The article is also full of bullshit and it gets basic history wrong. The agreement was never made, but to the extent it exists anyway, it was never supposed to be about a monopoly that’s destroying shit. Once upon a time, not even very long ago, there were competing search engines.

I know tech writers want to write stories that sound fancy, but if they don’t know the facts and the history then they need to find someone to proofread their work more carefully.

And maybe that’s okay, isn’t it?

Protests turn into riots when the police wanted to, exactly then, and very rarely before that point.

We can blame the officials. Don’t let the heckler’s veto work. It’s murder of course, but it’s also bullying. And capitulation only makes it worse next time. They’ll always have lunatics with guns.

Why? That question always has multiple answers. Are you asking for a historical timeline? That might be the true story, but it also might not feel compelling.

Above all else, remember that Reddit feels many sources of pressure. They want money and users, but they also need to limit spam, and they don’t wanna piss off the rich stock holders, either.

qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.

I don’t think we can accept your argument, because in point in fact Hong Kong was an independent country. Certainly trying to disagree but now we’re getting into a definition question, but if that’s going to stop us from applying the proposed principle, then we can do that in every situation.

Well no, it’s not, because they have multiple monopolies. So we should blame them and blame government for not stopping them.

Historically you are wrong, though. Mixed pressure has value and can be effective… But surely you know that, right?

Obviously the situations are different. We all know that. The point is that it’s hypocritical of a company to say hey, let’s ask our employees to do more by throwing AI at them, and then getting pissed off when potential employees do the same thing.

Although I think it’s more funny than anything else. The company found out that people are gaming the system, which means they have a really shitty system, and rather than change how they interview people or what types of questions they ask, they’re just acting obstinate.

I think we’ve seen enough changes in social media platforms over the past few decades to say that your claim is true until it’s not. As payments to content creators fall, and as garbage postings increase, the actual value to the average user of the site is clearly decreasing. So we’ll see how long YouTube is relevant.

So you’re saying that other options do exist but some companies don’t want to use them because Microsoft is very popular, which is kind of a circular thing, and I understand, but it’s a sign of laziness, not quality.

Now is the worst time to try to enter the field. We need to see the AI bubble burst much more spectacularly, and only then might it be more reasonable. You certainly don’t want to try to get into a field when you have a lot of other choices when that field is already flooded with all of these people who have been laid off, combined with the increased availability of programmers in other countries, knowing that at the moment many domestic programmers are not smart enough to form strong unions to protect their own jobs.

I have to quibble with you, because you used the term “AI” instead of actually specifying what technology would make sense.

As we have seen in the last 2 years, people who speak in general terms on this topic are almost always selling us snake oil. If they had a specific model or computer program that they thought was going to be useful because it fit a specific need in a certain way, they would have said that, but they didn’t.

Gotta love American exceptionalism … and then when other countries copy the U.S., you kinda gotta facepalm.

One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It’s not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that’s not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.

But if you’re trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper’s own decision making over the past few decades.

Well yeah. It’s possible for peaceful protests to work, but let’s look at history. In reality, the pigs are going to get violent regardless of what anyone does, the national guard will be called out and they’re going to use tear gas because their bosses want them to, and despite the fear of injury or death, large groups of people will keep working to make things better.

This is guaranteed to occur. For good or bad, whatever, it will happen. So let’s stop worrying about certain outcomes and move our focus to the uncertain things.

Right … except for all of the poor Boomers out there … let’s just forget about them. Let’s forget about all the Boomers who tried very hard to stop the wealth shift to the rich. They don’t count; they don’t exist.

You decided to blame the old people instead of … checks notes … the rich people. That was a bizarre choice. Meh.

I would qualify your first point. Parkinson’s Law tells us that we have pointless bosses in huge numbers, and they need to justify their own existence. The people who actually produce things, everyone can see if they’re working or not by looking at the output. But their supervisors, and especially their supervisors’ supervisors, those people are desperate to make themselves relevant, to justify their pointlessly-large salaries despite a complete lack of utility.