Skepticism is good. However, there is a lot of evidence that Gen Z is quite tech illiterate in general, but especially compared to the Millennial cohort. Colleges and universities have had to force Gen Z students into basically remedial computing courses just to teach them how file systems work and other simple-yet-taken-for-granted concepts work. Drop rates for CS degrees are climbing as Gen Z moves into higher education and hits a very difficult wall for them.

And, in the end, that last bit was definitely another scam targeting their relative ignorance in the space. That is why so many “influencers”/scam artists target/targeted them with “career guides” or code boot camps or whatever. And I think that disillusionment is also part of the backlash against devs in general as “tech bros” despite very few devs actually working in the Valley for those companies under those conditions.

Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do

Temu is legitimately malware. The company had their source dumped and they obfuscated their malware-like practices to avoid Google’s automatic detection. I presume they did the same with their iOS client. It is very telling that they have been extremely successful despite the same exact company and team doing this before with another app, Pinduoduo. That’s right; same dev team and everything. Temu goes above and beyond the normal surveillance capitalism stuff we are used to and circumvents system security in order to sell your raw data on the market. The entire scheme isn’t to build a retail space (although it is doing that as well); it is to get as many people to download the app so they can steal an absurd amount of data which is normally protected.

Microsoft has been slowly building toward requiring these subscriptions for enterprise for some time now. That is where Windows365 is ultimately going at an enterprise level, management just doesn’t realize it yet or are aware of how powerless they are to stop it.

Because Microsoft should’ve been broken up in the 90s. They definitely need to be broken up now. Same with a number of companies really, but Microsoft has a unique position to really hold enterprise and government by the balls.

Well one thing we can all agree on: it is a blessing to non-working capitalists who own huge stakes of Microsoft.

Because this will require expensive per-seat subscriptions to their Power Platform or Azure Services. And if Power Platform is any indication, likely some features of Python will be gated behind per-use models on top of that.

Others have pointed out that the article is jumping to conclusions by excluding the very and actually well documented economic factors at play here.

It is crunchy/granola technophobia. People need to keep in mind that popular (scientific, for the time) opinion used to be that excessive reading was had for children and adults. It is as old as our written records actually, going back to a handful of Greek historians warning about it even.

If people wanted the best for babies then we’d be raising them in collectives, with multigenerational households being the norm and free food, healthcare, and childcare widely available with few string attached. Some places already are close to all of those things.

But it is so much easier to clutch pearls and blame the iPad. It isn’t like brains shut off. They also used to argue that video games causes inadequate social and motor skill development and now fucking surgeons play games to build motor skills.

I’m sure we’ll hear that screentime proclaims “hail Satan” just as soon as they find a way to play the iPad in reverse.

Considering they are probably on the side of iMessage, I’m going to venture a guess and say the company size has nothing to do with it.

Meta is deeply unethical, even for a giant company.

I agree that most people don’t need SUVs. And even more don’t need a truck. But few others are forced to drive as much nor as far as Americans on a daily basis, so we don’t give a shit if people in other countries with robust public transport sometimes have to drive places in their (comparatively) small countries with their families.

TIL that a dubious 15% is also === 95%.

Edit: that is to say, this isn’t as simple as “LOL Americans fat, Americans dumb.” The same old Euro arguments don’t work on this one. Civil planning is completely fucked here. It isn’t just bad, it is actively hostile to non-drivers.

And SUVs in particular can get these massive tax advantages that cars don’t get. Same with some models of truck. Plus, marketing is highly effective and nearly totally unregulated like so much else over here.

You have morons giving themselves brain damage for the right to own gas stoves, and we have similar morons suffocating themselves and everyone else by insisting they need huge vehicles. And the government actively encourages it.

The US should really just directly employ regional workers to handle these projects. Corruption and nepotism are rampant in public construction projects, and the profit motive requires an inefficient use of tax dollars since we must pay a completely useless margin just so somebody can become richer for doing zero work.

We also need to stop expanding highways since additional lanes have been proven to not help congestion, and actually worsens it because it encourages more driving.

It isn’t even that. America, Germany, and the UK are all very similar. And those numbers are only becoming more similar over time.

Europeans need to remember that American states are often larger than European countries.

And that generations of neglect or intentional sabotage has rendered public transport completely useless outside of outlier scenarios.

People want to handwave it away, but there are legitimate safety concerns with driving smaller vehicles in the US. Not only are they less comfortable (in a country where you have to drive everywhere, for long periods of time, even for incidental items). They will get destroyed by our obnoxiously huge SUVs and trucks. Happens all the time.

Same thing needs to be remembered when people who don’t live here insist everyone should just be biking everywhere. I agree in spirit, but the reality is that biking in the US is a gamble every time someone does it. And you can’t convince a populace to do it when a normal American is 10+ miles away from a grocery store, and when most of our states experience both extreme heat and extreme cold.

The problem is truly systemic. We have a majority of civil planning intentionally implementing hostile engineering to incentivize vehicles.

Makes no sense. Mozilla has no horse in the advertising race. But Google does. Almost all of Google’s profits are from ads. Ads keep the entire Alphabet house of cards afloat.

But not Mozilla. The largest connection there is them being paid for default lt search engine.

Seems like arguing semantics. “Low” is relative. There are people who argue that living in minimum wage is 100% possible by oneself. People perform truly shit jobs that greatly endanger their lives simply because the pay is right.

Capitalists want a market economy right until the moment labor is treated the same way.

I don’t think it does. I doubt it is purely a cost issue. Microsoft is going to throw billions at OpenAI, no problem.

What has happened, based on the info we get from the company, is that they keep tweaking their algorithms in response to how people use them. ChatGPT was amazing at first. But it would also easily tell you how to murder someone and get away with it, create a plausible sounding weapon of mass destruction, coerce you into weird relationships, and basically anything else it wasn’t supposed to do.

I’ve noticed it has become worse at rubber ducking non-trivial coding prompts. I’ve noticed that my juniors have a hell of a time functioning without access to it, and they’d rather ask questions of seniors rather than try to find information our solutions themselves, replacing chatbots with Sr devs essentially.

A good tool for getting people on ramped if they’ve never coded before, and maybe for rubber ducking in my experience. But far too volatile for consistent work. Especially with a Blackbox of a company constantly hampering its outputs.

Apple already shipped attestation. It’s in Safari in both desktop and mobile. Unfortunately. It’s just going to take a couple big players to make this a blight everywhere. Netflix implementing this might do it. Google’s main sites would work.

The judge got fed up because her son works for Microsoft and thus the family is heavily invested–stock wise–in the company.

The judge should’ve been forced to recuse. Microsoft also should’ve had its breakup orders enforced decades ago, instead of having it tossed out by a cabal of judges.

Microsoft would be a totally different company if they didn’t have just Azure to subsidize all their own projects which operate at cost or loss to run competitors out.

Now it’s more like “upgrade to maintain your level of performance, because our patched CPUs take a 50% performance hit” (per the article).

That is quite convenient for them. I’m sure not a conspiracy given depth of the issue, just very convenient if people heed the call.

Which most won’t. Enterprise is likely already on the newer gens aa part of normal refresh cycles. Maybe this just accelerates that a bit.

It is always Blumenthal behind these anti-internet and anti-free speech bills. Always. He was behind the last few attempts under other names as well.

and since the state was not democratic

How do you define “democratic?” Because the “soviet” of “soviet union” is a type of council which was directly elected by citizens. The USSR was a democratic republic in that each soviet usually voted for a higher level soviet. Not that unusual, especially back then.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the books were never cooked. We know that Stalin rigged at least some higher level elections at the very least.

But “democratic” does not mean multi-party. It can also be “no party” or “three parties” or anything. In the USSR you could run for your local soviet or petition them to vote for you. Yes, you’d have to be a party member. But that doesn’t mean blind allegiance and no differing thought. I’ve brought it up before, but you had severe infighting in the party because of the diversity of opinions and thought, not lack of it. Sure, they were all communists or some flavor thereof at least superficially. But there’s a hell of a difference between Stalin and Kruschev and Gorbachev as examples.

And, Stalin aside given his prominence in the early years of the nation, the other prominent leaders were very dependant on entities like the Supreme Soviet which was elected by your elected representatives.

Different != undemocratic.

I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them

Demonstrably false. For example, are you suggesting that the 23 million serfs–dirt farmers–of the imperial Russian empire were better off not knowing how to read, having no education, no healthcare, no subsidized food supplies, no industry tools, and no ability to break free from being born into a rigid inherited socioeconomic class from which there was no escape?

Capitalists need to remember that last point. They have a shared and reoccuring thread throughout their history of thinking they can treat people in a similar way and that a break will never come. Except they know it does, which is why they were literally murdering communists, socialists, and union folk in both the Americas and Europe (and likely elsewhere, but I’m not well versed enough to speak on other regions of the world).

The USSR, as a model, worked. Capitalists don’t want to accept it publicly because it threatens their monopoly on state and enterprise power. A young government, forged through raw power, is going to be a bit different than what we expect. But the USSR was trending toward what we understand as liberalization which is why it dissolved the moment some ethno-nationalist capitalists were allowed to seize control of newly free media outlets and get people on their side with talking points. People like Yeltsin. I’d like to remind you that Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, didn’t react when people like (but not exclusively) Yeltsin used ethnonationalism to whip up mass riots and protests. He didn’t roll out the tanks,something tankies really hate. He didn’t refuse to recognize the results of elections and votes.

We know the USSR worked because the entire region went from nothing to world superpower in a single generation. It spooked the Americans and a lot of Europeans such that they adopted a practice of containment after WW2 in order to prevent a rival system from spreading. They dirtied the word for a couple generations such that people wouldn’t and still won’t consider what the ideology means. And that, just maybe, a period of time under an autocrat doesn’t define the entire nation.

Btw, the dictatorship of the proletariat, aka communist dictatorships are just fascist states in disguise, concentration camps and totalitarian bullshit included.

You clearly are not educated in communist ideology and philosophy. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” does not mean a literal dictatorship of a singular person or even a small group.

The dictatorship of the proletariat means that the entire working class, as a people, collectively own and run the entire state. As opposed to what we have in the world today, which is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie–either outright dictators, monarchs, or increasingly the tiniest fraction of the ultra rich controlling everything.

One person controlling a state with an iron fist, like Stalin, is not a dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class controlling the state is. It is called a “dictatorship” not because a singular person controls it, but a singular class. The largest class. The class of almost everybody but a fraction of a percent of outliers.

No country on Earth today has a dictatorship of the proletariat, because only the monied elite get to control the government. Whether it be through bribery (lobbying), captured government, literal monarchies (even if “symbolic”, they still have massive sway given their expansive wealth), literal dictatorships, theonomic regimes, elite and rich leaders of military juntas, etc.

There’s a reason that only the rich attend summits like Davos. There’s a reason nearly every country has golden passport/golden visa schemes which let the rich effectively buy citizenship.

The ultra rich, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, have strong class solidarity. That is why the world is the way it is.

America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.

It’s because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.

America didn’t change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.

People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don’t matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that’s how speak the dates.

I wouldn’t say it is us Americans who “find it hard to read” if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.

Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There’s no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.

But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let’s talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.