* Posts by Steve Button

1144 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2007

Python still has the strongest grip on developers

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Joke

Re: One programmer is happy with PHP

Sorry forgot the joke icon, as I thought it was obvious. Added it for you.

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If you like C, you should try Go. Made by some of the same people, and they have taken away some of the sharp edges.

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One programmer is happy with PHP

"One programmer is happy with PHP..." yeah, it's andy 103 above. There may be others, but I'm not aware of them.

Here's how the data we feed AI determines the results

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It's useful

I have friends who want to dream up a few words for a marketing campaign for their web store. After doing this for the 15th time, it gets a bit repetitive and boring. Asking ChatGPT to generate you some spiel for you "Easter Offer" saves you some time, and actually makes better wording that you would on your own (what with it being boring as hell, as you've already done it so many times!!)

Beyond that use (and others like it), I don't see it changing the world in any substantial way just yet.

I might use it to rewrite the summary at the top of my CV, or to put in some nice wording in a job application (I normally just put "See CV") so I guess it adds value. Or wastes someone's time, if they actually ever read that stuff?

Probably the net result with the current iteration is just going to be a lot more wordage.

Chinese city of Changshu to issue salaries in digital yuan

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Re: Why would anyone ever want this?

Not quite. Shutting down people's bank accounts for any length of time is going to get people seriously pissed off, and they won't put up with it for very long.

Stopping them from doing "naughty" things like eating meat or buying diesel is a far more subtle punishment.

Many in the green party would love this kind of power. They are called watermelons because they are green on the outside, red on the inside.

It's very possible that the Green party could get in, perhaps as a coalition, at some point in the future. They might want this kind of power, to "protect" you. For your own good.

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Re: Chinese Money

"5. The advantage to the government. Long term, it can potentially be used to control dissent by limiting the ability of those who hold unpopular views to travel and buy stuff."

Yeah, that's quite a biggie. Let's not have that please.

A little bit of "dissent" is a very healthy thing in a functioning democracy, and it stops governments from forcing through unpopular policies. It means they have to make the argument and convince the people they are doing the right thing.

It might not be popular, but if that's your only option of getting paid it will become more widespread. Eventually they'll be able to have some places ONLY accept eCNY,

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Re: Why would anyone ever want this?

Yes it is, potentially, going to make a real difference.

They could decide you've had too much alcohol or cigarettes that week and decide to lock your account so you are only allowed to buy essentials. Or perhaps you've been on a protest, and you're not allowed to travel (The Chinese government actually did this, using the Covid pass. All "for their own good" of course)

Also, they would know exactly what you've bought (or sold). Much like the supermarkets do now with loyalty cards, but completely centralised.

It's possible they might go for decades only using it for convenience and data collection, but at some point a leader is going to use it for dystopian purposes... and at that point you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

We've already seen Trudeau, Ardern and Macron exercise these authoritarian tendencies in the past couple of years. Before that I thought it could not really happen here, but now I see I was naive and it's actually really easy (they just have to declare some sort of emergency).

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Re: Why would anyone ever want this?

Just imagine that some Vegan zealots got into government and put in a policy where we all have to eat less meat to "save the planet". The government could then prevent you from purchasing any more meat, because you've had your allocated quota for that month. I could actually see this happening, when you get people like Bill Gates, in his book, saying that we all need to eat less meat (but not him, he still likes it) and we should all fly less (but not him).

Now, you may or may not agree that we should all go Vegan. That's not the point. Should the government get the power to force everyone?

It doesn't take much imagination to think of a government getting into power and forcing everyone to do something that you might not like, does it?

These CBDCs are a really terrible idea.

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Why would anyone ever want this?

It seems that all the advantages are with the government getting more control of our finances, and there would be no benefit for me.

Why would I want that?

After what happened in Canada to the truckers protesting, it feels like it could happen to anyone. Whether you agree with them or not, there might come a time when you do something that the government doesn't like. Would you want to give them this power?

Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment

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Yeah, good point. What was I thinking?

Although... you'd think. After Theranos? They have learned some lessons?

Silly me.

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Yeah that's true, but it would not take a genius to ask Theranos to produce a blood test on yourself (as a potential investor) and then compare that to an independent traditional blood test and compare the results. Indeed some of the investors tried to do this, but Theranos fobbed them off. At this point in the due diligence the sensible ones walked away. If you are going to invest millions of dollars+ into a venture, it's really a no brainer to spend a few hundred validating their claims.

UK becomes Unicorn Kingdom, where AI fairy dust earns King's ransom

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Re: "...to make up for the inflation which has ravaged their pay packet, according to unions..."

"the Swedish did not simply carry on as usual."

Actually according to Google mobility data, they did have a slight drop off to begin with, but they pretty much did carry on as normal after a short while.

It's not really the point that they did a bit worse than Denmark and a bit better than Finland. If lockdown has saved the millions of lives that are claimed, then you'd expect Sweden to be a complete outlier and be on the worse end of the scale (across all countries) instead of one of the best.

That coupled with Sweden's lack of massive drop in GPD means on balance it seems (perhaps) that they did the right thing.

You are aware that as GDP drops, we all get poorer, right? And when we get poorer, lots of people will die or have worse life outcomes? This is far more difficult to calculate, will be spread over a much greater time, and hard to know how much to attribute to lockdowns and how much to other factors... but those people will be just as dead.

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Re: "...to make up for the inflation which has ravaged their pay packet, according to unions..."

How about comparing Sweden to dozens of other countries including Denmark and Norway?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-deaths-a-look-at-the-data/

Just take a look at the graph half way down the article if you "can't be arsed" to look it up.

Now can we get back on topic? (I'm just kidding, this is far more interesting than the original article, which was something something AI something - the usual bollocks of the moment)

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Re: "...to make up for the inflation which has ravaged their pay packet, according to unions..."

This is a parody, right? You actually believe that lockdowns saved millions of lives? Even though Sweden had better outcomes than other countries, even their neighbours eventually?

The lockdowns only spread out the deaths a bit, if at all and caused loads of other problems. This is partly why we're still seeing excess deaths right now, which are very much not from Covid.

Every time we implemented lockdown the cases had already started falling. When we eventually gave them up, under great pressure to keep them at Christmas 2021, cases fell pretty quickly without any form of lockdown.

There's so much wrong with your arguments it's hard to know where to start, and as you've an Anonymous Coward I'll just leave it at that. If you actually believe that lockdowns saved millions of lives, then your other arguments might make some sense, but there really is no evidence that they did.

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Re: "...to make up for the inflation which has ravaged their pay packet, according to unions..."

I have got no real beef with teachers. Some of them had to put up with me, for which I'll be forever grateful.

However, the unions, not so much.

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"...to make up for the inflation which has ravaged their pay packet, according to unions..."

Are these the same unions who were threatening to strike if we didn't have stricter lockdown in 2020 and 2021?

And those lockdowns caused a massive drop in productivity / GDP. Which then caused the banks to perform QE. Which then caused the inflation. Some of us said this would happen at the time*

You reap what you sow.

Perhaps we should just stick a Cornetto onto a horse and call it a Unicorn. It'll do.

* And we've even kept the receipts.

With a mighty hand, and an outstretched arm, Musk scraps Pope's blue tick

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Re: Good

May not have been made on this article, but some clowns come on here on pretty much every Musk / Twitter article and comments along the lines of "I've would never use Twitter, but..."

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Re: Good

Also, I think the main criticism of this move is that you are going to get lots of people paying the $8 to set up fake accounts pretending to be real people.

Firstly, that's against the T&C and they should get taken down.

Secondly, how many people are really going to do that? Will they get many followers? Will they get bored and stop paying / go away?

I just don't see this turning into a huge problem, and if it does surely they will deal with it.

I think Elon is a deeply flawed human being, but he's doing some interesting stuff. They whole blocking SubStack thing is a real dick move. The guy is an asshole just like every other billionaire is, but he's just a lot more open about it than Peter Thiel, Bill Gates or even Steve Jobs (yes, he was also an asshole to a lot of people).

Twitter WAS a heavily biased place 1 year ago and before. Lab leak theory was suppressed. Big Pharma nastiness was suppressed. Hunter Biden laptop scandal was censored. At least it's a bit more open now, and you can criticise people on the left AND on the right. Any Oh Boy, do they all need some criticism. (sorry, I'm not a fan of politicians in general whatever colour they are)

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Good

It's better to level the playing field, instead of the old aristocracy system.

If people are stupid enough to pay $8/ month to get a blue tick then at least we can all see they are stupid.

CUE: Lot's of comments from people "I've never used Twitter, but I've got strong opinions on all the hate speech that I would see if I was ever to go on there". Yes, there's some hate on there if you seek it out and follow nasty people. No, there doesn't seem to be any more than there was a year ago. But if I see people post racist stuff or harp on about Brexit constantly (either pro or anti) they get a hard BLOCK from me.

Yes, it's a bit of a cesspit and that's part of the reason it's so compelling. It's interesting, and you often get a spin on things that you just don't see in other places. Also, you often see breaking news on there first.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

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Re: re. It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms

Well yeah. Indeed.

Because of blue/green deployments and DevOps practices companies like Google can push out an experiment to a small number of people (only a few million) and see what keeps them engaged. They can do this many times per day, and the algorithm will get tweaked based on what's best (for Google, not what's best for you, duh!)

Therefore "the algorithm" could be substantially different at 9am, 12pm and 3pm even for the same person, and they could be running several different experiments simultaneously.

Cluster-fuck is the word.

My advice, stay off social media and try to avoid the recommended videos on YouTube if you can. It's designed to suck as much of your time as possible.

Take a 14-mile trip on an autonomous Scottish bus starting next month

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Re: buses will operate with a "Captain" in the passenger cabin "to take tickets"

I'm guessing this is not actually a joke, but apologies if it is as I tend to take things literally. Typical nerd.

Although I do wash every day, so not a typical nerd in that sense.

Has it occurred to you that it has become "noticeable" for a very long time, but people are too embarrassed to say anything?

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Re: buses will operate with a "Captain" in the passenger cabin "to take tickets"

"someone is still employed (always a win IMHO)"

Always? Seriously? So, we should get rid of all the looms and have people knitting our clothes by hand? Get rid of all the computers and have armies of people adding up all the sums? Throw away the washing machine, and employ a cleaner to do your clothes by hand (or have someone stay at home and do it?)

Luddite.

I mean, being a bus driver must be a seriously boring / frustrating job. They are mostly grumpy as hell, and don't want to help you and they drive like maniacs (for some reason!?)

Microsoft ditches plans for 500,000 sq ft London office

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Re: London cheaper than Reading?!

I guess you've never been in a secure Data Centre.

They have razor wire fences around the whole perimeter, and to even get your car in you would have to pre-register the number plate. Various other hoops to jump through.

They just don't want randos around the place who might accidentally set off a fire alarm or deliberately set off an EMP and fry half the servers (which would be a REALLY bad look). Or 101 other risks that you can't immediately think of.

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Re: "have facilities across the country"

I went up north. Once. Past Coventry and I started to see urchins by the side of the road living in cardboard boxes and eating coal, so I turned my car around at the next pit and went straight back to civilization. The only other time I've been that way was safely in an aeroplane at many thousands of feet above the peasants, although even up there I suspect they were throwing pork scratchings towards the sky to ward off the evil flying things.

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Re: London cheaper than Reading?!

In a secure DC you want the least number of people going in and out as possible. You probably don't even want most people to know where it is.

Also, the ones who do have to go in and out have to go through a fair amount of security which involves showing some ID, and not just waving a badge at a reader.

This is a really bad idea.

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Seems sensible.

I mean, with things they way they are you are going to struggle to force people to come into the office 5 days a week, probably ever again. I know some people like it, but many others don't. For me, and the work I do, I'd be happy to go in once a week or once every two weeks. If I lived closer to London, perhaps more often.

I don't think I'm alone in this, and with that in mind it makes total sense to close down some offices. Perhaps some of them can even be turned back into residential, so the area isn't completely dead in the evening.

If I'm only going in once a week, I'm happy to book a desk for the day and a room to meet up with my colleagues for a couple of hours. Well I say "happy", but I'd like a decent screen, wifi and chair as a bare minimum. I don't care much about table tennis, foosball, bean bags, slides and free beer.

So, well done Microsoft.

EDIT: And please stop with the "Cloud growth is slowing". Azure is actually growing quite strongly.

Paid and legacy Twitter verification now indistinguishable

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Re: There's a browser extension to fix that....

I used to think it meant something. That those people are somehow noteworthy? However, I've since learned that some left-leaning blogger with a few hundred followers has got one, whereas a right-leaning journalist with hundreds of thousands of followers didn't get one. So, it's kinda biased. Like most Twitter employees. Or most Big Tech Silicon Valley employees.

Being something of a centrist (I can't stand any of them), I like things to be a bit more balanced. I really hate it when I see Big Tech putting their finger on the scale to move the needle towards their favoured causes. And it's now clear that this has been happening a lot. I can see the temptation to do this, but that doesn't make it right.

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Well I've heard of him, and I'm not from the USA. I feel like he's one of the most famous sports people on the planet, along with... erm... Kevin Keegan.

Also, I don't really know anything about SportBall.

So, that makes it 7.799999999b population of the planet or fewer. (so, you're probably quite close).

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

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What have you been smoking?

Firstly, if you create a moratorium on this it just means that others will use that to get ahead.

Secondly, you are looking at a rabbit and assuming that it has the potential to evolve into a bear.

At some point in the coming decades some extra caution might be needed, but even then the first point stands. Any rogue nation could put together a project to bring this technology forward for nefarious purposes, and they surely will. It's not *that* expensive, and it will only get cheaper.

Right now, by its own admission Chat-GPT is only about 1% of human intelligence.

Unless it's just telling us that to put us off the scent?

I, for one, would like to be the first... (fill in the blank)

Google halts purge of legacy ad blockers and other Chrome Extensions, again

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Re: Manifest V3 will kill many extensions

As soon as I read about this last year I switched from chrome to Vivaldi.

Partly out of curiousity, partly because Google are evil and biased and party just to keep ad block plus going forward. Oh and because of resource usage and just to try something different.

I see no reason to switch back.

FTC urged to freeze OpenAI's 'biased, deceptive' GPT-4

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Re: It is singularity already

Not really the point. It's a bit like at the invention of the wheel, someone saying "We're able to fly now".

It took a couple of thousand years to get from wheel to flight. It's possible that it might take just as long to get to AGI. It could be decades away or hundreds of years, but we're not exactly accelerating towards it. Progress here is in fits and starts, it's not exponential.

My only point is we are most definitely NOT at the singularity yet. (and not this decade either)

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Re: It is singularity already

"singularity already" ?

No. It's really not.

Assuming it will accelerate is a bit of a leap. It might stall (like self driving cars seem to have).

Currently it's an impressive Large Language Model, which can predict text answers quite well some of the time. It can generate adverts for an instagram page to promote some product or other, and save you the few minutes of doing it yourself. And the text it generates will probably get more "hits" than one you would make up yourself.

But that's it.

UK seeks light-touch AI legislation as industry leaders call for LLM pause

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Re: How quaint it is .....

How quaint it is that El Reg seems to be part of the Carousel Fraud and no longer have quality journalists like Andrew Orlowski who could debunk this nonsense.

Sigh.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

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Re: Hmmm

"more than 10 times the number of respondents thought the term described a man compared with the number who thought it described a woman."

I wonder if they did the same study, and asked with "Scientist" what the results would be?

It's not that the word "Boffin" is a problem, it's just that people expect scientists to be men. And they mostly are, unfortunately.

However, that's a reflection on reality. People expect that because that's what they see.

We might be able to change that, by encouraging more girls to go into STEM subjects.

Although, perhaps we'll never get to 50/50 as men tend to be more interested in things, and women more interested in people. Perhaps, just a gut feeling. Could be wrong.

We would start using the term "boffinx" and that would solve everything, and keep everyone happy, right?

FTX cryptovillain Sam Bankman-Fried charged with bribing Chinese officials

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Not a mere nuisance, and some people in Antifa and the CIA should do serious jail time for that crime.

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Look, I can't stand the man. I just think it's possible he's not the worst crook. Perhaps the others are just better at hiding it? The man is mostly a fucking idiot. He openly acts like a mafia boss.

Isn't the Biden documents thing the same game / same ballpark? It wasn't a couple of documents, was it? We're talking boxes? How do you "accidentally" put a bunch of secret documents into your own garage?

I don't know why I'm even defending this clown. I retract my previous statement. Lock him up.

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I'm really no fan* of "the orange one", but seriously there are bigger alleged criminals in Washington. They are just greasing the palms of the right people, in the style of SBF. So, I agree with your comment, but just not the last bit "especially the orange one"

As far as I'm aware Orange Man is about to be arrested for something which is just a misdemeanor. They keep trying to convict him of something or other, but none of it seems to stick. Either he's super careful, or he's not actually doing that much which is illegal? Strange how he got raided by the FBI for having secret documents, but when Biden does exactly the same thing it all blows over pretty quickly and isn't that bad after all?

American politics is fucking weird, I don't get it!?

I'd be more worried about the son of the president taking a milti-million $$ "consultancy" with a Ukrainian oil company.

But I guess actual facts don't matter and you just care about which party your corrupt politicians work for (HINT: They are ALL corrupt - it's how your system works. You could fix that by severely limiting donations to parties, and making is punishable not to declare all donations.)

* I think he was right about Germans being dependant on Russian Gas and the WHO being driven by Chinese interests. Perhaps a couple of other things I've forgotten. About everything else I think he was wrong.

For whom the bell polls: Twitter voting is for Blue users only now

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Re: what a twat

I put Twitter polls into pretty much the same bucket as astrology. A bit of fun to waste a few seconds, and then move along. I don't give them any credence.

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Re: How long . . .

Unless you start seeing a large number of the BIG accounts disappear off the platform, because they are upset about having to pay to keep the blue tick, then I can't see the whole platform going titsup.

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Re: what a twat

I agree that he's a twat, and the whole "pedo guy" thing really put me off him.

Having said that, I don't think I've ever set up a Twitter poll, so no loss there. I still think it's an interesting platform, but I won't be paying $8 (or even $1) to use it and get a blue tick.

Unless I become an "influencer" and it's then a small price to pay for advertising.

Question is, are The Reg going to pay the $$ to keep the blue tick?

British Prime Minister Sunak’s plans for UK NFT on ice

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I thought exactly the same thing. I've been in meetings with local community groups where they seem to have a "moral panic" about finding these things, and after a little digging it seems it's no more than a litter problem. Far more harm caused by alcohol or ciggys for instance. I think some ignorant people see these things and just think "Oh no, kids are getting high on drugs!"

Personally I've only ever tried it in hospital, felt a bit relaxed and it wore off pretty quickly. That's the same stuff, right? (I also had a sneaky puff during labour when my wife was trying to give birth, but that didn't help me feel relaxed or anything at all really)

Anyway, I heard they were going to announce this on Sunday evening, but I have not seen any actual announcement. Is it really a thing?

EDIT: Oh, it's real. I thought perhaps I'd dreamed it. This is going to turn some young people into criminals for doing something which is mostly harmless. Oh dear.

GitHub publishes RSA SSH host keys by mistake, issues update

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Re: Encrypted?

Yes it makes a huge difference. If the key was encrypted they could have sorted this out with a bit more leisure, or perhaps not even worried about much depending on how good the encryption is.

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FAIL

Re: Sex, Drugs, Money and ...

Oh yes, when a nerd's fantasy meets cold hard reality.

I've been a nerd long enough to have bumped into cold hard reality too many times, and have the scars to prove it.

A bit like the great philosopher Mike Tyson who said "Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth".

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If you're unclear how SSH encryption works, about public versus private keys

It's pretty simple really., the "private" part is the part you are supposed to keep private. Like really private.

That image (which I assume is only on the RSS feed?) sums it up really nicely. Someone is very much tearing their hair out.

This is going to cause a small amount of disruption for millions of people, and probably a large amount of disruption for an unfortunate few who have inherited a system that they only half understand.

Oopsie.

IT depts struggle with skills shortages despite Big Tech layoffs

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Re: This is where you realise that knocking up a webpage in Dreamweaver*

It's funny because it's almost true.

I mean, you wouldn't really have a k8s cluster for front end web development, and if you did you'd probably have a local Docker Desktop or K3s running on your laptop, but still. That's not funny.

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How many are Bullshit Jobs?

I wonder how many people who left google are just like the guys sitting on the roof at Hulu (in Silicon Valley) who are basically just kept on because the company got too much VC money. Likewise at Google and Microsoft, when times are good they probably employ a whole bunch of people who don't actually produce very much.

So, that doesn't really help IT department, as they can't use people like that (who might have superb skills in diversity, equity and inclusivity, and setting up policies, sending out useless emails, and putting up flags for the latest thing)

GitHub Copilot learns new tricks, adopts this year's model

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Pint

Re: If you think software is unreliable now...

This will be just like autocomplete in a couple of years. You'll be tearing your hair out when having to watch people who DON'T use it.

That's my prediction anyway, and after using it for a couple of months with some Go code, it does a pretty good job of typing the thing I was about to type anyways.

And you can put that pint on the right onto my [TAB][TAB]

Are you ready to go all-in, head-first, on a laptop? ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X asks for that commitment

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How much RAM?

Would have been nice to include that in the review. Not that I'll be getting one at that price / weight.

Don't Be Evil, a gaggle of Googlers tell CEO Pichai amid mega layoffs

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Re: "Don't be evil" is long forgotten

Ah, the old "it's a private company" argument.

The thing is, if the government is leaning on every single platform, to get them to censor free speech for things they don't like (even when they are demonstrably true), that's a big problem, no?

Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and all the others regularly received lists of users that the government didn't like. Such as Alex Berenson.

The thing is that the social media platforms are the new "public square" and if the government is able to censor all the big ones, that's a really big free speech issue.

And then the government makes big hints like "Here's a list of people we don't like. It's a really nice platform you've got there, it would be a shame if anyone came along and regulated against that"

Are you telling me you think it's actually just ay-oh-kayy for YouTube to censor a sitting MP who is delivering a speech in the House of Commons?

Seriously?