Pingk

Technological innovations have never meant less work for the worker. It's the bosses/company that benefit from being able to squeeze you that little bit more.

Want to do less work? Join a union and campaign for a 4-day work week or something. If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.

Sony chose to use the words "purchase" and "buy" on their pages, and hide some sneaky text in the EULA that changes their definition to remove the implication of ownership.

They know that using terms like "rent" or "lease indefinitely" would reduce their revenue, so they squirrel away legal gotchas that no one ever reads to cover their arse. It shouldn't be allowed.

Just because something is legal doesn't make it ethical. Sometimes the ethical thing to do is ignore the legalities, which is why people are fine with advocating for piracy in cases like these.

In some European countries, yes, but other countries like the US have different laws. The UK doesn't have a classification for a speed pedelec, just the 25kph class.

It really doesn't. You're purely relying on radiation fins to carry heat away, which are incredibly inefficient.

> The radiator surface area problem also scales uncomfortably. At 838 watts per square meter, rejecting 1 megawatt of waste heat requires roughly 1,200 square meters of radiator. Deploying that much surface area on a satellite is a structural engineering challenge that gets harder with every order of magnitude. The ISS solar arrays span about 2,500 square meters total.

So even a 2MW data centre in space requires a cooling array rivalling the international space station. Starcloud launched a single H100 in November and they were unable to run it 24/7 due to heat buildup.

Even with novel solutions to make heat transfer to the fins more efficient, like phase-change liquids, the limiting factor is that the vacuum of space is a tremendous insulator.

https://thecoolingreport.com/intel/starcloud-orbital-data-ce...

https://satnews.com/2026/03/17/the-physics-wall-orbiting-dat...

Not related to the story, but that your go-to example of converting to a for-profit organisation is a hospital is horrifying to me

You do it to yourself, you do, and that's why it really hurts.

> Importantly, the company did not mandate AI use (though it did offer enterprise subscriptions to commercially available AI tools). On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.

This isn't a good idea regardless of why it's being deprecated.

If it's no longer being maintained then put a depreciation warning and let it break on its own. Changing a deprecated feature just means you could maintain it but don't want to.

Alternatively if you want to aggressively push people to migrate to the new version, have a clear development roadmap and force a hard error at the end of the depreciation window so you know in advance how long you can expect it to work and can document your code accordingly.

This wishy-washy half-broken behaviour doesn't help anyone

Western employment has survived because automating and outsourcing labour has pushed people to take up knowledge/services work.

If AI is somewhat successful at automating knowledge work, what feasible job could exist that doesn't require your mind or body?

Services like healthcare and plumbing aren't going away of course, but there's not enough demand to support an economy on those jobs.

In my opinion the whole economy needs a rethink regarding what our actual goals are as a society, and maybe AI will force that conversation to happen, but I'm sceptical if it'll be a well-considered consensus.

There are plenty of non-US index funds, like EU, UK, Japan and others. There are also indices that track smaller companies rather than just the S&P500 or Nasdaq.

Or diversify in both directions - small US, and big and small international funds.

This is often made worse as a result of hiring outside consultants. Firstly they don't have the institutional knowledge you have when starting a project, but they also aren't incentivised to properly document and hand over their knowledge at the end since that means less future work.

This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.

Except it's getting so difficult to find the companies producing the more durable alternative, so everyone is forced to buy the flimsy piece that falls apart

The article doesn't mention if tips are included in their calculation (I suspect not).

Are Uber/Lyft still cheaper after a 10-15% tip?

Given that no models are profitable for the parent company afaik, it's only a matter of time before the money-squeezing begins

Consulting companies destroy valuable institutional knowledge and make the government less effective, so I'm onboard in theory.

The flipside of removing them is you now need to hire experts/specialists to do the work properly, not fire them...

https://youtu.be/ycVBoWsGLJs

It's cheaper and more profitable to make thing out of plastic rather than something more durable/sustainable, and companies lobby against strong environmental regulations so they don't need to care about improving.

This is the reason I chose to go with AMD's 7000 series for my 2022 build.

I wasn't aware of Intel's limitation when I built my first computer in 2016 so when I wanted to upgrade a few years later I wasn't expecting to need a new motherboard since it still had everything I needed - it felt so wasteful!

Instead I just waited for AM5 based on the longevity for AM4.I'm really hoping AMD support AM5 for a few more generations so I can do the same as you in 2026/7

To make 1 gram of antimatter, from E=mc^2, would take about 90 Terajoules. For reference, the atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima released about 60 Terajoules of energy.

So you would need at least (and with the efficiency loss of production, much more than) 1.5 Little Boy atomic bombs worth of energy to make a single gram of antimatter.

I'm not worried about the label, but I am worried about the implication - since software made the jump from physical to digital/OTA distribution, there's been a decline in software release quality because "we'll patch it later".

The historical financial punishments to writing buggy software are gone, and now it's infecting cars I'm concerned that safety standards will begin to slip and potentially injure someone.

Side note: I know a common response to buggy software is the market won't pay because it takes longer to develop etc. But writing robust software is a hard skill,and it you haven't seen an industry write robust software for a long time, why should you trust they still can?

Tech isn't siloed for no reason.

In the UK government, before programming was considered a high-value skill, the vast majority of programmers were women. So much so that programming was measured in girl hours (which were paid less than man hours).

When it became clear that programming was going to be a big deal, women were systematically excluded, flipping the gender balance (although they had trouble hiring initially because men saw it as lesser work).

The whole 9000 series has been disappointing, in terms of price/performance you're better off getting something from 7000.

It seems like 9000 (and the newly announced Intel 200 series) have a lot of restructuring work and lay the bed for future generations to push further

Maybe, but it was already public knowledge:

> In September 2023 the government regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), had issued an improvement notice to Network Rail about overcrowding at the station, warning: “You have failed to implement, so far as reasonably practicable, effective measures to prevent risks to health and safety of passengers (and other persons at the station) during passenger surges and overcrowding events at London Euston Station.”

It's concerning to me that Hendy was the chair of Network Rail from 2015 before becoming Transport Minister, and here he is sacking someone after a comment about his former workplace. Should definitely be an investigation into his motives/incentives IMO

I think you're missing the point, it doesn't matter if it was spam or not - The point is that automating creativity is not a useful way of facilitating content creation. We should be automating the tedious behind-the-scenes stuff.

Yes, being able to see all the traffic on a given network is a legitimate threat to Tor's anonymity.

IIRC There is an alternate method of connecting to an endpoint which uses a 3rd node as a rendezvous point which is meant to be better, but I forget the name of the process...

Why do you think he set up repair.wiki? It's a free resource he started to provide diagnostic and repair guides for a wide range of electronics. He's very transparent about wanting people to be able to repair their own devices and his actions clearly back that up.

These are not the actions of someone being protective of their skills to make more money imo.

Self-driving in Europe is more problematic in a couple of ways.

Firstly the road structure is very different to the US, streets are much narrower and less car-centric so models are harder to train; secondly regulating it is much harder because the EU is a collection of countries, which is very different to a collection of states.

Thirdly non-car alternatives like trains and ebikes are a lot more viable due to a higher population density, many big cities (such as Paris) are pushing for better cycling infrastructure rather than better layouts for cars.

How robust is the system to fix bugs? Can you just point at a thing and say "fix this bug"? How does that side of it work?

No one ever got fired for hiring a consulting firm to check if a potentially risky strategy will make them money.

If it pays off, the fee doesn't matter because we made more money. If it lost money, well we did our due diligence so we were just unfortunate.

As a physics graduate, I always knew the explanation was incomplete (like all analogies, they have to break down somewhere), but laying them out like this was quite surprising.

I've not read his book, but seeing an endorsement by Sean Carroll (a great physics communicator I've seen a few times on the YouTube channel Sixty Symbols), I'm very tempted to get a copy.

The problems with GIMP are the same as Musescore before it was bought out - Having dedicated designers/programmers allows more sweeping and coherent changes to be made.

Voluntary fixes are necessarily smaller in scope and suboptimal as a result, leading to more complexity when those systems need to be changed later.

I'm also reminded of Casey Muratori's talk about software architecture being a reflection of the organisation that made it. Open source projects are at the extreme end where contributors and org charts are highly fluid, and communication between contributors is low-bandwidth, accelerating the complexity increase.

Wonderfully uplifting, I love the idea of people quacking for a good joke! (Indonesia)