Jrockwar

They were comparable to the rest of the phones at the time. Not great, not terrible. Compared to anything in 2024 they were obviously trash, but that's mostly because we've made 10 years of progress since then.

Sort of. It just depends on how much the person needs to control the vehicle.

The easiest example I can think of: Imagine lorries traveling along a motorway, and they can do that autonomously because it's "easy", and when they get into a city a remote operator needs to drive them manually into the depot.

Each operator could easily drive 4 or 5 lorries, if only one of those is entering a city at a time. Instead of needing a driver per truck, you only need drivers for the maximum number of trucks that might be entering cities at the same time. For a fleet of 30, that could be 5 drivers.

For things like mining, where safety regulations mean that you want to avoid having people in the mine as much as possible, even having one driver for every haul truck (so yeah, regular driving with extra steps) could be economically profitable if it means you can reduce some other, potentially expensive safety controls.

So hang on, did your managers not come from the same background? Did they promote people who couldn't do the job at the individual contributor level, or was it that they hired "career managers" whose only skill was to organise things?

I'm obviously not as skilled with coding anymore because even though I try to stay current with pet projects, the reality is that I don't have much time for that and there's no replacement for practice. But whenever there are technical challenges I've usually seen them before and can offer at least some guidance.

What does help is that I work in a system-wide role (you could call it systems engineering) and despite the management component of my role, my understanding of the interactions between components has gotten better over time, not worse.

I think my job is technically a middle manager at this point?

The reality is that the priorities come straight from the top, people in my team are mostly self-organised unless the tasks they choose were to be wildly misaligned with company milestones (which in practice never happens) or people have questions about what needs tackling first or when by, and I'm mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges.

My point to all of this - "middle manager" is a wildly different concept in every company. Nobody likes a pen pusher with no knowledge, but also no company hires people into the title of "middle manager" hoping they'll boss people around cluelessly. If that happens and that role exists, something has gone clearly wrong IMO.

I agree with you with the fact that it's wild, very distopian sci-fi.

However, even it this very much an ethical no-no, I'm not sure which bit is the technically illegal part.

If he were selling normal sheep, that would be perfectly legal. Nobody would bat an eyelid, despite being similar treatment to animals.

Is it the cloning that is illegal? If he were to clone a species on the brink of extinction to re-populate an area, would that be ethical but illegal?

Is the problem that he's cloning without authorisation? Who decides whether we can bring new animals to life via cloning? Is there a Ministry of Clones that needs to authorise people to clone stuff?

Yes, but they're making people quit instead. They don't need to pay severance to employees who quit because of RTO.

Well then bring it on. If feels too big to fail, but if (hypothetically) Amazon were to go under, the world would be a better place.

Sure, just like other brick and mortar stores can refuse to give you backups of a DVD you own.

As long as the installer works offline this is just as good. It's up to you to store it in whichever format you prefer so that you don't lose it - hard drive, thumb drive, DVD...

If you nuke your computers hard drive with the installers of your games, or you step on your blu rays with games and break them, then you lose access to them. As it's always been, no matter the format?

I'm not a lawyer but, I know when you file for a patent you can do that in just one country or internationally (which is significantly more expensive). Skimming through the Wikipedia article it seems to be talking about that, but first you need to have filed for the patent internationally and not in just one country.

From what I've read about this topic, it sounds like this is a patent active in Japan only.

Hahaha so funny and edgy lol

It's hip to like Kagi because it's not Google.

I think I stopped paying for Kagi at the third or fourth controversy I heard about, I can't remember which one. I wasn't exactly happy about the implication that paying for Kagi means giving money to the bigot founder of Brave.

Like the fediverse? Like SearxNG? Like Wikipedia?

I know you've said "almost", but there's a free search engine in there where you're not the product...