Wasn’t this always the angle, even when people called his age out last election? The argument was that Kamala Harris would step up, and that Biden didn’t want a second term.

Given Harris’ recent comments in the press regarding stuff she’d fix “if given power”, I wonder if she’s even on the VP card this time around? IMO, AOC might be a smarter choice for VP, since the left love her and the right loathe her. She’d bring a lot of younger disenfranchised people back around, and that might be enough.

Not American, so excuse the silly question.

What is stopping the President from dissolving the Supreme Court?

A lot of people are giving Tesla shit here, but surely there should be regulations in place to ensure something like this isn’t allowed to be released for public use?

My hope is that Labour are playing this smart. They’ll bang on about how Brexit won’t change, but that “we’ll look to increase economic and social strengths via our relationship with the EU”. We’ll reintroduce entry to the single market, ensure freedom of movement, and basically rejoin in everything but name - and then eventually say “well, if we want to rejoin it’s basically a tick in a box”.

The EU will likely be happy for the UK to rejoin, even without punishment. The most reliable ally in the battle against Euroscepticism is a former Eurosceptic that can say how shit things were after leaving, and how much better they are since rejoining.

All of big tech is really worried about this.

• Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
• Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
• Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
• Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.

If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.

I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.

Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.

Like most big tech companies, they’re actually several divisions all competing with each other. Lately, the AI divisions have latched on to the hype and they’re pushing their wares to other divisions, often with enough clout to keep those in security/privacy quiet. Integrating LLM’s is also a great way for a middle manager type to curry favour with the bosses, and to build little empires for themselves.

Sadly, I don’t see Gimp ever competing with Photoshop. It’s not necessarily a feature parity thing, nor is it a mind share thing. It’s as you’ve said - it’s not built by creatives to be the best possible tool for many types of design.

It’s truly a shame, because for years Adobe slept on different aspects of digital design, and there was a true opportunity to build a Linux-first tool that made things like Web Design so much simpler. It’s an unpopular opinion, but Linux window managers have always lacked creative input. There has always either been a design-by-commitee, or a design-by-engineer feel - and this is reflected in how poor Gimp and design tools are in the Linux space.

In reality, Linux could have the best photo editing and design-specific tooling, but sadly the tooling either lacks a creative touch, or lacks features that are truly needed to be competitive.

There have been several instances where people have released ebooks that are fully AI generated, and are basically scams with no real content or information.

Outside of the “Microsoft bad” comments, this is a prime example of why big tech companies need to stop promoting AI leads to a position where they are able to have influence over initiatives outside of AI.

The worst thing to happen to basically every product/service in tech right now is AI. It’s made Google unreliable in the eyes of normal people for the first time in decades, it’s destroying trust in Amazon content across reviews and Kindle, it’s adding features to Facebook that no one ever wanted, etc.

I use Windows. It does what it needs to do, and while I haven’t upgraded past 10, it’s not complained about much.

At home I switch between Fedora and Windows, but at work I use OSX because using Linux at work gets you a shitty laptop instead of a MBP. I work for a big tech company, with the Windows and Mac user communities being pretty much the same size. What I’ve noticed is that Windows is fairly tolerable, and often has few issues that don’t need IT intervention. The MacOS community, while often being more technical because it’s used by tech workers, has a lot more issues than any other. Major OS updates are events that take months of planning because it’s guaranteed that thousands of people will essentially brick their laptops trying to just do a standard upgrade. Everything seems to break all the time, which is mad when you consider that Apple is a trillion dollar company with one hardware line. Windows and Linux support many hardware lines.

Ultimately, you know what you’re getting with each choice. All I care about is that my OS does what it intends to do.

It’s like this in many countries. In the UK we’ve never had to deal with people being held in contempt of parliament, but in recent years we’ve seen corruption and a blatant disregard for “rules” that would have made politicians sick a decade ago. It’s at a point where the UK has considered a constitution to ensure that anyone caught being openly corrupt or breaking the rules can be arrested.

Many right-wing politicians have shown that the rules have been lax for a very long time, and IMO it’s a sign that perhaps we as a society need to seriously look at how we stop the right (and perhaps even the left) from abusing their power without consequence.

Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops,

I’d love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.

The article says what part of Amazon it was for. It’s for logistics, not AWS, which is a separate division.

Alexa has had AI backing its services for the better part of a decade.

Source: I worked on some of it.

Uhhh…it’s had AI backing it for most of the decade

There has never been a better time for someone to swoop in and remake web search. Hell, there are probably dozens of software engineers from Google that have direct experience with search AND were laid off.

I’m surprised that no one is trying to compete with Google at the weakest point it’s been since going public.

That’s definitely not what’s happening right now at Amazon (where I work), and based on what I’ve heard from coworkers from Google and Meta, it’s basically the same story over there.

Hell, we’ve just had another layoff in our Games division, and many software engineers were enticed to work there so they could cut their teeth on games tech instead of standard micro-services. Now, they’re frantically battling against external candidates for the few internal roles available.

I’m not so sure that’s true in big tech any more.

When goals aren’t met, or projects don’t show validity in the market, those teams get wound down and the employees are laid off. Moonshot projects still exist, but it’s not uncommon to see execs be parachuted into new orgs with the plebs being fired.

I’d love to, but in terms of pure availability I can get almost everything I’ve ever wanted to listen to, aside from some weird geoblocking or removal of defunct band’s back catalogues.