Consumers is nice, but far more important are the big corporate purchases. There may be a lot of people there too who don't want AI, but they all depend on decisions made at the top and AI seems to be the way to go, because of expectations and also because of the mentioned prisoner's dilemma, if competitors gain an advantage it is bad for your org, if all fail together it is manageable.
On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains.
Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally gigantic mistake, if you want to use being human to more than a tiny fraction of its potential.
If you are interested in creating solutions and useful systems, "politics", human networking, should be THE number one priority. Long before anything technical.
Important scientists and engineers were great networkers and communicators. They also knew which connections where worth making. Just like in the brain, fewer good connections are better than wildly cross-connecting everything.
What you’re saying is true. Yet, I can only willingly go along with so much terribleness before it hurts my soul. We only have so many days to do things we care about. The thought of throwing away 6 months of them for no defensible reason horrifies me, and I can’t, won’t, participate.
Edit: for a compensating control, I pair with senior leadership I can directly ask about this things. “Hey CTO, is there a reason we’re doing this thing so ass-backward? No? Can I go fix it then? Thanks!” Or, “oh, because we’re stalling to avoid this horrible customer’s demand, and no one’s really going to be working on it as their day job? Sigh, alright, I’ll look the other way.”
I let them be political so that I don’t have to be.
Those using memes along the lines of "nobody is illegal" (sometimes "on stolen land" is added)? This is a movement not limited to the US. Here in Europe there is a similar movement, using that same slogan. They don't want any borders or border enforcement at all.
> Protesters were seen carrying flags, signs and spraying graffiti on nearby property, including on the U.S. Courthouse sign where it read "No one is illegal on stolen land".
This is completely orthogonal to the conversation, but I think you misunderstood that slogan. It does not mean “immigration rules must not be enforced”.
It means differentiating between a potentially illegal action (illegal entry/overstaying) and the person itself. You never talk about an illegal driver, or an illegal drinker, but people talk about illegal immigrants, with the implication that the person itself is illegal.
It’s subtle but it’s a step towards dehumanizing a person, or making infractions to their rights “count less” in the public eye.
The protest you linked wasn't calling for completely open borders. That's also not policy of either of the main parties in the US, as was implied above. I understand "no one is illegal" to be a counter to the use of language like "illegals" to describe the humans involved.
I get that you can make the argument that they're merely making a semantic point. However, if that side of the debate actually agreed with us that these people shouldn't even be here at all, what difference does it make what we call them? If the side who wants them gone had their way, they'd be gone back home and they'd no longer be in any illegal status in any sense of the word.
It only matters what we call them, if you want to keep them here forever. I think the present-day recommended term is probably just "immigrant" right? So basically we should call them the same thing we call the people who waited years for their turn and proved that they had a positive contribution to make to our society.
Why do you choose that single example, which I said was just that, and pretend my whole statement hinges on it?
You are either misinformed, willfully ignorant or lying, and I've had it with this discussion style.
Yes, people who use "no one is illegal" do also say "no more borders". Not every single one, clearly humans are diverse, but your statement is just false.
> Why do you choose that single example, which I said was just that
Because we're looking for people saying borders should be completely opened. An example of people saying something else is irrelevant.
> Yes, people who use "no one is illegal" do also say "no more borders".
Ok but the conversation is about people saying the latter. It was you who brought the former into the conversation.
> Here a UK example
Which British parties are active in the United States?
> Another example, also showing this is an older movement
The claim was that "the left" has no response to emigration issues beyond "open all borders" and that this was the policy of "one party." The existence of an anti-borders movement is again irrelevant to the questions I raised in response to this assertion.
Just because some people who say "no one is illegal" also say "no more borders," that does not automatically mean that the former implies the latter. If that were the case, we could paint everyone who agrees with Nick Fuentes on any point (including, in the extreme, "nice weather we're having today") as a antisemite. The old joke linking dietary choices to Nazism ("You know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler!") is meant to make light of this logical fallacy.
The grandparent post accurately captured what I have understood people to mean by "no one is illegal" -- it is meant to protest a dehumanizing way to describe a class of people.
Yeah, the cost of doing it on the moon would be even more astronomical. Then there also is the three second of round-trip latency to consider (ca. 2.6 s just the signal, but processing adds a bit more).
Billionaire money is not like money for the normal person. It is a placeholder for how much influence you have on the economy - and even the state.
It is not just a number, as it is for people who just save a few dollars, for whom it really is just a number until they withdraw money to use it. The billionaire's money is not "money", it is actual working assets, and the abstraction of turning this into a number does a terrible job, the result now misunderstood by many. Assets being companies doing stuff mostly (holding non-control-giving paper assets is different and not what being a top capitalist is about, only used as an additional tool below the actual goal). Which they fully control (the small investor does not even have any control worth mentioning when they own shares of a public company).
They don't just play with money, they play with real things! And they want to play with ever bigger real things. They don't just want to improve some minor product. They want to control the fate of civilization.
OT:
I hate this money view with a passion, this is what too many people discussing wealth inequality issues get wrong. This is not Scrooge McDuck and his money pile. Money is an abstraction, and it is misused terribly, hiding what is actually going on for too many observers who then go on to discuss "numbers".
That is also why the idea to "just redistribute the money of the rich" is a failure. It isn't money! It is actual real complex organizations. And you can't just make everything into a public company, and also, even when they are, for better or worse owners don't lead like managers. Doing the socialism thing (I grew up in the GDR) where everybody owns a tiny bit of everything just does not work the same.
We will have to look at what those super-rich are actually doing, case by individual case of ownership, not just look at some abstract numbers. Sometimes concentrated control over a lot of assets is a good thing, and other times it is not. Ignoring the objection of "who would control that?", because right now they control themselves so it's never nobody.
I think you have read the "redistrubute the money" people wrong. They definitely, absolutely want to reduce the power the tiny minority hold over the many. That's the whole point. The money is a tool to get the work done.
I think you missed the point. If you have a 100 MW communicstion satellite and a 100 MW compute satellite those are very different beasts. The first might send 50% of the energy away as radio communication making it effectively a 50 MW satellitefor cooling purposes.
No, they didn't. You can't "send away" thermal energy via radio waves. At the temperatures we're talking about, thermal energy is in the infrared. That's blackbody radiation.
Nobody describes a satellite by specifying the amount of heat that it produces, but by the amount of electrical energy that it consumes.
In a communication satellite, a large fraction of the consumed electrical energy goes into the radio transmitter. Radio transmitters are very efficient and most of the consumed power is emitted as radio waves and only a very small part is converted into heat, which must be handled by the cooling system.
So in any communication satellite, a significant fraction of the consumed energy does not become heat.
Your answer makes it seem like you too missed the point. If a Starlink sends a 1000W signal to Earth, that is 1000W of power that does not heat the satellite.
Because that is useless? The physical phenomenon is so very, very different in biological systems compared to the metal-wire electricity our electrical devices are based on that they are entirely different things.
For example, charge carriers are electrons in metal wires vs. ions in biological systems. That has huge implications, because moving around ions is a lot harder, and slower.
In a metal wire the electrical field is established from beginning to the end, and that means that the electrons at the end start moving at pretty much the same time as the ones at the other end, no matter how long the wire. That means in a metal wire signals move at a significant fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum, because it is the speed of the electrical field and not that of the charge carriers that matters.
In a biological system electrical fields are tiny! The way the signal propagates in an axon is much more cumbersome, expensive, and slow. Speed of signal propagation is ca. 1/2 to at most 100 m/s (for thick myelinated axons). The signal is propagated by jumping in very tiny steps along the axon's inner surface. (https://youtu.be/tOTYO5WrXFU)
This also makes The Matrix movies' main premise about humans as batteries a little strange: Sure, there's lots of electrical activity, but it is in trillions of very tiny places across nanometer distances. And it is created by moving ions around (at great energy cost).
So anyway, what actually physically happens in an electrical grid of metal wires, or in a biological system are vastly different things. It is not the same "electricity", the only thing they have in common is that electrical fields and charge carriers (but different ones) are involved. But the way it is structured, created, propagated is entirely different in both cases.
When I asked Google out of curiosity what it had to say it showed this:
> Despite their differences, both are fundamentally, at their core, the movement of charged particles driven by electrical potential differences.
This is just not correct! The "the movement of charged particles" part specifically. Again, wires have one electrical field, but in biological systems propagation is entirely different, and slow, and expensive! The methods used to propagate a signal are not even remotely comparable. That's a difference not even a Radio Yerevan joke could make use of.
I think in the original story of the Matrix humans were not batteries but meant to be used as biological GPUs for the machines to run upon. The studio felt that this idea might be too confusing in 1999. So that’s why Morpheus holds up a battery.
And not letting farms go bust is not the worst idea. Crops are not like industrial products, how much gets produced has a significant random component. Relying on market forces alone does not appear to be the best solution in this field, no?
That's independent of how much big agro-businesses benefitting from policies they asked politicians to create for them is a problem too.
Anyway -
my recommendation for potatoes is "Kartoffelpuffer"! Can be combined with a large number of things, applesauce is the most simple and laziest choice.
This is very easy to make, the only problem is that you may end up with a lot of oil splashes around your pan. I cover everything around the pan with kitchen paper towels, carefully leaving a few millimeters of space around the heating circle, so that afterwards all I have to do is collect them at the end, no other cleanup necessary.
They need to be as brown as shown at the beginning of the above video for best taste, and not too thick.
They do it all manually in the video, but I just use a mixer, which is much faster and the resulting texture is more to my liking anyway compared to having solid stripes of potato in there. It is also the more common method. Do it like in the video if you prefer them made out of small solid stripes.
> Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though
> governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech
I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a major Linux company for quite a few years, started using Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related kernel modules.
However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many non-PC systems).
I have been in projects for large companies but also government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50 employees) non-IT business with people in several countries.
People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters the least in business. Office is another, and even there most people who don't deal with it at scale are way too focused on some use case where individuals write documents and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very small setup, or even just a single PC.
However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess, duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But nobody in the world would be able to provide soooo much stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just a tool will not switch.
But something can be done.
The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.
They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once wrote some code for some government agency to manage business registrations, and it was web software.
The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches for local business to start making money using other stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same time, enact policies that let local business grow using alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does not have to compete with US based ones.
The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about the MS stack is that I can use it everywhere, in almost all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business would have to use a different local company in each country.
I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their focus is on their own business and domain problems first of all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if the US were to do something really drastic that crashes some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.
> However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser, and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is certainly competition in the IT management space. Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.
> The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
This is stuff other vendors have been offering for ages now.
The browser versions of the Office apps aren't comparable to the native apps, and also don't support whatever native integrations (like VBA add-ins) companies use.
Trading dependency on a company in Redmond, WA, USA, for one in mountain view, CA, USA does nothing for moving away from USA in the dependency chain, but it proves that it's possible. And I know it's possible as there are several billion-dollar companies in Google Workspace I know of personally. And if it's possible for them, it means it's possible for the EU to get there. The only question is will they ever? Let's form a committee to schedule a meeting to look into that question.
"Possible" is everything that does not violate any laws of the universe, that is not a useful criterion!
Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?
But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.
I wrote assembler on pages of paper. Then I used tables, and a calculator for the two's-complement relative negative jumps, to manually translate it into hex code. Then I had software to type in such hex dumps and save them to audio cassette, from which I could then load them for execution.
I did not have an assembler for my computer. I had a disassembler though- manually typed it in from a computer magazine hex dump, and saved it on an audio cassette. With the disassembler I could check if I had translated everything correctly into hex, including the relative jumps.
The planning required to write programs on sheets of paper was very helpful. I felt I got a lot dumber once I had a PC and actual programmer software (e.g. Borland C++). I found I was sitting in front of an empty code file without a plan more often than not, and wrote code moment to moment, immediately compiling and test running.
The AI coding may actually not be so bad if it encourages people to start with high-level planning instead of jumping into the IDE right away.
Now if only you had read to the end of my comment, to recognize that I was setting up for something, and also applied not just one but several HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, under "comments")...
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