https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ

Their new CEO is a McKinsey consultant so this is pretty much guaranteed.

Last recall was also a real recall: to rivet the slipping gas pedal cover down.

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own.

That is not what the lawsuit is about, and that was not what the plaintiffs or the judge argued. Their argument is that if you can not take a physical copy and digitize it.

If you want a digital copy to lend, you must beg the publisher to allow you to have a digital copy to lend and you must accept their terms. If they don’t want to provide you with a digital lending option as a library, then you can not lend it. If they want to make you use their DRM software you must use it even if it spies on your patrons and charges you per-lending fees, or even “expires” the book after so many loans, or “blacks out” or “embargoes” lending of titles you are supposed to have in your catalog (these are all features of publisher-backed digital lending schemes).

This is depressing as hell and a statement about the time we live in and the corporate overlords who control our lives.

Jimmy McGee made a great video about it last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoGm8c523M

And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive.

As opposed to now…

With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components

Nobody had done that before? Wasn’t the promise that they would do few quick checks, refuel, and send it back up same day?

Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia’s soyuz to get us to and from the space station.

Nasa had do use Soyuz because crew dragon was late. SpaceX won the contract then underdelivered a late product. Basically exactly what ULA or Boeing would have done.

Wanna talk about Artemis?

“Self driving cars will make the roads safer. They won’t be drunk or tired or make a mistake.”

Self driving cars start killing people.

“Yeah but how do they compare to the average human driver?”

Goal post moving.

When I first started using DDG I would use the bang to get me back into google very often. Now whenever I use a browser or device (mis)configured to use google I feel like a guy who accidentally launched and tried to use IE8.

I switched from Alta Vista at Google in the early 2000s because the Alta Vista index was stale and full of spam. Google search tools were comparatively primitive (av let you do things like word stem search) but the results were really good.

Unfortunately Mozilla is being run by a McKinsey consultant.

I wanna see Sam Altman reenact the “make it work” mirror scene from always sunny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBXNa0ipFPQ

Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it.

Has more to do with the market for supercomputers. They are monsters to keep fed so it’s not a question of if you can buy it but rather if you can run it. But customers for supercomputers are in the market because they need the most raw power that the technology is capable of supplying, so buying and installing a decade old supercomputer (which is going to have the same operating costs at a lower capability than a new one) doesn’t make sense.

You also have to consider that the downtime’s going to be a lot higher on this equipment as you’re going to start having components hit the end of their useful life.

The biggest con is the industry’s war to make Kei trucks illegal in the US.

These are almost certainly saleried, exempt employees with no “timeclock”.

They were fired for expressing a political opinion and doing so in a way Google did not like.

It is certainly legal for Google to fire them for this because it is legal for Google to fire them for almost any reason. But it’s also pretty certian that there is no way in America to protest your employer in a way where the law would protect you from retaliation.

Hacker news is full of people LARPing as corporate crisis management officers, or counsels for the defense. Every post you get about “company caught grinding up babies to fuel forever-chemical cancer machine” will get a ton of posts by people arguing that actually it’s a net positive for the world and how could anyone be against such amazing innovation?

Unfortunately, then they can legally terminate you for refusal to work.

I don’t think they’re being fired for “refusal to work”. There is a concept of “job abandonment” but one 9 hour period wouldn’t count. Typically you need several days of no contact/no show before you have considered to have abandoned your job.

This is more about at-will employment: Google has a right to fire an employee at any time for almost any reason, or for no reason. There have been people getting fired for posting pro-Palestine content to linkedin, which is completely legal in the US.

This isn’t a story of “employees overstepped a line and got fired” this is a story of “there is no line, companies can fire employees for almost anything and definitely for their political views regardless how respectfully they are expressed.”

Also going on strike is basically the definition of “organized refusal to work”

I guess they decided to lean into it.

This isn’t even remotely true. This is specifically what the DOJ is suing over: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39780312

I think OJ single handedly killed the Bronco as a car anyone with self-respect would own.

The image of that white Bronco rolling down the highway in the slow lane with a long procession of cop cars behind in second gear was one of the most iconic images of the 90s. You couldn’t have picked a worse getaway car.

More of a fart reel than a sizzle reel.

The basic message was “stop resisting” because AI is “inevitable.” I think it’s telling that this is the message the industry is going with.