YouTube needs to be regulated as a telecom provider. As such, it must be prevented from discriminating against content for any reason other than it being illegal.
Sure, if you want it to become an unusable cesspool. If you just hate YouTube and want to kill it, this is the way. Same with any other site that hosts user-provided content -- if it's popular and unmoderated it will become a hellscape in short order.
The buy-now-pay-later services being used are zero interest as long as payments are made on time, so it could just be a case of people who are living paycheck to paycheck (which indicates bad financial management more than poverty) using this to smooth out their expenses so they don't have to wait for their paycheck to be able to buy groceries. It could be a significant improvement for those who used to occasionally use payday loans (which are not zero interest). These people would be better off adjusting their spending habits to maintain a buffer of their own cash instead, but if they aren't going to do that BNPL is a better option than waiting for payday before buying food or using a payday loan service.
But obviously the only reason these by-now-pay-later services are in business is because some of their customers fail to make the zero-interest payments and end up having to pay interest, and this number is high enough to make them profitable. It would be very interesting to find out what that percentage is. People who are paying interest on regular purchases like groceries are throwing money away, which is clearly bad.
Funny the first thing they blame is climate change, and not insecticides, which are a million times more effective today than they were a century ago. With climate change, you'd figure bugs have no problem migrating slowly as the cooler zones move geographically.
Insecticides tend to not be used in natural preserves. Unless you have a different definition of what a preserve is that I'm not aware of.
Insects tend not to stay exclusively in natural preserves, unless you have a different definition of what a preserve is that I'm not aware of.
Insects migrate. They move around to feed on food sources outside the immediate area. Some, like the monarch butterfly or the dragonfly, migrate thousands of miles, even across entire oceans. The notion that a preserve would protect insects from pesticides is based on an assumption of localized effect that doesn't always line up with the real world.
When a large percentage of insects that leave the preserve don't come back because they fed on crops sprayed with pesticides, that diminishes the population of the preserve, both directly by their loss and indirectly by the loss of offspring that would have come back in a future generation.
And if we reach a point when the only place where the insects are surviving is in the preserve, the loss of insects that leave the preserve would also reduce the genetic diversity of the preserve and accelerate the collapse of the species.
... 5,000 Indians pretending to be robots.
5,000 Indians controlling 100,000 robots, though, would represent a huge cost savings in this case.
First, you wouldn't have to hire in the local market, so the labor would be cheaper. The median salary in India is about $350 per month. California's minimum wage (assuming four 40-hour workweeks) is $2,640 per month. So that's almost an order-of-magnitude reduction in cost by itself.
Second, at least half of a delivery person's time is spent in a vehicle going from place to place, and in low-density areas, that increases to maybe more like 80%. Assuming the vehicles are autonomous, the workers controlling the bots won't have to do anything with a bot while it is in transit (and presumably the autonomous vehicles themselves will require only occasional human intervention), so one person will be able to control a large number of bots, taking control of a bot only when one arrives at a destination.
Third, if the bot is autonomous except in exceptional circumstances, the percentage of time that a human will be in charge will be reduced even further.
So if you assume that the cost per hour is lower by a factor of 7.5, that 75% of time is spent driving (no interaction), and that 90% of deliveries are done fully autonomously without human intervention, and that intervention takes only a quarter of the time that it would take to deliver a package entirely by hand, that would mean that a remote delivery driver would cost 0.75% as much per delivery, and that would only improve over time as the reliability of automation improves and the number of interventions decreases.
The end of for-pay non-artistic manual labor is near.
hope that the new vomit is marginally different
The rest of your comment is basically correct, if unnecessarily negative, but this isn't. Traditional tools like diff make it very easy to see exactly what has changed. In practice, I rely on git, staging all of the iteration's changes ("git add
I also find it's helpful to make the AI keep iterating until the code builds and passes the unit tests before I bother taking a real look at what it has done. I don't even bother to read the compiler errors or test failure messages, I just paste them in the AI chat. Once the AI has something that appears to work, then I look at it. Normally, the code is functional and correct, though it's often not structured the way I'd like. Eventually it iterates to something I think is good, though the LLMs have a tendency to over-comment, so I tend to manually delete a lot of comments while doing the final review pass.
I actually find this mode of operation to be surprisingly efficient. Not so much because it gets the code written faster but because I can get other stuff done, too, because I mostly don't mentally context switch while the AI is working and compiles and tests are running.
This mode is probably easier for people who are experienced and comfortable with doing code reviews. Looking at what the AI has done is remarkably similar to looking at the output of a competent but inexperienced programmer.
They got to collect 30% of developers money for 20 years and will likely only be required to refund a tiny fraction. This isn't a mistake its weaponized disregard for what's right. Apple is only starting to follow the rules now after they were threatened with criminal contempt, that's how little their cost is of flaunting the law.
They're now a multiply convicted monopolist, which means everything they do from now on is going to be under much more careful scrutiny, by the courts, by other companies' lawyers, and by the DOJ. As a result, they're likely to get a lot more cases and *lose* a lot more cases. And at the rate things are going, fines are the least of their worries. They should be worrying that the DOJ might demand them to spin off the entire App Store ecosystem into a separate company and completely lose control. A little bit of short term profit doesn't really balance that out.
You're a very sick puppy
Sick of politicians who use their power for their own benefit instead of the general welfare... which to some extent is almost all politicians, but not remotely equally.
This is a nightmare scenario of Tim Cook's own making.
You misspelled Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller. The mistakes happened back when Tim Cook was still VP of operations. My exact words when those iOS App Store rules were first announced were "This is an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen." It was an obviously bad idea seventeen years ago, and the antitrust landscape has only gotten worse for Apple since then.
These big tech companies need to hire legal counsel with a more paranoid opinion of the law. They'd get in a lot less trouble if they paid some of their lawyers to tell them whether they should do something, rather than paying them to find ways to justify doing what they've already decided to do and look for legal loopholes to help them get away with doing it.
Hahahahahaha!
Yeah, I think they misspelled "lottery ticket". It was an incredible opportunity when the platform was new and nobody was there yet. Now, it's a sea of flappy little bird games, all alike.
Yeah, the first thought that came to mind was that maybe they're in trouble because the company is A.S.S.
What kind of code coverage are you getting from your autogenerated unit tests?
It does a pretty good job at the obvious flows, both positive and negative cases. But where coverage is inadequate you can iterate quite easily and automatically with a coverage tool. Just take the coverage tool output and feed it to the LLM. I have found that I don't even need to prompt it what to with the coverage, it understands what the tool output means and what it should do in response.
Like with the compiler and testrunner, what would really make this work well is if the AI could run the coverage tool itself so it could iterate without my interaction. With that, I could just tell it to write unit tests for a given module and give it a numeric coverage threshold it needs to meet, or to explain why the threshold can't be met.
I expect that the resulting tests would be very mechanistic, in the sense that they would aim to cover every branch but without much sense of which ones really matter and which ones don't. But maybe not. The LLM regularly surprises me with its apparent understanding not only of what code does, but of why. Regardless, review would be needed, and I'd undoubtedly want to make some changes... but I'll bet it would get me at least 75% of the way to a comprehensive test suite with minimal effort.
I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.
Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.
My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.
That was basically my suggestion. The government assume a standard deduction and basic public records and sends you estimated taxes. You can accept and pay, or file a return.
Makes sense.
For me I'd never need to do anything, every thing I do is already reported to the government and I'd suspect most americans fall into that category. Unless Fidelity isn't telling the government my capital gains.
Could be worse than that. One year I had a problem that my brokerage reported all of my gains but failed to report the cost basis. This was on a bunch of Restricted Stock Unit sales which happened automatically when the stock vested, so the actual capital gains are always very close to zero, since the sale occurs minutes after the vesting. But from the 1099-B it appeared I had 100% gains on a bunch of stock sales that approximately equal my annual salary (about half of my income is stock). Worse, taken at face value would have taxed me on that money twice, since the vesting counts as normal income and is taxable income reported on the W-2, then the sale counts as a 100% short-term capital gain.
What would happen in your scheme in such a situation is that the government's pre-filled form would show up as a massive tax bill. Assuming the taxpayer survived the resulting heart attack, they'd just have to file a return that shows the correct cost basis. So it's fine; no worse than the status quo, and better for most people.
What I'm more curious about is to whether it's dissolving or disintegrating. i.e. is this thing breaking down creating microplastics, or is it going into the constituent chemicals?
Or somewhere in between. I mean, I can buy dissolvable PVA 3D printer filament right now from Amazon or whatever. But there are limited uses for plastic that can't get wet.
Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks.
