Neat.

We generally put this kind of thing into a chat window and have people ‘thumbs up’ the ones they want to vote for. It’s not elegant, but it’s quick and gets the job done.

Nah. Oracle is trying to pivot from “people noticed we hate humans” into “Like Microsoft, we embrace open source now”. I’m glad to see it, but also very skeptical that it represents a long term change.

Edit: Oracle’s stance on basic accessibility seemed really bad, to me, for a long time. I don’t actually think they hate humans…probably.

Except Oracle didn’t create either of those, Sun Microsystems did. Oracle bought Sun, and then made both products worse.

Yeah. I’ve always thought timed open source was probably a sweet spot, but I don’t have a lot of trust that companies will actually follow through on the open license at the end, so it doesn’t buy my goodwill just yet.

Fair enough. I’m just getting a little tired of our monopolist companies buying every competitor while burning through venture capital and then claiming they need to raise prices to “survive”.

All great points. That said, no one should feel sympathy for Disney’s profit margins.

They can and should spend less on anti-piracy measures to become more profitable.

And Disney could be 100% profit, overnight, while paying their actors and writers handsomely, if they just license their content to a streaming service that knows what they are doing.

The goal of AI is fictional, and there’s no solid evidence today that it will ever stop being fiction.

What at have today are stupid learning algorithms that are surprisingly good at mimicing intelligent people.

The most apt comparison today is a particularly clever parrot.

I’m all for having the discussion about how to handle AI when we have it, but it’s bad faith to apply it to what we have today.

Critically, what we have today will never ever go on strike, or really make any kind of correct moral decision on it’s own. We must treat it like dumb automation, because it is dumb automation.

Pro tip: If you draft documents in Markdown, lots of programs have a “preview” that renders perfect formatted text to paste into a Word document.

I find it saves me a ton of hassle to leave Word to the very last step, when .docx is required.

Wilsooooonnnnn!

“At Viridian Dynamics, we build our robots with ethical AI, whatever that means; so that humans and androids can live in peace - we hope.”

Ssshh. Let’s not give away that little hint - there may be bosses present.

I learned Linux on the boss’ dime and it created tons of career opportunities.

Yeah, as the gap between paid OS and free ones narrows, we see the free ones in use in more and more contexts.

Cloud and phone went first, now it’s finally the year of the Linux desktop, again.

Yeah. It was embarrassing all those years we declared it the year of the Linux desktop, before. I’m glad we finally got there this year!

Plus on Pixel you can run GrapheneOS.

These are all very real possibilities.

Here’s another: The big shot billionaire’s agreed over drinks one night that their handlers - the staff that used to make them look smart - were overpaid.

I’m guessing that skill with Cascading Style Sheets is considered wasted time and effort at X, much like media relations, accessibility, and microservices.

I’m getting sidetracked here, but I want to give my support of McD’s turning every possible life event Grimace can have into to a new marketing event, so long as each comes with a new Gameboy color game.

I’m not sure, honestly.

Charitably, we could assume it’s just from removing Google and various carriers background apps meant to improve my experience.

Uncharitably, I have my suspicions. For the last five or so versions of Android something always seemed to be using processor cycles and battery when I wasn’t actually doing much with my phone.

But I never saw evidence of usage data exfiltration via Google apps - at least after I turned off the related optional settings.

In any case, switching to GrapheneOs was a startling and pleasant speed boost for me, whatever the real root cause.

Spoiler for a later stage of your journey: Your phone gets wayv faster. That part is pretty nice.