They will get rid of all human employees and drive their companies into the ground before they realize ML is supposed to supplement jobs, not take them over completely.

Exactly, replacing jobs with robots will not end well. It’s been going on for a long time and is about to hit the steep of the curve. Problem is when machines are doing all the work, there’s nobody making money to support the consumer economy a company relies on.

Even for companies that don’t rely on the consumer market there’s a trickle down. They’re producing for companies that do and their customers will dry up when those companies fail.

In order for a wholly machine serviced industrial system to work we would need a whole new economic system. That’s not a good thing since we’re talking a situation where everyone is basically a ward of the state. We saw how well that worked for the former USSR.

Machines need to help people do their jobs, not replace them. The people running these companies have always been notoriously short sighted and it will be their end, ours too. The draw is too big to resist since labor costs are by far the biggest overhead in running a company.

These modern CEOs need to take a lesson from Henry Ford who’s goal was to close the circle, pay people to make the products they will buy. He pretty much invented the middle class. That idea died in industry a long time ago and nobody is the better for it.

It’s pretty ironic how companies will spend so much money on advertising to gain brand recognition, but then throw it away on a whim.

Good to see the FCC going after this kind of thing. Put them in jail even better.

I have my phone set up so the only numbers that chime the phone are those in my contact list. The abuse of voice and text on the cell network is rampant and it’s equivalent to trespassing.

I would say this is likely not a practical super conductor… But it may well be the first ever room temperature super conductor.

Yes of course it would be a big deal if they create one to begin with. However if it’s difficult and expensive to produce, that’s not much help. It has to be mass producible and inexpensive to have industrial significance. I mean we already have expensive solutions. Don’t need any more of those.

The first semi-conductors were not practical either, but we can all see where that led!

I don’t know that semiconductors are a good parallel. Growing the crystals dates back to the early 1900s and was never an expensive or technologically difficult process. Doping silicon to create devices like diodes and transistors was something new, but was not exceedingly expensive or a great technological challenge. The migration to chips which require lithographic doping was more of a challenge.

In any case semiconductor devices were practical shortly after development. One of the first consumer products that used them was the “transistor radio” which was inexpensive and came out shortly after invention of the technology.

A practical superconductor is a huge deal, it would drastically change the way we deal with electrical power distribution and electromechanical applications. So any development is going to be big news. Though we’re not talking about an actual working conductor, it’s just excitement over research advancement, yeah? I’ve seen this kind of “big news” before in other tech sectors and time often proves it unworthy. If it does present a big step toward a practical superconductor that’s great, but I wouldn’t count any eggs yet.

I’ve ripped a good number of blu-rays to network storage. If you’re looking for older, less popular stuff it’s the best option. And older releases are usually just a few bucks. The new stuff I torrent because I can usually find a decent rip, but for stuff I want to put in my library a rip from optical disk is the best, but not free of course. You can even do it for free, public libraries often have a good collection of older releases on optical disk.

Yeah nobody is all bad, even Reddit.

Strange new Worlds. I think it’s the best Star Trek series since the original. I don’t think the casting is particularly great, but Anson Mount makes up for it. Like William Shatner was born to be Captain Kirk, Anson Mount was born to be Captain Pike.

I rarely use any kind of chat, but I used IRC sometimes back in the day. I was recently working on a thing where I needed to use Discord for some programming advice. I got the info I needed, but yeah that Discord is a convoluted mess. Newer hardly ever means better.

Great software, used it a lot. Also Handbrake.

What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon.

Biggest tool in the history of tools.

Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.

When I initially heard about Elon paying what he did for Twitter my first thought was he’s buying it to kill it, then I thought nobody in their right mind would spend that kind of money to carry out a personal vendetta. Now I think that’s absolutely what’s going on.

I believe he’s killing Twitter purely for personal reasons (he hates it because people gave him shit there). I don’t think there’s some kind of grand social agenda. It would require an assumption he cares about someone other than himself. Unlikely as the guy’s ego extends past Planet 9.

Actually after thinking about it, the stuff he’s doing to the company is just batshit insane. It has to be intentional. He’s on a campaign to kill the company for the tax write-off and because he has some kind of personal beef with it. If he were to just fire everyone and shut down the servers he wouldn’t be able to take the write-off. The company has to die a slow death for it to look legit.

In imperial units I get this for a single stack of 44B in $100 bills;

.0043 inches * 44B / (12 inches in a foot * 5280 feet in a mile) = 2986 miles

That would be approximately the distance from Los Angeles to New York. That’s a long stack of bills.

For sure, either he’s destroying it on purpose of he’s that stupid, either one is just way out there.

How does it impact Chromium?

Chromium is the open source part of Chrome. I’ve actually run Chromium before, but it’s kind of hard to find a binary release. Chromium lacks some Google additions like an mpeg player and PDF reader. It’s also free of some annoying add-on stuff like that app tracker that runs a background process full time. Who knows what that process does really. Of course I have it disabled on my system, but you have to go out of your way to kill it.

Otherwise Google has the Chromium project under their thumb so they’re not going to do anything Google does not approve of or refuse to do anything Google wants them to.

Speaking of Google influence, it bothers me that Google is a big contributor to Mozilla. I think it’s mainly to stay out of hot water with the FTC. They know all too well what happened to Microsoft and Internet Explorer in 2001. They need to keep the competition alive. Still it makes me cringe knowing they could exercise their will on them as a big contributor. I mean everyone has a price, and in Silicon Valley it’s not very high.

and am stunned when I see the web without an adblocker.

True, True, it’s damn near unusable. You take it for granted what a job your blocker is doing for you.

I know my uBO has saved me from some hostile shit. So yeah it’s a part of my browser security. I have it configured to a stricter blocking mode so it’s not just blocking ads for me, it gets other stuff that can be a problem.

Anyway I’m aware of the Manifest V3 business and being on Chrome I’m just waiting for the hammer to fall before going to Firefox. If they start adding DRM as well, I’m out of there quick.

Yeah, yeah, I know, just go to Firefox now, but I don’t really want to deal with a new browser and all my custom stuff until I have to. I’m old and that shit is super hard to motivate on for me. Not to say I’m inept, I mean I’ve spent my whole career in tech, but old dogs and all.

I use fastmail, great service.

What motivated me to do that is finding these megacorp providers do not keep your email private.

All I can say is Netflix at 12.99 was a tough sell. That was the rate hike that made me drop them. 15.49 forget it.

When Netflix was the ticket and my sub was 8.99 some years ago, I didn’t pirate anything because I didn’t need to. I’d have to pay a hundred a month due to the fracturing and inflation of streaming services now, and I still wouldn’t get everything. I didn’t wanna pirate, but the industry backed me into a corner.

I’m still using Chrome, but it keeps getting shittier. At some point they’ll push me over to Firefox. Hope Firefox can avoid getting shitty.