From my math, once you account for inflation, Silicon Valley (and broader tech industry) compensation has declined about 23-30% since 2000, relative to the national average. I know multiple companies where it's basically been flat since 2012, particularly for support roles - $90-100k then is only making $105-110k now in the same roles (with some of the same people, granted, but also new blood).

Considering how many foreigners from specific countries I see in places like Omaha, NE, I'm pretty sure it's not just a problem in Silicon Valley.

That may be true, but it's irrelevant.

They'll 500 500+ Americans from Division A while hiring 500 Indians to Division B.

And then the next quarter, it's fire 500 from Division B (all Americans, mostly white men), and then hire 500 Indians into Division A - because they had a shortage, don't you know.

How was it not fraud?

H1B is/was intended for worker shortages: for roles you couldn't fill domestically. It was not supposed to decrease the wage of the role, but (in theory) keep it at parity. It was always a ruse, but that was the premise.

If you're firing people and then hiring others at a fraction of the pay, you're literally abusing it. You've applied under false premise. That's fraud.

This 'study' was clearly constructed to create narrative, not to do actual science.

"The study was conducted with 189 people."

And what was the distribution of men and women in that sample? Because that's a very important criteria.

I promise you the results would be significantly different with all-male vs all-female groups, and depend heavily on the attractiveness of the 'male' or 'female' AI persona (assuming it had visuals).

HEIC is worthless because it's illegal to implement unless you get permission. Maybe in 20 years it'll be usable.

Don't like that fact? Then we need to find and support (oh no, and be?) political candidates who oppose software patents.

You shouldn't need anyone's permission to write a computer program. It's infuriating.

Interesting point! I did not know that was the origin of their zone oddness. Thanks for that information.

Lots of other places drift west. Like lots of islands that are in the wrong zone for no real good reason. Probably silly reasons like past (or current) country ownership.

Stupid it may be, but there are a lot of places in the world that already do that and are effectively already going permanent DST. In fact, some of these places then also do DST again, making double DST. Don't believe me? Well, let's look at a time zone map:

Time zone map
Places that do DST

Consider the US state of Alaska. It is nominally in time zones -10 and -11 (check the water north and south of the state). But for some reason, the whole state is in -9. And for some reason, despite their high latitude, they also do DST. I guess they have so much, or so little, sun that it doesn't really matter if their clocks align to it, but then why change twice a year?

But a sparsely populated place not very interesting? Then consider China. Despite being 4 time zones wide, the whole country is in a single time zone (+8). The western border of China is in effectively triple permanent DST. Must be annoying to have solar noon at 3 in the afternoon. At least they don't do DST, through, and a lot of China's population is on its eastern side, which is in the right time zone for its longitude.

But maybe an authoritarian dictatorship isn't a great example. Then turn your eyes to France and Spain. They are effectively south of the UK and effectively in the GMT (+0) time zone entirely. But for some reason, they choose to be in the +1 timezone, giving them permanent DST. Then they also do DST in the summer, making it effectively double DST.

Basically, a lot of time zones "drift" to the west. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, some reasonable, some perhaps less so (the cynical part of me thinks it is older leaders trying to get younger people to wake up earlier and stop sleeping in, though it is actually hard to assign that much forethought to country leaders).

Interestingly, if you look at the DST map linked above, it is clearly just a European and US concept. Not to get too political, but I expected the non-thinking, white-things-are-bad, extreme TDS sufferers to loudly call for an end to DST now that Trump supported it so strongly, but so far that doesn't seem to have happened.

Your honor, my script was a "rogue," so therefore it is responsible and I am not.

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

That's not the important metric. It only tells you the percentage of users, not the percentage of people who play games on Linux (or buy games).

For instance, I have a Steam account. I've got the client installed on my phone and Mac. I don't really play games anymore. I'm sure this counts towards something.

What's meaningful to those who might target a platform is what percentage of those people buy games. It might just be that Linux users are the only ones who play dungeon crawlers, for instance - which could be meaningful information.

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.