Remember the good old days, when the Internet hype was suddenly over, and self-proclaimed "world market leaders" collapsed left and right... usually because they never had a profitable business model? Back then, reading http://fuckedcompany.com/ was really good daily entertainment. Someone should revive that web site, I guess the owner of that domain would be willing to sell it :-)

Well, it seems many western video game companies had no intention of "resonating with the locals", but instead became openly hostile towards their former customers (like the Ubisoft CEO telling his now former customers to "get used to not owning their games"). Which resulted in some epic flops from the west (like "Concord" etc.), while some far east productions (like "Black Myth Wukong" or "Crimson Desert") "resonated with the locals" enough to make them big successes. And that was not because those Asian companies had better developers or were attempting to tailor their games specifically to have success in "the west", but simply because they implemented what average video game buyers liked, instead of berating them and trying to sell them unwelcome stuff.

Regardless of how good one estimates the chances for those specific workers to achieve something through a union (and I would agree the chances to be small in this case), there definitely have been significant improvements in working conditions through Unions in history.

Microslop taking action against phishing reports, rather than closing security holes, is exactly what I would have expected of them. And I would not be surprised if the scamming originates from inside Microslop.

In the scenario where Robots produce everything vastly better and cheaper than humans ever could, it would clearly be Robots that build further Robots. Which isn't so Sci-Fi anymore, many modern factories already have automated most of the build process.

No, I think the likes of Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg will prefer to live where ever they like, protected by an army of Robots which, unlike the security personnel they currently need to employ, will not object to whatever atrocity they are asked to perform.

I'm honestly trying to understand how UBI would be supposed to make a difference: Let's assume the extreme case where Robots produce everything vastly better and cheaper than humans ever could. Let's assume the government is willing to pay out arbitrarily high UBIs. Why should money in the hands of those not owning the Robots motivate those owning the Robots to give them anything? Those owning the Robots (including the Robot army to defend themselves) already have everything they want, and money from some no longer needed humans is not really of value to them anymore.

So instead of UBI, a government interested in the welfare of its human population would rather have to somehow provide the amount of Robots, land, and natural resources needed to become self-sufficient to each of its citizens. Which will, of course, meet fierce resistance by the original Robot owners, who certainly have no interest in sharing resources with just everyone, and will let their Robot army fight for them.

I am sure there a plenty of tests. Written by exactly the same LLM that also wrote the code. And therefore expects the same defect output in its tests that its code generates. It was never a good idea to have the same programmer write both the code and its test, whether human or LLM, but now there are far fewer distinct LLMs than there were distinct humans to do the job in the past.

Yes, damning food just because it is "processed" is stupid, as there are many forms of processing that improve food health-wise, and yes, there is a lot of hysteria around "what diet one eats" with little evidence backing it.
What they should really say could use an abbreviation: "Food processed by greedy corporations that improve their profits at the expense of making it more unhealthy for the consumer should be avoided to become the main component of one's daily intake."

The small overall score difference between Claude Opus 4.7 and DeepSeek 4 in contests that are based on mostly English speaking participants scoring the results could well be the other way round when doing such contests among a mostly Chinese speaking population.

That is why I do not connect the Xbox to a network. And will certainly never buy any future one that refuses to work without network connection.

Yes, for the price of a new gaming PC they will send you one, outfitted with an "Xbox"-sticker at the front. Then you will only need to buy once again all the games you have on your Xbox discs, and you are good to go again. Ok, some of those Xbox games you previously bought won't be available, but that is just to enhance your experience.

I think nobody at the top of Microsoft really expects or even wants to re-enter the console market. They just want yet another marketing bullshitter join the attempt to mislead people into believing that that Windows pig painted with some Xbox-branding lipstick is a gaming console.

... to allow for the use of LLM-based bots to read texts or to do math, and just like that scores will dramatically improve. I'm sure there are certain companies willing to sponsor such a change of scoring rules / education goals. Remember, as one famous Oligarch stated: “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”

... not for Microslop, who are just doing their business as usual, and won't squeeze any less money out of their vendor-locked-in victims.