Their pricing is already high for streaming, but that's apparently not enough for them. If you actually try to sign up you find that they pump the price > 33% more with "fees" for various things they advertise as benefits of their streaming, and so push the price to over $100/month.

Somehow it doesn't surprise me that they want even more money under the table after that.

At one point, diquat was used for weed control in lakes because it won't disperse or break down to become ineffective even if just poured in the water.

Imagine what that says about washing it off of fruits and vegetables or it's ability to diffuse into aquifers.

Check prices for Taiwan as well if you like. Meanwhile, where do you think American companies have boards made for them? The big differential in price is mark-up.

But really, there isn't a lot of human labor involved in board fab these days. And certainly not the sort that pays the lowest wages.

Components are just as crazily marked up in the U.S. I wouldn't be at all surprised that the Chinese manufacturers can get even better pricing then an individual could from a Chinese supplier due to volume.

It's like visual coding or RAD all over again. Whenever suits and PHBs are told there's a magic wand that'll allow them to do without paying people for the nitty-gritty bits, they get all excited and convince each other in their echo chamber that their dream of a company of all managers and no workers is just around the corner.

Then reality says "hi", the hype dies down, a few scam artists got rich and the world continues as it was, with a couple new cool tools in the toolbox of those who know how to use them correctly - which is generally the same people that were supposedly being replaced.

That's how I see AI. I've been writing software for the better part of 40 years. What I see from AI is sometimes astonishing and sometimes pathetic. I would never, ever, ever put AI generated code into production software without carefull checking and refactoring, and I would fire anyone who does.

Code completion is mostly in the "astonishing" part. If I write a couple lines of near-identical stuff, like assigning values from an input to a structured format for processing, the AI most of the time gets right the next line I want to write. Anything more complex than that is hit-and-miss.

Mostly, I use AI the way I would use an intern. "Can you look up how to use this function correctly? What are the parameters and their defaults?" or "Write me some code that's tedious to write (like lots of transformation operations) but not rocket science by far.
Essentially, it does faster and a little bit better what previously I'd have done with Google and Stackoverflow.

I have no fear it'll replace developers anytime soon. Half of the time the code is outright wrong, most of the time it has glaring security issues or isn't half as fault-tolerant as it should be, and for any case where I know how to do it without any research, I'd be faster writing the code myself then going through several iterations with an AI to get it done.

Yeah, just shove the worms back into the can.

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

The 1890's called, but it turns out they DON'T want their 16 hour work days back.

It's on you to present actual evidence.

That depends on the work. For maintenance, you don't care if he labors like a madman for hours a day, or if he reads a magazine all day, then takes out his wand and says "REPAIRO" with a flourish. So long as shit works.

But it DID. Better performance is a real and measurable result.

And get a lot less vacation days.

Tell that to the back to office zealots that expect 8 hr/day 5 day/week attendance.

The process of board FAB is now mostly automated. I honestly think much of the difference is that thChinese companies don't have to tithe to the toddlers of Wall Street (The yachts for tots program) so they can do it MUCH cheaper.

I would also help friends with such a thing. None of them are on /.

Others might decide to make it into a business or at least a side hustle. They could easily make some spare bux while saving their customers some money.

The OEMs wouldn't like that, but the laws are supposed to be what's good for the society as a whole and it's economy, not just what makes manufacturers the most money.