One would think the finger pointing should go towards the shitty governments causing trouble and pain for their own citizens, but somehow you've managed to find an angle to blame the West.
It is truly an unthankful job being the saviour of the entire world.
Wouldn’t be surprised if Theo did a video about investing in ffmpeg and how he revived it and has been consulting to the developers and we should bow down and praise him for resurrecting ffmpeg.
You are joking, but there was actually a very popular enterprise SAST tool that used to offer a "cloud" version of their software. It worked by having someone from their team manually download the zip file of your code, run it through their desktop software, and then upload the results back to make them visible in the web portal.
That's a totally valid and useful way to validate an idea. After a few months of manual labor they will have a good idea of how/what to build and if it is even worth building.
It is if you can keep a baseline level of quality uniform across both your customers and each of your customers projects. It's less OK if the human-assisted output is a loss-leader you burn on the pilot project, the first couple projects, or high-profile customers.
There's nothing fundamentally bad about having Oompa Loompa's behind the scenes, as long as you're honest about the outcomes you can provide.
I agree, though: also a very sensible way to prioritize development work.
Unless the lack of real time (or consistent time to) results drives down interest in the cloud version, or instead of driving down interest makes it appear as if people want something different than what they would want if the time to results was consistent/faster.
Still could be worth doing a bit of manual work like this, but it's worth being cautious about drawing conclusions from it.
I know who you're talking about, but also: this is the joke about basically every hosted SAST and DAST tool. I call it the "Oompa Loompa" model of security products.
You really think Microsoft has been ”cool” for the past decade or so?
First the rampant spyware, then they gradually wreck every single piece of software into unusable buggy AI-slop-mess just to play the trashy MBA valuation games.
I still hold nostalgic value for the old OSes (say up to XP/7) but everything after has been nothing but maximal profit extraction.
The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly" and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.
Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.
This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or so.
Only people without any sense of reality believed this. Being exploitative is a core feature of MS, since its foundation. It's like believing a serpent won't bite you. They're in the middle of the embrace, extend and extinguish cycle for open source technologies.
So many fond memories of these games in my childhood, afterwards it's been interesting to see how widespread their adoption was outside of Finland. Some other notable games like Mine Bombers, Liero etc. come to mind. As a kid you always thought they were just a local phenomenom.
Proponents pretend like 4 day work weeks don’t reduce output with all sorts of dubious motivated reasoning.
A lot of it is “we can be more efficient” and therefore we don’t need to work as many hours, overlooking the obvious fact that if everyone can be 20% more efficient then logical thing to do is downside headcount by 20%, not keep 100% of the workforce at 80% of capacity.
It takes so long for a woman to go through the gestation period before giving birth. But when you get 9 women you can get 9 babies in the same period. But it still takes 9 months. I think the women just aren't working at full capacity for those 9 months. It should be possible to just get the 9 women to produce 1 baby in 1/9th of the period.
The person I replied to made it sound like there's a magic switch you can press to make your workforce operate at 125% efficiency after getting rid of 20% of it and that it's idiotic to reduce the working week from 5 to 4 days.
I thought this was so absurd of a statement that I re-stated the 9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month saying to jokingly point out that it's just not how these things work.
... Except the obvious argument for a 4 day week is that in a knowledge economy, downtime is more critical to meaningful work. People like Tolkien don't just write 9-5, there's no reason consultants or programmers should work that way, it just doesn't scale.
Knowledge work does require time where you are mulling over the problem, rather than executing, but that isn’t downtime. Reducing working hours, in most cases, will reduce time spent doing both those tasks.
If Tolkien took an additional day off each week, it absolutely would have increased the time taken to complete his works.
... are you not at all more productive the week right after a holiday than when you've been crunching for 5 months straight with no time off? Because I bloody know I am. Knowledge work really can't just be conveniently bundled into units of productive vs unproductive time like making widgets.
There’s no quality evidence that reducing hours worked below 40 hours increases productivity per hour.
All research done to date shows that productivity per hour is flat until about 60 hours or even higher for low skill work.
What you’re doing is called motivated reasoning. You want to believe that you can work less and still get the same amount done, so you cling to whatever nebulous explanation you can find to support it.
The reality is that you work less hours, you get less done.
The obsessive need for AI developers to make everything into the most banal, inoffensive version of said thing will probably end up being the biggest roadblock for AI taking over human jobs.
You phrase it well. It's not the AI themselves. You can as easily get an AI to take something fundamentally banal and write it into something exciting, dynamic, exotic, or strange.
If you analyze these systems as a work of art, using the postmodern toolset, the people and systems taking one of the most potent technologies humanity has ever created and using it to craft a banality machine is just... very revealing. Like the great-uncle who can't even finish protesting how non-racist he is without using a racial slur in the process.
"We're innovative! We're hip! We're on the cutting edge! We're setting trends! Now here, let me help you turn your text into the grayest corporate sludge imaginable."
It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.
It is, isn't it. It's the Sokal Hoax on a society-wide automated scale: rather than being concerned with what a "text" might "mean", generate millions upon millions of "text" sequences and mechanically separate those which pass as real enough. Baudrillard's simulacrum.
> It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.
People seem to be very insistent that the output of AI is not capital-A art, because that threatens their worldview, ignoring how artists had previously pushed to expand "art" away from any concerns of technique, intent, legibility etc.
I mean the system itself is art. The output is some kind of anti-art, but the system that uses the world's most amazing technology to extract the art out of everything that passes through it is an amazing piece of inadvertent outsider art on its own.
"The obsessive need for AI developers (...)" - Of product product/business people trying to fit into the "AI era". Developers, if given a chance, wouldn't probably built this.
Honestly the only spot-on use case I can think of for an eternally calm, friendly, totally bland and generic customer service AI is for interacting with the Karens of the world and only because it would spare the nerves of human employees and because the logs would no doubt be hilarious to read.
I feel like nothing would turn me into a Karen more than interacting with AI customer service on a regular basis.
It’s already severely frustrating that at many companies, you have to talk to several people (separated by copious waiting) to get your problem solved after handling a severely outdated and underdeveloped phone system.
I see it as like- if you were the owner of a company, you could decide for yourself what the $/abuse trade off is, and for each individual customer decide if it's worth it.
As a disempowered employee, you can only decide in aggregate if the total $ vs total abuse is worth it. So in order to keep getting paid at all, you Must put up with every interaction. Which leads to no alternative to the person being abused and no real consequences for the person being abusive, which is a shame. And it seems a lot easier to take abuse if you know you have the upper hand and have an out if you ever want it.
It is truly an unthankful job being the saviour of the entire world.