The author has clearly never tried to leg press 300+ pounds in the gym to Madonna's "Like a Virgin". Sometimes the biggest sell of earbuds is noise REDUCTION, not what sounds they can make.
I do agree that there are "social interactions" that are greatly devalued by people wishing not to be interacted with. But for me the earbuds are usually in to block annoyances, not avoid human contact.
Another reality is that at that scale you need to diversify your vendor portfolio so you never get stuck in a single-vendor scenario (for contracts, liability or scale). Many companies half this size have infrastructure across all three - AWS, Azure and GCP. The primary reason is redundancy, but that also gives them potential leverage for contract negotiation.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.) I could be the lone dissenter here, but to me well-written comments are a lot more fun to read than near-gibberish.
I wished more people tried harder to be better communicators, but it is what it is. If AI can decipher these comments and produce a much more coherent statement, then I'm for it.
The world changes. Time marches on, and the very skills you spend your time developing will inevitably expire in their usefulness. Things that were once marvelous talents are now campfire stories or punchlines.
LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not the cause.
If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given technology, it is the ability to master a given technology. This is a university that has no graduation!
The only places where a 4-way stop has room to make a roundabout are places where there is not enough traffic for it to matter either way.
The biggest obstacle is that there are just too many 4-way stops in urban areas where there is no space left to make a roundabout, you would have to tear down buildings. I don't think that is a valid argument in that scenario.
This is ultimately the first question I have whenever someone tells me about a bouncing new AI shiny... "Where does my data go?" Because if it does not stay on my machine, hard pass.
What I want to know is the privacy impact of this partnership. I see terms like "Apple will be running Google's models on their infrastructure" but that definitely is not enough detail for me to know where my data is going.
Any details on privacy and data sharing surfaced yet?
> People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked.
Astonishingly ignorant hot take. Music is what MUSICIANS DO. Some of them are also performers, many are not. What they create is the same as what a painter does, or even a chef or architect. However it is not a physical good so people with tiny brains think that means "iT's FreEEe!!1!" when each musical instrument used costs money, the recording cost money, the distribution cost money, the filing/registration costs money, and then there's all the years of time and effort spent learning how to do all of this.
The fact of the matter is that right now music is treated very similarly to software. There is ownership and copyright, and being able to make a digital copy for minimal cost/effort does not magically remove that ownership.
If you don't like it then you should change the laws. It's like being mad at cops because of the speed limit, when the likely culprits are your local city council.
Although I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, the reality in 2025 is that it is a totally dead market and we are still trying to figure out WTH is going on.
Some companies are holding their breaths due to political instability, others are in sectors that are already getting decimated (likely from the same instability above), yet others have reached a point where they (and "they" appear to be in a majority in their respective industries) are more centered on efficiency than headcount.
I'm employed and I'm grateful... I know plenty of people searching and are getting nothing but silence in their search. I think both sides of the hiring equation are getting a hard reset right now.
I do agree that there are "social interactions" that are greatly devalued by people wishing not to be interacted with. But for me the earbuds are usually in to block annoyances, not avoid human contact.