Yeah we can’t expect them to be able to hire the expertise required for this, it’s not like they made over $1,000,000,000 net income last year or anything. Oh wait…

My coworker was making a browser extension recently and noticed that most of Facebook’s frontend code is crazy bullshit designed to make it difficult for scrapers and bots to navigate the DOM.

The saddest part of it is that none of it is particularly effective, it just means they had to write 2 lines of code to grab the fields they wanted instead of 1, so all that’s happened is Meta have made everything worse for everyone and burned an extra kajillion client-side CPU cycles worldwide, for almost no benefit.

Windows XP was initially only capable of addressing a maximum of 4GB of RAM in its first 4 years of release, and I can’t think of a single damn thing I want from Windows 11 that XP didn’t already give me. How bloated does this bullshit have to be for 8Gb to be the bare minimum?

I’m somewhat suspicious of the way the Guardian didn’t actually publish the interview itself, but just their journalist’s writeup of it. We’re not told what the question he answered actually was, just what it was “about”, and then the headline writers of the outlets quoting that quote take it a step further into implying that he’s a full-on genocide denier.

The conventional wisdom is that he’s still a genius but was masterfully playing 4-D chess.

Personally I don’t believe it, I think he genuinely did think he was being a genius and that it was going to happen.

I can’t believe he doesn’t get more shit for that whole Hyperloop debacle.

The hype around it was a big part of his whole elevation in the media to “Real-life Tony Stark” status. Engineers who called it out as impractical half-baked nonsense were ignored or ridiculed, but now that they’ve been proven correct everyone’s just moved on and forgotten about the whole thing.

Require an AI SLOP disclosure.

No advertising bot is going to admit to it. The only people for whom failure to jump this hoop will be a blocker, are legit posters.

I’ve been interviewing software engineers for many years, and this was the first year the “AI natives” started graduating and applying for jobs.

Never had such a high rate of people completely unable to write one line of code in a language that appears on their CV, it’s been about 50% in the last few months where I had to end the interview during the warmup question.

IANAL but it does have a bunch of exceptions allowing governments to do whatever they want.

If you’re a salaried employee who isn’t currently looking for work then this might be an option. If you’re a consultant who relies on networking then LinkedIn has a near-monopoly. If you’re not on it then potential clients will assume there’s something wrong.

Same bullshit happened to me when they froze my account after their AI bot flagged me with on false positive for “discrimination” (I’d posted a job with a legitimate language requirement).

They then made me go through some humiliating ritual of having to write them an email with a written promise that I wouldn’t break any discrimination rules, which I hadn’t done to begin with, but the support clown wouldn’t reinstate my account until I’d done their specified grovelling.

yeah we’re like three quarters of the way through that Niemöller poem now

The starkest signal of the MAGAfication of Silicon Valley isn’t this fairly par-for-the-course spyware tech, but their public response.

A short couple of years ago they would have downplayed the whole thing and peppered a few apologies in, but these days the standard response is attack, attack, attack. Call the journalist a liar, call the journal failing, no need for evidence on either, just as long as you keep attacking.

You can get on a horse, or horse-drawn carriage, completely wasted drunk out of your mind, or high, or just too tired to drive. Tell horse “home” and he will go to the stable he came from, dragging you with it all the way.

Horses are statistically more dangerous than motorcycles (or skiing). I can’t find any statistics on drunk riding because most horse owners aren’t stupid enough to try it, but it seems very likely that riding a horse drunk is way more dangerous than driving drunk.

As soon as I saw “Florida” I thought, what’s their real angle?

If the settlement takes the form of a new data center being opened in Florida, please quote this post in the comments section of the news article announcing it.

A Russian drone hit an apartment building in Romania, a NATO member state, sparking outrage across Europe, where nations have ramped up defense efforts against Moscow. The explosives-packed aircraft was ostensibly bound for nearby Ukraine, but crossed into a Romanian town near the two countries’ border.

Of the five posts I’ve seen so far on social media on this topic, this is the only to give some sense of what actually happened.

Yeah, it did exactly what it said on the tin.

Yeah I’d only barely heard of it, and even then I thought it was just what they were naming the new season of the TV show. Marketing department fucked up.

I’m not sure what you think an “example” would look like. It’s not taking a photo of you, it’s measuring what’s distinctive about the way you personally mess up radio signals and how it differs from how other people mess them up. Internally it’s just a ton of numbers.

This is an extremely high quality list for spear-phishers, because it’s all gullible morons with highly visible levers.