• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • Skepticism is good. However, there is a lot of evidence that Gen Z is quite tech illiterate in general, but especially compared to the Millennial cohort. Colleges and universities have had to force Gen Z students into basically remedial computing courses just to teach them how file systems work and other simple-yet-taken-for-granted concepts work. Drop rates for CS degrees are climbing as Gen Z moves into higher education and hits a very difficult wall for them.

    And, in the end, that last bit was definitely another scam targeting their relative ignorance in the space. That is why so many “influencers”/scam artists target/targeted them with “career guides” or code boot camps or whatever. And I think that disillusionment is also part of the backlash against devs in general as “tech bros” despite very few devs actually working in the Valley for those companies under those conditions.


  • Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do

    Temu is legitimately malware. The company had their source dumped and they obfuscated their malware-like practices to avoid Google’s automatic detection. I presume they did the same with their iOS client. It is very telling that they have been extremely successful despite the same exact company and team doing this before with another app, Pinduoduo. That’s right; same dev team and everything. Temu goes above and beyond the normal surveillance capitalism stuff we are used to and circumvents system security in order to sell your raw data on the market. The entire scheme isn’t to build a retail space (although it is doing that as well); it is to get as many people to download the app so they can steal an absurd amount of data which is normally protected.


  • Microsoft has been slowly building toward requiring these subscriptions for enterprise for some time now. That is where Windows365 is ultimately going at an enterprise level, management just doesn’t realize it yet or are aware of how powerless they are to stop it.

    Because Microsoft should’ve been broken up in the 90s. They definitely need to be broken up now. Same with a number of companies really, but Microsoft has a unique position to really hold enterprise and government by the balls.



  • Others have pointed out that the article is jumping to conclusions by excluding the very and actually well documented economic factors at play here.

    It is crunchy/granola technophobia. People need to keep in mind that popular (scientific, for the time) opinion used to be that excessive reading was had for children and adults. It is as old as our written records actually, going back to a handful of Greek historians warning about it even.

    If people wanted the best for babies then we’d be raising them in collectives, with multigenerational households being the norm and free food, healthcare, and childcare widely available with few string attached. Some places already are close to all of those things.

    But it is so much easier to clutch pearls and blame the iPad. It isn’t like brains shut off. They also used to argue that video games causes inadequate social and motor skill development and now fucking surgeons play games to build motor skills.

    I’m sure we’ll hear that screentime proclaims “hail Satan” just as soon as they find a way to play the iPad in reverse.



  • I agree that most people don’t need SUVs. And even more don’t need a truck. But few others are forced to drive as much nor as far as Americans on a daily basis, so we don’t give a shit if people in other countries with robust public transport sometimes have to drive places in their (comparatively) small countries with their families.

    TIL that a dubious 15% is also === 95%.

    Edit: that is to say, this isn’t as simple as “LOL Americans fat, Americans dumb.” The same old Euro arguments don’t work on this one. Civil planning is completely fucked here. It isn’t just bad, it is actively hostile to non-drivers.

    And SUVs in particular can get these massive tax advantages that cars don’t get. Same with some models of truck. Plus, marketing is highly effective and nearly totally unregulated like so much else over here.

    You have morons giving themselves brain damage for the right to own gas stoves, and we have similar morons suffocating themselves and everyone else by insisting they need huge vehicles. And the government actively encourages it.


  • The US should really just directly employ regional workers to handle these projects. Corruption and nepotism are rampant in public construction projects, and the profit motive requires an inefficient use of tax dollars since we must pay a completely useless margin just so somebody can become richer for doing zero work.

    We also need to stop expanding highways since additional lanes have been proven to not help congestion, and actually worsens it because it encourages more driving.


  • It isn’t even that. America, Germany, and the UK are all very similar. And those numbers are only becoming more similar over time.

    Europeans need to remember that American states are often larger than European countries.

    And that generations of neglect or intentional sabotage has rendered public transport completely useless outside of outlier scenarios.

    People want to handwave it away, but there are legitimate safety concerns with driving smaller vehicles in the US. Not only are they less comfortable (in a country where you have to drive everywhere, for long periods of time, even for incidental items). They will get destroyed by our obnoxiously huge SUVs and trucks. Happens all the time.

    Same thing needs to be remembered when people who don’t live here insist everyone should just be biking everywhere. I agree in spirit, but the reality is that biking in the US is a gamble every time someone does it. And you can’t convince a populace to do it when a normal American is 10+ miles away from a grocery store, and when most of our states experience both extreme heat and extreme cold.

    The problem is truly systemic. We have a majority of civil planning intentionally implementing hostile engineering to incentivize vehicles.


  • Those companies aren’t supplying telecom kit.

    I don’t know what you mean by R&D “taxes.” Do you mean profits that go into R&D? Tax breaks which Microsoft and others exploit to the maximum under the guise of “R&D” to lower their burden to negotiable (for them) amounts?

    Regardless, there’s a huge difference between a bad company like Microsoft and one like Huawei. China is absolutely notorious for modern day industrial espionage. Anyone who denies it has to be delusional. And they lose their shit when their own tactics, like forced technology transfers and requirements to partner with domestic firms, are applied to them in equal measure.

    Let’s look at Huawei for example. They straight up plagiarized a huge amount of code from Cisco. This includes esoteric bugs and their error messages. This isn’t a Oracle vs Google “same name of API” thing.

    Europe should really subsidize their own tech sector so they don’t have to rely on China or the US for vital infrastructure.


  • These people are just coping and lying via social media. Baulder’s Gate 3, while Budget undisclosed, was surely made for less than what some of the richest companies in the industry spend on shit game products like Modern Warfare 2 or Assassins Creed games which have quarter of a billion dollars budgets or better.

    Larian put this game into early access at full price and ate shit for it. I’ve been playing it for years already, first on Stadia (where it was already excellent, just clearly unfinished).

    Tangent, I’m sick of these knuckleheads talking about Larian as if they aren’t a western gaming company based out of Belgium and employing Europeans and others. They know the anti-Sini sentiment is politically strong which is why they point to minority shareholdings by Tencent and label Larian an eastern company.

    Epic has a bigger claim to being a non-Western gaming company since Tencent owns almost half of them by itself.

    These particular devs are apparently either astroturfing messages with political undertones for their employers, chronically online and in desperate need of some Tumblr therapy, or have a conservative’s guilty conscience and are projecting their inadequacy onto everyone else.



  • I don’t think it does. I doubt it is purely a cost issue. Microsoft is going to throw billions at OpenAI, no problem.

    What has happened, based on the info we get from the company, is that they keep tweaking their algorithms in response to how people use them. ChatGPT was amazing at first. But it would also easily tell you how to murder someone and get away with it, create a plausible sounding weapon of mass destruction, coerce you into weird relationships, and basically anything else it wasn’t supposed to do.

    I’ve noticed it has become worse at rubber ducking non-trivial coding prompts. I’ve noticed that my juniors have a hell of a time functioning without access to it, and they’d rather ask questions of seniors rather than try to find information our solutions themselves, replacing chatbots with Sr devs essentially.

    A good tool for getting people on ramped if they’ve never coded before, and maybe for rubber ducking in my experience. But far too volatile for consistent work. Especially with a Blackbox of a company constantly hampering its outputs.



  • glockenspiel@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    The judge got fed up because her son works for Microsoft and thus the family is heavily invested–stock wise–in the company.

    The judge should’ve been forced to recuse. Microsoft also should’ve had its breakup orders enforced decades ago, instead of having it tossed out by a cabal of judges.

    Microsoft would be a totally different company if they didn’t have just Azure to subsidize all their own projects which operate at cost or loss to run competitors out.





  • It isn’t about ChatGPT. That’s just the consumer side of things people know.

    These strikes are about industry exploitation. For example, the actors are striking for, among other reasons, forced acceptance of deep fakes being created in their likenesses without payment, for unlimited use, in perpetuity.

    The writers wants actual residuals, as do actors, for streaming views. And directors and writers want performance information that they have traditionally been given so they can 1.) fact checking what they are being paid, and 2.) cater their content.

    Also, humans should never side with AI when it comes to a job. If and when it comes for them, it will also come for you. Google right now has successful pilots of their transformer models being used to train physical robots operating in meat space.

    It’s only a matter of time. Humanity needs to put a collar on this shit before it collars us. These “AI” should be tools we used not full blown replacements.


  • There are lots of reasons:

    Naked corruption, be it financial or (more like since this is state level), nepotism.

    When many of these laws were instituted, it was generally illegal for producers to own their own means of distribution. Movie studios couldn’t own movie theaters for example. That’s why streaming went from a small collection of collaborative entities with most things you’d want to watch, to four (or more) dozen, all price fixing and moving in unison just like the cell industry does.

    Theoretically, tax money is more likely to remain in a state if a car dealership is local to that state. Ford selling vehicles in Georgia, for example, would almost surely send all their profits back to Michigan or whatever tax haven is cool these days (which wasn’t as much of a problem when these laws were made).

    I’m not defending dealers, though. They are rent-seeking parasites that grossly underpay the people in the garage who keep things humming along. There is a very real dealership-owner (or children) to state politician pipeline in my state and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.