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Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

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    W
    Crypto is a solution looking for a problem. The people behind crypto never studied the history of the gold standard. Crypto is a ponzi scheme virtual asset, not a currency.
  • San Francisco crypto founder faked his own death

    Technology technology
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    S
    My head canon is that Satoshi Nakamoto... ... is Hideo Kojima. Anyway, Satoshi is the pseudonym used on the original... white paper, design doc, whatever it was, for Bitcoin. There's no doubt about that, I was there back before even Mt. Gox became a bitcoin exchange, on the forums discussing it. I thought it was a neat idea, at the time... and then I realized 95% of the discussions on that forum were about 'the ethics of fully informed ponzi schemes' and such, very little devoted to actual technical development... realized this was probably a bad omen.
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    M
    A private company is selling cheap tablets to inmates to let them communicate with their family. They have to use "digital stamps" to send messages, 35 cents a piece and come in packs of 5, 10 or 20. Each stamp covers up to 20,000 characters or one single image. They also sell songs, at $1.99 a piece, and some people have spent thousands over the years. That's also now just going away. Then you get to the part about the new company. Who already has a system in Tennessee where inmates have to pay 3-5 cents per minute of tablet usage. Be that watching a movie they've bought or just typing a message.
  • CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

    Technology technology
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    S
    This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/
  • 551 Stimmen
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    100% agreed. Here's a relevant Louis Rossmann video where a US Senator (Ron Wyden) officially asked the FTC to look into issues like this. I sincerely hope something comes out of this.
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    Apparently, it was required to be allowed in that state: Reading a bit more, during the sentencing phase in that state people making victim impact statements can choose their format for expression, and it's entirely allowed to make statements about what other people would say. So the judge didn't actually have grounds to deny it. No jury during that phase, so it's just the judge listening to free form requests in both directions. It's gross, but the rules very much allow the sister to make a statement about what she believes her brother would have wanted to say, in whatever format she wanted. From: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18471175 influence the sentence From what I've seen, to be fair, judges' decisions have varied wildly regardless, sadly, and sentences should be more standardized. I wonder what it would've been otherwise.
  • Skype was shut down for good today

    Technology technology
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    L
    ::: spoiler spoiler sadfsafsafsdfsd :::
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    B
    ... robo chomo?