Menace in the middle

It’s likely also plain corruption, just lawmakers creating ways for their friends to siphon money from government budgets with useless gadgets like this.

It makes sense for everybody, except for those with a financial interest in selling and/or haggling over software licenses. That’s not only the companies producing the actual software, but also legal firms and similar “specialists” who siphon off money from this system of complex IP law.

IMO the only way to transition to more software being open sourced, is to deconstruct these vested intrests with regulation. We need to fundamentally restructure the way software development is funded, and transition away from a model where ownership is the only thing that’s profitable.

Doing that is delicate though, because as backlash from those vested interests, a lot of workers will likely lose their jobs. You need to make sure those people easily find new jobs working on open source, and communicate that effectively, so workers’ job insecurity is as low as possible during the transition.

Yes, but also cartel behavior. Those same 3 manufacturers have been found guilty of it in the past, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they were fixing prices again now. See this video by Gamers Nexus.

This is the way

Developers have high workloads and managers are remarkably oblivious to sloppy work.

That rate of exploitation is pretty wild though, $2/hr while earning hundreds for the employer. Most capitalists begin uncontrollably salivating just thinking about that.

This is a power thing though, the closest we have/had in terms of rate of exploitation was silicon valley software engineers. They got basically free everything to distract them from how much they were being exploited. If working circumstances were worse, they would have demanded higher pay or quit, because they could afford to.

As the article notes, in the Philippines that is not the power dynamic at all. These are already among the highest paying jobs, and I doubt these workers are in a position to bargain for better. There are too many people willing to take their job, either in their own country, or in other impoverished countries.

Yes, and he’s such a great communicator as well. In those few paragraphs he packs arguments to convince people ranging from idealist liberals to cynical leftists.

Nah, just a TI-84 and teach them programming in BASIC

But it can be sold as good enough to credulous management, thereby still doing damage by getting people laid off in the short term.

There’s this famous quote about investing which goes: “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”. I think that equally holds for the labor market. Just because you and everyone around you knows your job can’t be replaced by AI, doesn’t mean there won’t be an attempt to replace you which lasts long enough for you to lose your house.

I think this is mostly a symptom of the gerontocracy. Most elected officials have not grown up with computers, which is already likely to make them incurious about them. Couple that with being in office so long, likely developing a very high opinion of themselves that they know best. I would guess a significant minority is actively hostile to learning anything about computers, so you can hire any professional to explain stuff with baby talk, it won’t work on them. Combine that with the rest of the technologically illiterate politicians just being indifferent, and you get this kind of policy.

It makes more sense if you read it as a threat.

Why? Because of the chat control stuff?

Also it’s mostly security through obscurity. It is just difficult enough to dissuade most people, but not actually secure because that costs money.

That’s true yeah, there is a lot less retail investment in those companies.

What is similar to the dot com bubble though is many “smaller” companies (i.e. not Google or Meta) are buying into AI as an investment into infrastructure for their company, just like was happening with useless websites during the dot com bubble.

The AI bubble is going to be like the dot com bubble I think, but with the world being so heavily financialized it might spiral into something like 2008 or worse…

I doubt they’ll be that stupid, however, all bets are off with the MBA’s back behind the wheel…

Not unless you choose really slow hard drives, or stream very high bitrate media. Most hard drives can easily do 100MB/s sequentially (i.e. reading a large file, such as long video files). Meanwhile high-bitrate 4K video is only about 50Mbit/s, so about 6MB/s.

OK I didn’t know that, stupid move on his part then… What do you mean by likely illegally?

I’d go further, you should help with the development. Seems like some people would rather spend hours hounding a developer to implement their thing, rather than figuring out how to do it themselves…