Of course it is. Textbook enshittification: first be good to your users, then to your providers, then fuck both and rake in the cash.

Inevitable, really. And zero surprise it's coming out of China.

I spent way too long researching the morning. That industry implies a much greater population that is attracted to children. Things get more nuanced. People are attracted to different stages, like prebubesant, early adolescence, and mid to late adolescence. It seems like an important distinction because this is a common mental disorder. I was ready to write this comment about my fear that there's a bunch of evil pedophiles living among us who are simply deterred by legal or social pressures. It seems more like the extreme stigma of pedophilia has prevented individuals from seeking assistance and has resulted in more child sexual abuse. This sort of disorder can be caused by experiencing this abuse at a younger age. When I was religious, we worked closely with an organization to help victims of trafficking. We had their stories. They entered our lives. I took care of some of these kids. As a victim of sexual abuse when I was kid, I had a hatred for these kinds of people. I feel like my brain is melting seeing how there is a high chance of people in my life being attracted to children. This isn't really to justify the industry. I'm just realizing that general harassing people openly about it might not be helping the situation.

Brother I live in western Europe and of the 6 supermarkets in my smallish city, 4 offer the handscanner. It's incredibly common here, and very convenient.

I remember an Arthur Clarke novel where a space ship needs water from the planet below. The easiest thing is to lower cables from space and then lift some ice bergs.

AI isn't math formulas though. AI is a complex dynamic system reacting to external input. There is no fundamental difference here to a human brain in that regard imo. It's just that the processing isn't happening in biological tissue but in silicon. Is it way less complex than a human? Sure. Is there a fundamental qualitative difference? I don't think so. What's the qualitative difference in your opinion?

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/