The academy has been using the term “AI” for a while now for things that are much less sophisticated than the current/popular generation of media generators. I took an “Artificial Intelligence” class as part of my undergrad around the turn of the century.

It is confusing though, since sentience and intelligence are synonyms in the right context, but no AI has shown any good evidence of being a non-human sentient being.

When MS was pushing the Bing challenge with TV ads, it really was quite close. I did the challenge and Google “won” (only) 3/5 of my test searches.

Of course Bing already had a hilariously incorrect “AI” interfering with the first page of results for a week or two before Google decided to further fsck up their search with LLM response generation.

Web assembly ? It’s not driven only by Google, but I think they have been involved.

In the U.S., laws that disadvantage specific entities are generally considered to not be following the “equal protection” part of the (amended) constitution.

Countries without (their own) laws prohibiting it can (and do) prohibit specific services.

Member states of the WTO (like the U.S.) have agreed to allow themselves to be sued for lost profits based on any (new) laws they pass.

But, I’m no expert – this is just the view from my (potentially misinformed) corner of the world.

I “upgraded” to a new Pixel last year because I thought the battery on my old 4A was getting wonky (and I have not had good luck with doing battery replacements). At the time, I did not know (enough) about the Fairphone, and I could not find a new Pixel with an audio jack (maybe I didn’t look hard enough?).

I’d like to go back to having a jack. I do have one scenario where I want to use well-fitting BT buds, but I can do that on any phone. I want wired buds that I don’t have to charge, can switch between devices in 0.5 second, without interacting with any software, and don’t have misbehaving touch controls that trigger when I brush my long hair back behind my ear(s) or shoulder(s). In fact, I still have a set of completely dumb buds that I use for my work laptop that I’d love to be able to use with my phone – don’t need noise cancelling or controls of any kind. I really hope that I can find a phone with a jack next time I do an upgrade. I don’t care if it is thicker, I’m gonna stick on Otterbox (or similar) on it anyway.

I was also concerned about security, but full-power BT is fairly secure now. No one can “drive-by” and monitor or replace the audio; they have to get you during “initial” pairing.

Mine is close to that. I still had a working libc, but the dynamic library for C++ programs wouldn’t load, so most of the Gentoo tools and several other things I expected simply crashed on startup.

Found enough working programs to get the library restored and remove the bad arch flags from my configuration to start another emerge world.

After that, I was pretty confident that I could run Linux at least as confidently as I had previously run WinNT 4.

I usually only have to deal with this feeling a few days at a time. I hope it gets better for you.

Seriously tho, didn’t one country determine that Subway sandwiches are served on pastry, not bread? I believe the legal definition (in that country) had to do with sugar content and Subway’s was too high.

I recommend having a public portfolio. You needn’t have all your hobby code be public, but I think having source you’ve written available is an advantage.

When I was doing interviews, I definitely looked at GitHub (etc.) profiles of they were listed on the resume. I even found at least one indirectly – either from their email or LinkedIn.

I like to point people at my accepted patched to open source software (Git and a Haskell library).

Multiple hour-long interviews I’m actually fine with. It’s not ideal, but in that case at least the company is also spending resources on the process.

Homework / pre-interview projects that take more than a hour is unreasonable, to me. I have public repositories / commits I can share with you if you want to see how I write code.

Yeah, I ghosted at least one company because the pre-interview task was far too much effort. I’m all for having some writing of code as part of the process, though IME reading code is much more frequent/important.

I guess we all set our own limits, but I refuse to work more than an hour or two without (at least an expectation of) pay. Maybe that’s privilege talking, tho.