyout is offering up to 39 weeks total.

Weekly, that's $4.7k vs $1.2k. Total, that's $184k vs 31k.

I can guarantee nobody smart enough to be an engineer at Microsoft (as much as we might make fun of their culture and products) is dumb enough to fail that one-question math exam.

But again that's backwards. I let my AI coding assistant write tests exactly so that I have a reproducible, deterministic ground truth that I can inspect for logic errors. If you let the AI do the testing directly, it's a toss-up if today it feels like it or it decides that your desired result is "everything green" so it'll just give you that answer without actually testing anything.

LLMs obviously aren't human. But that's not the point. The point is that you don't need to know a programming language to program a computer.

For example: Especially in the early days of smartphones, there were mountains of small tools that did something that's essentially a simple script. Egg timers, remind-me-tomorrow apps, tons of stuff that's basically a wrapper around a web search, and so on. Almost all of those are today something ChatGPT can do, and are easy enough to describe.

I've actually outsourced the first iteration of that to AI. :-)

At the end of coding sessions, I generall ask it to spin up an adversial agent whose task it is to find flaws, inconsistencies, mistakes, bugs, etc.

I'd still strongly recommend to anyone shipping AI-generated code to have a thorough human code review, but for a first pass at surface level, the AI can check itself if it has some kind of separation between the generator and the reviewer.

Personally, after some experimenting, I've concluded that:

• AI is good at implementing known algorithms.
• AI is good in creating code that flows straightforward from a design document.
• AI is good at code reviews and finding bugs.
• AI (unlike me) doesn't mind writing a few hundred tests.
• But, it tends to over-engineering simple tasks to the point of "why does Hello World need enterprise-software levels of abstraction?"
• It struggles with code that doesn't have a known solution.
• It's difficult to get it into a different lane once it started going down the wrong way.

What I use it for these days is rapid prototyping. Using AI I can make a functioning prototype of an idea I have in a few days instead of a few weeks. I can quickly test out an idea for a feature or change in my existing codebase.

What I also have been using it for a while is as a code-reviewer and for someone like me who is mostly working solo, that's an insanely valuable thing. Not just the bugs themselves, but also the ability to discuss code with someone. Basically, AI is a rubber ducky that replies.

Mickeysoft lost the plot again.

The game-changing element of LLMs and agents is that they have a non-computer-language interface - you can talk to them in plain English (or Chinese or whatever). This makes complex computer interactions available to a much wider audience than any previous computing invention. Adapting humans to the AI is getting that backwards. It's a sign you don't understand the first thing about why AI is so widely successful.

I predict this will be an abject failure and a year from now will quietly be pushed to the very back of the bottom-most drawer, never to be spoken off again (though it is getting crowded in there for M$).

Meanwhile, in the real world, everyone I've talked to about these things already has a skills file to teach the AI about their personal coding style. This is what actual humans came up with, independently several times, and it works: Adapt the AI to you. Plus we've been writing coding style guides for humans for a long time now, we've got plenty of experience doing that at least somewhat right.

Here's the problem, and why everyone resents this crap (your fellow IT folks most of all)...

Yeah, great, you're an Exchange admin and can send email "from" any random VP you want. And you have access to their recent document history so can "spice it up" by referencing actual projects we might really be assigned to. When your phishing tests are literally indistinguishable from legitimate emails, you're not "testing" anything, you're daring people to ignore legitimate work at risk of their continued employment.

If "my boss" sends me an email, which the headers show really came from his account, and asks me to take a look at a spreadsheet we worked on three days ago - You're not being clever, you're an asshole.