breakpointalpha

Yes.

The day reddit asks me to upload an ID to shitpost about the NBA is the day I stop using reddit.

A union absolutely can and should protect workers from frivolous layoffs.

If the company tries to layoff 10% "due to AI" the remaining 90% can strike.

History is full of union solidarity vs idiotic management.

US software engineers need a union.

If I hadn't already landed a job somewhere else, I would only return with a 20% pay bump and an iron-clad contract.

It's routine and trivial for the US Gov to enforce export controls on non-US based companies.

This "across the border" strategy will not work.

Seagate Singapore was hit with civil penalties and settlements for shipments to Huawei under the Foreign Direct Product Rule.

ZTE, a Chinese company, was criminally prosecuted and settled with U.S. DOJ/BIS in 2017 for violating U.S. export controls and sanctions.

Ah thanks for reminding me to cancel my subscription.

Good reminder for me to cancel my Cursor subscription. I don't support Elmo.

As a pedestrian, can you sell your neighbor's dangerous car?

If a driver would get a ticket, shouldn't Tesla also get a ticket?

In the US, drivers kill pedestrians all the time and are barely punished.

Is this the same standard that should be adopted everywhere?

There's nothing truly secure from a group of highly motivated nerds.

I don't understand why "break the door down" wouldn't be the most immediate course of action by a senior engineer in that situation. I'll get my tools.

I don't understand this point of view. $140k in a LCOL is a fantastic salary. Median US household income is $83k/yr.

It feels more likely your investment account gains are driving your decisions. Stock gains are also driven by inflation though!

I can sort of understand the feeling though, I just recently got a 2.5% raise for "inflation", which hardly feels like it's making a dent.

Discord's killer feature is the "hangout" room.

You can see if people are in there and actively talking before you join and that alone encourages spontaneous drop ins.

I actually think many people would choose this option, if it was possible.

21% of Americans are functionally illiterate according to the University of Alabama.

I quit reading after the first paragraph when I saw this pattern:

"Not X, not y, not z, A!"

The overly emotional paragraph headlines were also off putting.

U of Arizona graduated roughly 10,000 students this weekend.

Schmidt could have paid off every student loan for every graduate in full and not even noticed it as a rounding error in his net worth.

Would have done so much more for humanity that this vapid speech.

Still Capitalism, but the Nordic Model.

High taxes on the wealthy, high social spending for all, lower business regulations, lower wealth inequality, and high labor market flexibility.

https://maseconomics.com/nordic-model-economics-high-taxes-g...

The core loop of new friend formation is repeated casual contact.

School is naturally good at forcing this, since we are filtering in and out of different class groups.

If you want to recreate this in post-school life, you have to join high membership interest groups, like casual sports groups (kickball, tennis, golf).

Game nights at the local pub work well too, since there will be a rotating cast of characters to make friends with.

Basically, you have to seek novelty and regular re-occurance to make "natural" new friends.

No, it's infinitely worse for your life to be surrounded by bad decision makers.

From the post:

"curl is currently 176,000 lines of C code when we exclude blank lines. The source code consists of 660,000 words, which is 12% more words than the entire English edition of the novel War and Peace. ... curl is installed in over twenty billion instances. It runs on over 110 operating systems and 28 CPU architectures. It runs in every smart phone, tablet, car, TV, game console and server on earth."

I wouldn't call that simple or well contained...

Most OS or web browsers don't run on cars or tvs.

If this is sarcasm, it's amazing. If not, depressing.

I would 100% expect a commencement speaker to be hyping me up for what comes next.

People love hot dogs. People don't want to know how they are made.

If I had a magic wand, I would enforce an internet-wide separation of human activity metrics from bots.

I want to know how many real humans read my post, commented, shared etc.

Clankers can keep their own counts.

Retired USAF Major General McCasland disappearing from his house is probably the most serious.

He was the commander of the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. This would have given him direct oversight of all of the Air Force's most sensitive technology for decades. His intelligence value to a hostile adversary, even retired, is incalculable.

He was an avid hiker and biker in his neighborhood trails, so it's very unlikely that he just got lost.

Left behind were his prescription glasses, along with all his personal electronics (phone and watch).

It's shocking and alarming that there wasn't a full blown military search and rescue operation mounted within hours of his wife calling him in as missing.

How far could a 68 year old man travel on foot within 8 hours?

He was reported missing within three hours of his last contact with his wife.

New Mexico Search and Rescue wasn't dispatched until Sunday, two days later.

Again, why wasn't the DoD tasked to find him at all costs on the same day he went missing, given his knowledge of the Air Force's most sensitive technologies?

I'm sure there something in the hundreds of pages of Microsoft o365 about "we may share your data with third-parties" blah blah...

Yes, so the lawyer can use AI to answer your questions and then the judge can discover that, since there isn't attorney-bot privilege. :/

Self-hosted, local only models are probably going to obviate a lot of this.

Google AI Edge Gallery now runs Gemma-4-E2B-it locally on an iPhone after a 2.5Gb download.

No network calls needed, claims Google.

Self-hosting is always a strong option for privacy seeking people, as it should be.

I wonder if a legal firm could setup a privately hosted LLM then claim attorney-client privilege as a rendered service.

Would a judge be able to demand the attorney hand over written notes from his clients?

I doubt it.

Does this mean I can tell my team to stop requesting CoPilot code reviews on my pull requests?

Why is it that every legitimate concern or downside pointed out about AI is met with the same tired, low signal, rebuttal of FOMO.

It's become the "no u r" argument of the AI age... :/