

I like big-ass garlic stuffed green olives.
I like big-ass garlic stuffed green olives.
Ingenious name. I feel like Bitchat should be connected somehow with PenIsland.
Steady now, my generation got through the Macarena, you’ll get through this. Nice deep breaths… in… out…
Insightful. I think what happened with tuition was that universities were actually undercharging until around 1980, when they realized they could charge a lot more and people would still pay it, so they did. In America there’s a prevailing mindset that the economy boomers grew up in was normal, and today’s economy is stunted. The economy of the 1950s and 60s was actually an anomalous boom, like a bumper crop. Today’s economy is what it would have been decades ago if the business world had risked charging higher prices and paying lower wages back then, instead of waiting for an excuse like COVID. Kind of a harsh realization.
Shifting personnel to grocery duty during work time to handle a surge or whatever is fine. Asking them to volunteer their free time is bullshit. I might do it if Bezos volunteered to come clean my house.
For clarity, Mozilla isn’t one thing. There’s Mozilla Corporation (profit) and the Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit). Firefox is a product of Mozilla Corporation. And yes, the need to make a profit is a bug not a feature.
Only if you believe the prophecies that fell through the time hole.
Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. So this would end up costing legitimate senders nothing but would require spammers to front way too much money to make email spamming affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.
Seems like it screens out bots regardless of whether they use AI or are just traditional asshole-created bots.
Depends on your tolerance for code spelunking. Back in the 90s I was encouraged to do Y2K prep because I had some COBOL experience, but I really hated pawing through old code. To be fair, COBOL was designed to be self documenting and English-like. But I’m glad I got into web dev instead back then. It was right at the dawn of “dynamic HTML” when web pages started actually doing things. Very cool time. Right now I’d be more inclined to go into helping companies recover from failed AI projects.
Helps if you pronounce it “yoo rainus” instead of “yer anus”. We should change it to something sensible like Urectum.
Wow. Many years ago I bought an old cash register to use as a prop in a play, sounds like the type you’re talking about, and it was already way outdated then. Thing was amazingly heavy, like a refrigerator.
That’s a good one. Why would companies give employees special purpose gizmos that just tell them to use the phone in their pocket to call the office.
Welcome to “That’s not surprising at all!”
So does pretty much the whole banking and credit industry. When you get money out of an ATM there’s usually some COBOL code involved.
LOL, sort of like hiring the CEO’s unemployed brother in law to build your new factory because he has a friend who knows about construction.
TBH that sounds like a lot of code I’ve seen from outsourcing companies in India. Their typical approach is to copy an existing program, module, web page or whatever and modify it as quickly as possible to turn it into what’s needed. The result is often a mishmash of irrelevant code, giant data queries that happen to retrieve some field that’s needed along with a ton of unnecessary crap, mixing frameworks, etc.
In the early 2000s I had a manager who hardly ever gave me anything to do. Like in 6 months I did maybe 3 weeks work. And it’s not like I never asked. I was already fairly disgruntled and had other reasons, but it led to me leaving the company for a job at a cancer research center. The problem with not doing anything at MS is that unless you can hide it somehow your review comes up and you have nothing to show for the year, you’re kind of screwed. So after a relaxing 6 months it was a good time to jump ship. Anyway, a couple years later I read MS was laying off like 600 people - which might have been their first layoffs ever, I dunno. It was supposed to clear out “deadwood” - so I checked after another couple months and found out my old manager was still there! So much for “clearing out deadwood” lol.
Capitalism fanatics will say with great conviction that business has to be efficient because of competition, while government is inherently inefficient because it has no competition. There’s a little truth there, but the complete truth is that business is as inefficient as it can afford to be. The more money a company has, the more inefficiency they can absorb. In my mind that’s one good reason not to allow these gigantic mergers of mega-billion-dollar corporations. Huge entities with tons of money can be inefficient and sloppy as hell for a long, long time before they fail.
My daughter has used AI a lot to write grant proposals, which she cleans up and rewords before submitting. In her prompts she tells it to ask her questions and incorporate her answers into the result, which she says works very well, produces high quality writing, and saves her a ton of time. She’s actually a very competent writer herself, so when she compliments the quality I know it means something.
My in-laws do that. Just today I ordered them a lighted electric kettle.