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.

That’s not accurate. The article is about Australia. Netflix Australia had a net loss of 200K subscribers specifically due to the anti-consumer moves they’ve made which affects a lot more than just sharing a password with a family member. That’s a 3% decline in a major country. Meanwhile, Netflix rivals had subscriptions increase overall and several saw huge surges. Netflix remains #1 by total subscribers in Australia, but that shouldn’t shock anyone given the inherit momentum they possess.

The article was never about Netflix globally. It was always about Australia. Companies operate business units in regions, and each region must perform.

The comments are just so much worse than the top posts. It is akin to Twitter after Musk pushed the main active user base away in exchange for a Faustian deal with right wingnuts. That or Reddit was truly duplicitous in their messaging and are perfectly fine taking money from propaganda organizations running in other countries which can pay the API fees to push narratives still. Not that they’d want that before an IPO or anything…

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.

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.

Not by a long shot. Connect is good, don’t get me wrong, but Sync has some major points that others usually just completely gloss over or ignore entirely–including Connect.

Like tablet-friendly UI.

And no, Infinity, “tablet-friendly” does not mean like 5 columns of independently scrolling content which take you to one big comment section which is a mobile UI stretched to screen size.

Tablet UI–let alone good, productive tablet UI like Sync has with pagination and all–is always overlooked.

Adding onto that, the quality of Reddit content [in my former subreddits] has slid dramatically in my opinion. Sure, those niche communities will exist and persist for a while. But, as more tech pros move to the Fediverse I have to imagine that is where a lot of information will reside going forward. Hopefully it becomes or remains discoverable. I get some glimmers of this happening with the various Steam Deck communities here. It is already happening with the various programming communities.

I think a far more likely thing to happen is that you get people scrapping the Fediverse for content to repost on Reddit, like what happens with Facebook and Instagram users scraping TikTok for content to repost. Social networks these days seem surprisingly sticky now that it isn’t just a place where all your friends are at.

There are already some bots that essentially do that (perhaps not with that particular approach). Unfortunately, I think it has the opposite intended effect: organic growth doesn’t seem to take all that well.