What do you mean what was the plan?

This is the new CEO, spinning into “stripping Intel off for parts” mode.

The previous CEOs (Brian Krzanich, Bob Swan, and Pat Gelsinger) meanwhile made more money than you or I will ever make on maximizing short-term profits by refusing to invest into competitive levels of R&D.

That has always been the plan. If you want to figure out why Intel paid 3 CEOs millions to shoot itself in the foot, then one has to start investigating the board of directors since 2013-ish. They’re either inside traders, incompetent, or both.

Intel, Boeing, and the Big Three are emblematic of the ultimate decline of American capitalism post-2008. They inherited empires and had virtually unlimited state welfare and still fucked it up because halfway decent corporate governance is apparently a bigger challenge for these big companies than building airplanes the size of buildings or mass-printing circuits with sub-micrometer resolution.

Unfortunately Americans cannot stand being told they don’t live in the greatest country on earth. It’s a wonder that fascism took this long to win in the US, because it’s fundamentally hyper-compatible with American Exceptionalism which every American besides a tiny fraction of far-leftists believe to be inherently and unshakably true.

Where do you go from there when most of your population wouldn’t accept a trade alliance that doesn’t massively favor the US? Because even if Trump is impeached tomorrow that’s what Fox News will be running all day every day to successfully torpedo anyone attempting to rebuild the country.

I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I’ve yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.

The 100 years old brick buildings don’t have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.

But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.

Doesn’t HP end up a literal magic cop at the end of the series? The whole caste system is also upheld throughout, at no point is revealing the wizarding world to muggles even considered an option despite the fact that little kids are dying from cancer all over Britain/the world that could be magically healed in an afternoon. The whole SPEW thing is just profoundly racist and always has been. “Cho Chang” – nuff said. The whole point of Hogwarts is that it’s a boarding school, which proudly inherits all its real-world British characteristics which are intrinsically linked to the more problematic parts of the British class system.

Rowling has always been a bigot and I will die on this hill. Any progressive messaging that people read into harry potter is at best performative (for instance yes she explicitly denounces “blood purity” pretty early on, but that’s super performative considering her entire worldbuilding is built on the premise that some people are just inherently magical and others are inherently not invited to the party. “Blood purity contests” are only bad when wizards to it to other wizards.).

I don’t think she’s a good enough writer to have done most of the racist/classist/misogynist messaging intentionally, but nonetheless her reactionary poorly thought-out world view transpires through every bit of her writing.

EDIT: Trying to expand on my own thoughts here. I’ve always despised HP as a franchise so to try to be fair to HP let’s contrast and compare with the piece of shit author who did make a book I like, Ender’s Game. I pirated it a couple years back, and I won’t pretend it’s not obvious at times that he’s a homophobe and a religious nutcase with some obvious cognitive dissonance with some of his (at least at the time) progressive views. I guess the good thing about that particular IP is that there’s no new stuff coming out besides one awful movie, so everyone can agree Orson Scott Card can get fucked and move on with their lives. But it’s important to acknowledge that his religious zealousness did impact his writing and to take a step back even if we decide to still appreciate his work.
The problem is that HP fans are in a much tougher situation because the writing just isn’t good so if you drop the flimsy pretense that 2000s Rowling was a champion of liberal ideals, then you really don’t have much left besides a profoundly flawed worldbuilding with shitty characters who only work to uphold the wizarding status quo. Yeah I’d get pretty mad too if I had spend my teenage years obsessing over that heap of trash.

I love Dune but that game is so powerfully unappealing to me… I didn’t play it so maybe I got the wrong impression from a few minutes of gameplay but it read to me like every generic crafting-survival-base-building live service game from the last 15 years since MC and DayZ. Does it do something subversive or is it really just Rust on Arrakis?

Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.

Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from

The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.

Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?

The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.

This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.

Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever “hey BTW this device is at those coordinates”.

Google already uses this with WiFi to help “bootstrap” GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn’t change, this did.
Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple’s database with GPS coordinates.

So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn’t disable the “enhanced localization” feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.

Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.

There’s lots of room to give additional info in between that and “brake light is on because the driver doesn’t understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights”. It’s like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they’re on when the car isn’t meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.

Sure, but I don’t think Waterfall is going to save you from the soul-crushingness in such an environment.

Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.

Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.

How much of it is due to Agile (which is a very broad concept even though some people mistakenly equate it with scrum), and how much is it due to corporate pressures and inadequate processes though?

I find Agile conceptually meshes a lot better with “standard” product and solutions development thanks to the tighter feedback loops and increased reliance on local expertise over centralized planning. This only gets truer as project complexity grows.

However some companies try to make Agile work with top-down decision making and/or hard deadlines, which are deadly antipatterns. As for lack of time/resources and/or timesheet micro-management, this isn’t a problem unique to Agile nor something that waterfall is exempt from.

Good agile teams are mostly independent and can define their own testing/release cycle as required for a given project; though of course when that happens there are at least a couple layers of management who feel a burning itch to stuff their dirty nosed where they don’t belong because if the team succeeds despite their lack of direct involvement then everyone might realize the emperor has no pants.

That may be true in some truly well organized (usually “legacy big corpo” companies).

Where I’ve worked it’s more like:

• Requirements only cover user-facing features, if that. (Not so) senior engineers are left to bridge the gap between UI mockups and literally everything else.
• Implementation issue is accidentally introduced
• Priority on the bug is lower than new features so no-one has any way to justify working on it
• One day a dev might be personally annoyed enough by the issue that they fix the part as part of some tangentially related work. Else it stays like that forever.

That is a basic side-effect of Agile development. If you have implementation details figured out to such an extent before writing the code, you are not doing agile, you are doing waterfall. Which has a time and a place, but that time and place is typically banking or medical or wherever you’re okay with spending several times the time and money to get maximum reliability (which is a different metric than quality!).

I bet NVIDIA has driver crashes to figure out, and I know which of those issues I’d want them to focus on first if I used their windows driver.

If god didn’t want my buttcheeks poopy, then why did he make them hairy?

Ironic, IKEA is married to PZ2. Which to be fair is a fine standard (aside from the fact that unaware people tend to confuse it with PH2 then wonder why their screws are stripped), it’s just annoying that I have to switch my drill from T20 to PZ2 to build IKEA furniture.

As a European software developer I would love to see that.

Unfortunately I’m afraid those most likely to cry foul aren’t Americans, but the majority of European tech businesses who are either reselling MSFT bullshit or completely locked in AWS/Azure/GCP. Open-source/sovereign software services are the exception, not the rule.

You know, maybe my grandparents had it right.

It is weird that computers give so little sensory feedback for what they’re doing. Flashlights go click. Cassette decks go clack-vrrrr. Whiteboards go squeek-squeek. Screen sharing goes… nothing, just a small mostly white rectangle on top of my much bigger rectangle until a disembodied, 4 kHz-wide simulacrum of someone’s voice from halfway around the world says “yeah we see your screen”. Unnatural is what it is.

The damn dean could have invited Kanye to do a standup routine that is just roman salutes and this would still have been an extremely gross violation of every democratic principle that would have gotten any other president impeached.

However in Trump’s America it’s just a Thursday and the so-called opposition is just nodding along and dutifully complying with every unconstitutional order. At this point Trump could sign an executive order for every registered democrat to literally dig their own grave and I think a majority would actually do it.