generic92034

Wait till there are organ harvesting bots. Only half joking, I am afraid.

Yes, that is typical for a certain kind of management. Only costs that are visible and easily measurable are taken into account. Invisible costs or costs that are hard to measure are ignored, even though they may amount to a whole lot, up to the ruin of the company. Employee motivation is one example for the second type of costs, while the 500 bucks per month for pizza were easily seen and cut.

There is a difference between hard and soft DRM. Soft DRM can be only some watermark, not keeping you from creating copies for your own devices. Hard DRM aims to prevent any copying.

In my experience soft DRM is very common, hard DRM not so much.

Well, if we are talking the worldwide software development industry, FAANG-like salaries are a tiny exception. There are so many places without strong worker rights and without a high premium for workers.

The expectation of higher productivity measured by completely useless means, letting a highly qualified employee jump through hoops for the amusement and misconceptions of the C-level.

Be careful what you are wishing for. All the leisure time you would want while having no job or money could be the future we are heading for.

*the whole industry in countries without strong worker rights

Maybe for ebook readers, but not for books.

If there is mass starvation that kind of lethargy can quickly change.

At least you would need a sort of creative continental gerrymandering. ;)

You could try it with some development support work, doing customer tickets. At times there is complexity but you have real people asking for help and usually a limited scope. It is a (nowadays rather small) part of my job and it often gives me that kind of satisfaction you are alluding to.

> Nobody's exactly like Banks though.

Indeed. He died way too early. R.I.P.

They are not necessarily lacking imagination, they are just not providing answers to their own question. Almost everyone has read some dystopian SciFi.

Cannot happen, these days. The US taxpayer will be glad to bail them all out (again).

You forget the times with an overproduction of electrical energy in Germany. Then they sell it for a negative price to the neighbor countries. Later, when they need more energy they buy it back at a premium. It is good business for neighbor countries with enough storage (pumping hydro, etc.).

Yes, but you (as a human) can still understand the cathedral (the building). This is not guaranteed for advanced AI work in mathematics in the future. If so, are we/they are really still adding to human knowledge, at this stage?

I wonder if AI is one means to overcome the natural limits of human knowledge aggregation [0].

On the other hand, in the very long run, what does it mean if a talented human being does not have enough years of life to fully analyze and understand an extremely advanced proof created by AI?

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/

If there is such a ceiling (clearly, I doubt it, seeing many of the main German industry leaders going down or offshore, so there is plenty space to grow), it is not of the EU's doing. It it about money and the advantages large incumbents have in our version of market capitalism.

EU trap? How far do you think Poland would have come economically without access to the EU common market and without EU subsidies?

> Chrome would end up being spun off from Google.

You mean, with reasonable administrations, caring for antitrust laws.

Well, he did a good job of freeing Hungary from Orban. So, cut him some slack.

/s

When will the C levels of the "allin on AI" companies realize that? Or is the Nvidia exec mistaken?

That is not how responsibility works anywhere. If you are stealing a gun and murder someone with that gun, you are still responsible, even if it is not your gun.

> The best way to describe AI agents I've heard: treat them as hostages that will do anything to appease their captor.

A scary image, if we consider agents to develop anything like a conscience at some point in time. Of course, with the current approach they never might, but are we so sure?

It is worse. The code changes are mostly random, only surviving the tests of fitness nature is applying (on various levels though; immediately catastrophic changes on level of cell biology are sorted out). And at least the high-level tests are also random and unreliable.

But what about my impression that it is getting worse? When I (as a developer) was trying to help customers with the product 20 years ago, about 50% (my guesstimate) of the people were actually reading what I wrote, at least to a good degree. These days I am lucky if it is 20% who are reading answers to their problems more than in a completely superficial way. I blame social media and smartphones.

> This is why it's important to write things down in details and as-unambiguous-as-you-can forms.

While that might be a prerequisite for a deep shared understanding, I have made the experience in the last few years that the number of people really reading more than the starting sentence of any message/ticket/email is consistently decreasing. I often have to feed them the information in very small and easy to digest portions. I so dislike that.

I would not be so pessimistic. Look what the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria have done for our atmosphere.

But certainly indirectly with cash. All the advertised products are more expensive than they could be, due to the costs of advertising. This comes out of everyone's pocket.

14-19 years might be a respectable lifetime for a handheld electronic device, but in most cases (good care assumed) it is not a respectable lifetime for a book.

Most of their products are so large that you can easily find parts with very bad and parts with excellent code. I am not sure a whole ERP product could work with all very bad code, though.