The car industry: “That’s a good idea!”

No, not from a startup. It might be worth mentioning that I’m in the U.K. so the terms and lingo may differ from yours.

I’ve had RSUs from series D scale ups. I’ve had options from start ups. Typically in the UK they’re wrapped as an investment you make on entry (using a loan the company offers you) to only pay capital gains tax (25% in the UK). And I’ve had RSUs from big, established enterprises.

What’s common to them all, for me, is that they’ve broadly not paid out what they were advertised to, either because the stock falls (Unity springs to mind), you leave before anything material vests (and the hiring company matches your RSUs) or there’s no liquidity event.

I trust cash, paid into my bank account. The rest, IMHO, is just trumps (US: farts) in the wind.

Well it depends on how the RSU is set up of course. All the equity I’ve apparently received in my time is still waiting on “defined liquidity event” before I can do anything at all.

Yes, there’s nothing like an imaginary number that keeps growing and never materialises.

It’s almost as if investors themselves often aren’t that smart and they, themselves, won the lottery that gave them money to invest.

My first computer was an Amstrad 664, with a green screen. I’m old. And I’ve been around Vim and EMacs from time to time and I love the console but for the love of god, since GUIs became the normal way to interact with computers, I just install micro now and have the same hotkeys across all the modes of interaction.

Speed of typing really isn’t the defining productivity measure for code.

Now I use VS Code in a GUI and micro on the console and that provides a reasonably consistent way of interacting with text.

And the tobacco industry. And the gamling industry.

Eh, TPM is pretty convenient for full-disk encryption tbh

If they’re breaking the law with racist bullshit they can at least get a knock on the door.

Sure, but that doesn’t fix the many crashes and hangs. Most of the GPU effects in the adjustment layers grinds everything to a halt. It’s not really all that usable in practice, IMHO.

In theory yes. Not in practice though; unstable and slow.

You propose we do what exactly with AI?

And I’m not ignoring “rapid deskilling”. I’m specifically arguing against the very specific point that TFA made that “we will forget how to code”. That’s clearly not what will happen.

Some people today still know assembler. Some people still how to design CPUs. Some still know lithography. Not as many as before, because we just don’t have the need.

I marvel at the number of engineers who don’t think about memory allocations at all. But it’s ok - they probably don’t need to, for the task they’re solving.

I’m sorry but I’m not buying it. We’ve been sitting on top of abstractions for years.

What, you think the average engineer knows assembly? You think they know how to design gates? You think the gate designers know how to make lithography work?

How do you build a new factory, of anything? By using machines that have been built in other factories! We’ve got a highly redundant, interwoven mesh of things that rely on others things to be made. There is no “starting point” that you can trace today - all is done with something else that’s also complex.

Everyone’s got something they’d miss. For me it’s Affinity (though that’s on the way, it sounds like) and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s insane, but MSFS is the 800-pound gorilla; it’s not just visuals, but almost all the new stuff (like Beyond ATC) is targeting MSFS.

Short answer: If you don’t know if you’re using it, you’re very likely not using it.

Npm is a package manager for node.js, a programming framework for JavaScript.

Same. Just waiting on a native Linux version.

Literally not a single lick of usability improved from glass theme. Lots of elements worse. I support a handful of relatives and none of them like the change and still find the theme confusing.

That’s not quite my understanding of EEE.

• Embrace - adopt something that someone else has done
• Extend - add proprietary extensions on top of the original, quicker than the original owner can
• Extinguish - Kill the original owner off by moving quicker then either slow down or kill your own support for the product

What the AI model owners are doing seems to me just to be normal loss-leading with a view to gain market share.

They are currently selling it at a huge loss, agreed. They’ve got plenty of runway for specialised hardware prices to come down, for companies to get hooked and plugged into the ecosystem and for real value to be demonstrated.

When this happens they’ll raise prices and companies will gladly pay it.

Profit at this point is not relevant, seen from the perspective of investors.

Again, this discussion is about the EU proposal, which explicitly does not connect your ID to everything you do. In facts it’s designed exactly to ensure that sites can verify you being over a threshold age without having any other knowledge about you. Have you read the EU implementation or are you conflating it with the US proposal?