So they slashed most of the existing programs and now have not-launched the shiny alleged alternative. Truly the new era of competence at work.

This seems like an extraordinarily bad sign for how this place is managed (probably not surprising; but still):

If you have to mandate use and make decisions based on use metrics that suggests that either the tool isn't actually good enough that you can just mandate productivity and let people figure out that they need to use tools to get there automatically or that you are so bad at measuring productivity that you gave up and are just measuring something because it has EZ audit logs.

Not really a consultancy I'd be excited to bring in.

Fossil fuels are globally subsidised to the tune of $11 million every minute, according to the International Monetary Fund. That money has to come from somewhere, and there's no way in hell a billionaire is subsidising some soccer mum's SUV. Which mean that the money has to come out of taxes.

So it's not particularly cheap, net. It's just that the total cost is diffused across the food you buy, the house you own, the car tags, the money you earn. All of these different taxes contribute some percentage of the cost of the coal and oil. However, collecting and distributing the money isn't free, which means that you're actually paying MORE than you would if you were paying honestly.

Still, if people want to pay more and get less, and die young as a result, that's really their business. Of course, they're making other people die young, too, but that's a democracy for you.

It wouldn't be so bad, but there are hardly any lumberjacks in the UK.

*runs away and hides from an irate mob of Monty Python fans

Seriously, it very much depends on the area. Rugby, a town-borderline-city, has fewer pubs than the Marple/Mellor collection of villages up in t' norf. This is mostly because Rugby is a run-down dump with a dying town centre and hardly anything left in it, whereas Marple (although it lost its engineering back in the 60s) is a major commuter/retirement town with just enough rational people to keep the businesses vibrant and alive.

And that's what keeps pubs open. Not the economy, but the attitude.

As music evolves, it has tended to become simpler, more repetitive, less original, and basically BORING AS ALL F.

(And those who know me on Slashdot, I think this is the third time I've used that sort of language since the site came into operation, which should tell you something about just how bad modern music is.)

If the only music out there is, honestly, turgid, then having it AI-generated simply eliminates the brain-damage induced by having to memorise and play these excuses for songs.

You cannot blame people for skipping the middleman when the middleman honestly doesn't do any better of a job.

Yeah, I fully understand, not everyone wants to listen to 22-minute metal anthems about the universe (even if it does feature Richard Dawkins and fireworks), or indeed 18 minute songs about exploding air balloons, even if I am of the personal opinion that said people should seek help. And people are going to like what they like.

But if you're going to object to AI music, then the only way that's ever going to work is if you reverse the trend and make songs that have sophistication that AI cannot match.

Personally, I have no problem with electronic music or even music wholly manufactured through complex electronics, and regard Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram as polymath geniuses that really should have been respected in their lifetimes, but I'd also argue that they actually made an effort to do precisely what I'm describing. They did not, as a rule, make stuff that was simple, unless ordered by higher-ups to do so. It would not be hard to mix their techniques with modern synthesiser ideas and generative systems to produce much more sophisticated music of decent quality.

The Beatles were capable of producing an album over a weekend.

If they'd had the inclination (and assorted supplies best left undiscussed), they were more than capable of churning out 52 albums a year. Whilst we must be grateful for small mercies (it would likely have had an impact on quality), I would argue that the 60s were not short of new music.

"AI agents don't sit in chairs, and they don't need licences."

I wouldn't be surprised if the juiciest days of SaaS rent seeking are behind us(if nothing else, SaaS vendor numbers were starting to look less promising prior to the 'AI' craze; arguably one of the reasons why they all jumped on it like rabid animals hoping that it would salvage their growth); but this premise seems deeply and obviously flawed. Per-seat licensing has never involved chairs; and (especially when you are dealing with software contracts high value enough that you can litigate, rather than relying purely on DRM) you can make whatever you want need a license.

There's obviously no completely ironclad way to stop your customers from using a scraper to hide their activities; just as you can't entirely prevent account sharing between employees who should be licensed separately; but there's nothing about 'agents' that is any harder to require a license for.

Is anyone else vastly more concerned about the unspecified 'AI' that definitely-securely handles deciding what to hide than they are about someone shoulder surfing them?

Realistically the greatest risk to your phone's privacy lives behind the screen not in front of it.

I'm tempted to do a recompilation of an old MCC distribution, just to mess with people now. :P (MCC was the very very first Linux distro.)

I found a few that are more recent than the one I saw.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fportlandpress.com%2Fbioc...
https://royalsocietypublishing...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mdpi.com%2F2075-1729...

That's why I tagged that bit as the part that Marx would not have expected; and a historical period that (while it unfortunately has the look of having been an anomaly) ran counter to his thesis. To the best of my understanding he essentially considered the sort of welfare state/regulated capitalism stuff that gets called 'socialism' as either irrelevant or antagonistic to 'Socialism' as he had it in mind(though, admittedly, he was a much more interesting critic of capitalism than theorist of what would come after it, as a fair few of the people who tried to build post-revolutionary economies found out the hard way).

As I understand it; Marx's thesis was that the market value of unskilled labor would decline to more or less match its cost of production(very orthodox position on what a commodity in a competitive market will do) and that industrialization was steadily replacing jobs that were formerly artisanal and small business that was petit bourgeoise with capital intensive operations that required only unskilled labor; and sooner or later something would have to give because having your salary reduced to your cost of production is exceptionally miserable. He was either unimpressed by the likelihood, or saw as not ameliorating the 'alienated labor' concerns, any sort of welfare state/regulated capitalism arrangement that runs more or less straight capitalist economics but skims some of the (considerable, as he noted) productivity to ameliorate the plight of the laborers.

The post-WWII period was essentially one where precisely that happened; for some mixture of genuine cultural reasons and fear that, with actual communists about, it would be a terrible value to squeeze labor to the breaking point when the (very real) productivity advantages of industrial capitalism meant that you could offer them enough to keep them happy and get still get rich; along with enough fairly rapid technological changes that the ranks of 'artisan' labor were steadily refreshed with various white collar and skilled trades jobs that were not immediately amenable to automation.

I'm certainly not an economic historian; but it seems like the post-WWII period was a genuine anomaly in terms of labor relations and distribution of wealth, at least for the US; though seemingly one that was already starting to show cracks within a generation or two(though any 'marxist' analysis of it gets complicated by the fact that some of the cracking involved the substantial removal of the US industrial base; and I don't think Marx did nearly as much writing about service-sector economies with offshored industry, since that wasn't really a thing at the time).

I suspect that he would and he wouldn't. The specifics of commodities used for popular light entertainment suddenly becoming an ultra-hot item as an ingredient in the means of production would probably come as a surprise: as though readers of penny-dreadfuls were suddenly rioting because mill owners switched to building factory equipment out of paper pulp.

The broad-strokes realization by formerly skilled laborers and petit bourgeoise that they are actually moving downward toward 'proletariat' status, rather than being the respectable junior partners of capital, though, seems very much in line with his expectations; and (depending on where you stand on what 'AI' is doing to programming and various sorts of white-ish collar data munging) may very much be what plays out.

The development that Marx didn't seem to have suspected(though, in the slightly-a-cop-out 'sufficiently long term', wouldn't necessarily view as relevant); is arguably the post-WWII period of backsliding on industrial revolution era labor relations. It certainly wasn't all roses; but out of some combination of genuine conviction and (ironically) competitive market pressure from more or less authentic capital-'C'-"Communists" there was a period where people where being GI Bill-ed into education in huge numbers, Western Europe was urgently Marshall Planned out of the ashes, state tolerated or even encouraged labor unions made industrial jobs at least steady lower middle class livings, and it was generally seen as a bad strategy, potentially even a bad thing, to say "fuck you, I've got mine" too loudly.

Wasn't really until the early '70s that the old ways reasserted themselves, wage/productivity numbers started to decouple, executive vs. worker compensation ratios started flying up, the various planned economies that had once had people running scared either collapsed into basket cases or turned into authoritarian market-capitalist operations; and so on.

According to the researchers involved (I emailed them directly), the difference is due to retrotransponsons moving the genes into a different order rather than a simple mosaic effect.

But the non-coding regions do seem to be metadata used to interpret and regulate genes, and the interpretation of genes is impacted by placement (the brain has no two neurons with the same genome - a completely pointless mechanism that is expensive on energy and carries high risk unless there's an actual benefit from it).

As a result, we cannot assume mutations in the non-coding regions are "safe". The best I'd feel comfortable with is "the effects don't appear to be harmful so far, and there doesn't seem to be any immediate health impact". Those with a better understanding of generics are welcome to correct me on this, but I think it wisest to be conservative on both optimism and pessimism.

You are absolutely right, but I will continue to say "please" and "thank you" to AI bots, just on the off-chance one of them is actually a dalek pretending to be an AI.