Came here to say the same thing which I was pretty shocked at. Engaging in flame wars on a site that's supposed to be for professionals was really eye opening.
Was also on Harvest when news broke they had bought them here on HN. A lot of the same comments. I thought, "Well, maybe this is hyperbole, let's wait it out." About a month after they were acquired, same thing. Price of my plan went up almost by double.
So if anybody is reading this? They absolutely will gouge you. All the stories you've read are all true. Take some advice and get out while you can.
This is one of those things I barely noticed because I tend to read fast and skim. Someone pointed the over use of these terms and now its like hitting a set of spike strips every time I'm reading the output from any given model.
Its like when someone points something out a in picture you never saw and now you cannot "unsee" it ever again.
>> 74% of installs are unofficial builds, not ones released by LineageOS.
One of the first versions of LineageOS I used was Evolution X on my Moms old OnePlus phone since it wasn't supported by the "official" Lineage version. Great track record of almost daily updates, and the customization you could do with it was phenomenal. The funny thing was I was running Ubuntu Touch on it before and it was super sluggish (totally not expecting that tbh) so switched to Evolution and suddenly the same phone was really snappy and the battery lasted for almost two days.
But yeah, I'm not surprised many installs are just branched versions of the original since many of them you can run on phones that aren't supported by the official version.
>> The tar pit of being able to use my brain to make money instead of navigating politics inside academia... happened for most of us a long time before AI.
Anecdotal evidence to support your point.
Have a degree in Anthropology. Took copious amounts of philosophy classes as part of my major. Took some CS classes just to stay on top of the stuff happening in tech.
I wasn't able do what I wanted in Anthropology, so I took the same route and ended up in SWE. To a degree, I have monetized my degree because everything I learned while obtaining my degree I use almost every day in SWE. I was jaded by the toxic politics of academia and it finally pushed me out as well.
Years ago when I was thinking of moving, I started looking at houses with my real estate agent. I started asking about foreclosure sales and he said the same thing. Seller and seller's agent will try and obfuscate the numbers to make it look attractive and essentially "stick" the buyer with something that costs way more than its worth.
This is the same thing that happened back in the day. I remember seeing ads to buy castles in Europe for under $10,000. I made a quip about it to my boss and he said he was seriously looking into it as he was really big into real estate at the time.
He assumed he would have to put some money into it, but not the millions the fine print said they would need to invest to bring it up to a livable standard - which required a ton of construction, electrical and plumbing as a starter. He kind of scoffed at it once he started learning all of the details.
I also remember seeing the same thing when entire blocks of houses were being sold during the housing crash after 2008. Majority of the houses were in really bad neighborhoods (the ads for houses in Detroit were eye opening) or conversely way TF out in never never land where some developer decided to build some neighborhood development that went belly up after the crash and was stuck with half finished houses and no way to pay to get them finished.
Still have my 2014 Corolla which was the last year they included a CD player. My son is begging me to have it instead of trading it in when we get a new car this Fall. He's super into physical media which is crazy to see since he's a zoomer. I'm seeing a lot of kids in the zoomer generation coming back to physical media which is really cool. I play with two guys who are millennials and they're completely hooked on their Sony Minidisc players.
It gives me hope the future is not completely lost.
AFAIK nobody was collecting analytics. The one team I was working on had put out a goal of "30% more efficient" using AI tools. Its about as subject as you can get. We never got around to what exactly that meant before everything got shut down.
Myself and several other devs were laughing about the whole thing. The company was so amped about what AI could do they never even bothered collecting any analytics that would affirm or deny any of this had a positive impact. Even some of my team members were talking about the placebo effect AI has had on a lot of C-Suite folks.
I can give you some additional anecdotal evidence to support your comment.
I work at a Fortune 200 company. At first, it was the Wild West. Need an LLM? You got it. Need to or want to build an army of agents? Done and done. We literally had everything at the tips of fingers for about 3 months. Teams were building their own internal tools, the team I work on canceled contracts with several software vendors because teams were building the same tools for what they thought was nothing.
Then they signed contracts with Anthropic and Google because I would assume they saw the token usage was through the roof. One month later? They completely cut off access to everybody for both Claude and Gemini. If you wanted access? Suddenly it was several forms, along with several approvals and a rock solid business case why you needed it. And before you got to the forms? You were added to a waiting list that was thousands of people long.
The entire company is now in damage control after trying to get the genie back in the bottle. I'm guessing someone saw how much we would be paying for the tokens we'd been using and decided to shut the party down so to speak.
Do people not read the article, or do they just read the clickbait title and comment?
Apparently they missed Ron Wyden (co-sponsor) of the bill is a Democrat and the bill is a bi-partisan effort?
Or the fact the EFF is actually in support of the bill:
EFF applauds Senators Cruz and Wyden for taking this critical issue seriously, and we look forward to working with Congress on this bipartisan bill as it moves through the process. We hope it lands on the right balance to provide additional protections for everyday users around freedom of expression.
My next door neighbor was a few years older than me and was constantly showing me all kinds of nefarious stuff. One thing he showed me was if you tape over the tab on cassettes, you can erase and re-record what you want on them.
One time my older sister and I got into a fight and to get back at her, I erased side A of her Michael Jackson's Thriller cassette she had just gotten a few weeks prior. She got it replaced at the music store and the salesperson was completely befuddled by the entire situation. That one day the music was there and the next day just gone? Inconceivable!
I just played stupid at the time, but felt like a god knowing that little trick. So, sorry sis. But John C, you were the man.
The crazy thing is these came out in 92' and they didn't stop production until 2013 so you can still find these players. I just found out Sony stopped production of the minidiscs just last year which is crazy. A 20 year run for the player and 30+ years for the minidiscs.
If you can find a player, you can still get the discs on Amazon which is awesome considering how disposable tech has become.
Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make.
He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest.
Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.
Just to play devils advocate here - but from 2022-2026 did they ever have any large hiring cycles that would replace some or most of these layoffs? Or should I believe none of the layoffs in the last four years have been replaced at all?
I do agree with your point about overhiring, its been way to long and this continues to be an excuse without any real evidence to back it up.
Was at my daughter volleyball game a few years back. Sitting in the gym. In walks mom with a baby girl and a boy that looked around 10ish. They sit down. Mom gives the baby the ipad to futz around with. The son? Takes out his book and starts to quietly read.
It was an interesting contrast to say the least.
This is also something I've heard from my son about more kids are getting off of social media, or giving it up for other means to communicate. My son just graduated HS and said all of his peers have left Facebook, Snapchat, X and several others. He said his generation now sees social media as something for Boomers and my (Gen X) generation. He said people think you're lame if you're still on social media. Everything is now back to Discord servers and other platforms like 4Chan. Anonymous, under the radar stuff, out of the prying eyes of adults.
So in prediction markets I've heard a lot of times people will collaborate in order to make certain predictions pay off higher sums by having more people put money on a certain bet.
Is it true with these markets the more people bet on a specific day and time, the value will increase more, increasing the overall payout? If that is true, I wonder if they're looking at anybody else helping place the bets or a group of people trying to wager a higher amount of money to increase the return?
I sense your lack of hope and see it in a lot of younger people these days.
I grew up in the 80's. College in the late 90's. Start of career in the mid aughts. Went through two dot com busts, and have seen a lot of shit. The one thing that my generation (Gen X) seemed to have was always some optimism for the future. Some hope that as bad as it is now? It will eventually get better. The economy will recover, tech jobs will come back, new companies will start up, things will get back to normal.
There seemed to be so much open road with our generation. We knew we were at the forefront of something really special. The road to being successful was pretty standard. Go to college, get a degree, start a career making 40-50K. Get married, buy a house, have kids, live happily ever after.
That seems to have dissipated with Millennials and has gotten worse with Gen Z. Even college for Gen Z is like, "I don't know, is it really worth it any more?" How do you pick a career in something that may or may not exist in a few years because of AI? It just seems like we were the last generation that really had so much hope (regardless of which party was in the White House or controlled congress) and it seems that kind on relentless optimism for the future has dimmed immensely over the past few years.
I'm grateful for the time I grew up in. I'm not sure I would be able to handle the amount of pressure and stress that young people have to deal with these days.
I did find this, but also the fact there is a huge sharing community. When I was in marketing, most of the people would show up, do their work and go home. Lunch was spent complaining about this new report or some new algo the sales team wanted us to be using.
On the flip side when I became a developer, it really felt more like being a part of a real community. People would show up at my desk and say, "Dude, have you seen this new plugin?" or "Man, I just found the coolest logic game, you'd love it!" or "I just started playing around with this new JS framework, have you tried it yet?"
As in, all the people I met were so genuinely interested in my opinion. Lunches were suddenly brainstorming sessions. Or someone had a problem and we'd all sit around frantically scribbling on napkins trying to solve it. Or talk about the latest conference or when DefCon was and who was going. You really felt a part of a culture in every way. The devs I got to be friends with genuinely loved what they did. It wasn't just a job, it really was something they were all passionate about. Something that consistently extended beyond the 9-5 jobs we had. Side projects were always a hot topic at gatherings and lunches.
For the first time in my career, I really was proud to be apart of the developer community at a time when everything was (and still is) changing so rapidly. Without those friends and mentors, I have no idea where I would be. It was kind of like landing at college and finally finding a place you felt you finally belonged and fit in with like minded folks.
I barely go on there any more its gotten so bad.