Your definition of "the economy" must be how Google shareholders feel. Which doesn't concern me.
Individuals in the USA have been experiencing the pain alone for a few decades now. They've felt a very real crash for quite a while now. For me, how a worker born in the US is doing is the economy. That's the New Right, while your views represent the Left in this country.
Any pain Google feels in the shift to tariffs and jobs for Americans rather than the rest of the world isn't optional. They're welcome to shutdown US operations if it's undoable.
I expect current AI models to behave like an L1 or L2 at a big tech company, where they will eventually fire you unless you reach L4.
The only reason they’re useful is that, unlike a human, they can be summoned in under a second and you can’t hurt their feelings by rewriting 100% of their stuff.
The data disagrees. Here’s a graph of private sector spending on new factories in the US. 2020-2024 blows every time period out of the water since 1975.
Look at what’s happening now: Spending started to collapse immediately after Trump got in:
Instead of discouraging offshoring, they’re threatening the physical safety of highly skilled foreigners. Those people have been the glue that holds the US economy together since, what, WWII?
If the US is no longer an attractive destination, they’ll set up shop overseas. Fast forward ten years, and the jobs they create will definitely not be in the US.
Concretely: Silicon Valley’s white collar workers are 66% first generation immigrants, and it’s the 4th largest economy on earth. (The US, including Silicon Valley, is number one). Just about all of my native born coworkers moved here for work.
All that needs to change. The glue to the US economy needs to be Americans. We have the best universities in the world but we decide to invest in foreign students instead of our own for wage reasons.
It just so obviously doesn’t, and even more obviously won’t. A pool of 9 billion > 340 million is a simple, hard reality that has trivially curb stomped any and all opposition since the dawning of the human race with the only variable being time-to-acceptance.
This also feels like yet another boom-bust cycle to me.
During the boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs. After the dot com bust, many people avoided CS because such jobs evaporated.
This cycle will be a bit worse because four things are hitting simultaneously: (1) Hangover from idiot over hiring during COVID (2) AI is going to replace a lot of incumbent businesses with startups (3) The real economy shows every sign of collapsing due to the trade wars (4) The US is intentionally giving up its position as the best country for skilled workers to move to.
I can’t say what will happen with (4), but it seems unlikely (3) is going to win many elections for the incumbents.
Anyway, this year, firms are probably going to be simultaneously too conservative (eliminating job positions instead of retraining people to use AI with more aggressive product targets) and too aggressive (betting the magic AI genie will grant middle management’s wishes and also somehow not simultaneously commoditize all the stuff it automates away).
Anyway, I think there’s plenty of opportunity this year for any company that’s borderline competent. My personal experience with middle-manager-dominated large firms makes me pessimistic about their futures.
> During the [dot com] boom, many people that couldn’t write a for loop got degrees and somehow got entry level jobs.
This wasn't universally true. In the SE US, late 1990s, I got 2 responses over a year of submitting applications for entry level coding jobs. One response was for a position hundreds of mi away.
Overlapping this time, I was serving as an employment counselor. I learned that this region was super insular and you need some kind of inside referral to get hired - in pretty much every industry. Local tech wasn't immune to that mindset.
It took me a few years to make connections and start working and even then it self-employed, on-site support. Thirty years later I'm still doing that.
On the other side, once I broke into an industry I could go all over. I got a referral into an ARC and within a few months I was serving all of them. They were all years needing someone but went without rather than hire cold.
But why patch it in debian, and not file an upstream bug?
It’s doubly important to upstream issues for security libraries: There are numerous examples of bad actors intentionally sabotaging crypto implementations. They always make it look like an honest mistake.
For all we know, prior or future debian maintainers of that package are working for some three letter agency. Such changes should be against debian policy.
Infuriating. The developer is just making excuses and refusing to address the users' actual concern. And why are they phoning home in the first place? What is this critical use case that requires this intrusion?
"This daily count of users is what keeps us working on the project, because otherwise we have feel like we are coding into a void."
So, they wrote code to phone home (by default) and then digging in and defending it... just for their feelings? You've got to be kidding me!
> So, they wrote code to phone home (by default) and then digging in and defending it... just for their feelings? You've got to be kidding me!
Is that better or worse than phoning home to serve ads?
Also, if feels misleading to me to call fetching a motd phoning home. You know Ubuntu does this too right? That feels more worthy of outrage than this.
If someone tells me, this software phones home, and it's not transmitting anything other than a ping; kinda feels like they're lying to me about what it's actually doing.
I'm not upset by the author wanting a bit of human connection to the people who enjoy his software. I empathize with the desire to see people enjoy the stuff I've made. Is it a privacy risk? Perhaps, but it's not even on the top 1k that I see daily. There's more important windmills to tilt at.
But... if you really just wanna be outraged; I recently wrote a DNS server that I use as the default for my home system. Currently It prints every request made, you might wanna try something like that. If you're that upset about this, you're gonna be blown away by what else is going on you didn't even know about.... and that's just dns queries, it's not even the telemetry getting sent!
Many corporate privacy policies per their customer contracts agree with this. Even a single packet regardless of contents is sending the IP address and that is considered by many companies to be PII. Not my opinion, it's in thousands of contracts. Many companies want to know every third party involved in tracking their employees. Deviating from this is a compliance violation and can lead to an audit failure and monetary credits. These policies are strictly followed on servers and less so on workstations but I suspect with time that will change.
I can only repeat myself from above: it's about what data you store and analyze. By your definition, all internet traffic would fall under PII regulations because it contains IP addresses, which would be ludicrous, because at least in the EU, there are very strict regulations how this data must be handled.
If you have a nginx log and store IP addresses, then yes: that contains PII. So the solution is: don't store the IP addresses, and the problem is solved. Same goes for telemetry data: write a privacy policy saying you won't store any metadata regarding the transmission, and say what data you will transmit (even better: show exactly what you will transmit). Telemetry can be done in a secure, anonymous way. I wonder how people who dispute this even get any work done at all. By your definitions regarding PII, I don't see how you could transmit any data at all.
By your definitions regarding PII, I don't see how you could transmit any data at all.
On the server side you would not. Your application would just do the work it was intended to do and would not dial out for anything. All resources would be hosted within the data-center.
On the workstation it is up to the corporate policy and if there is a known data-leak it would be blocked by the VPN/Firewalls and also on the corporate managed workstations by IT by setting application policies. Provided that telemetry is not coded in a way to be a blocking dependency this should not be a problem.
Oh and this is not my definition. This is the definition within literally thousands of B2B contracts in the financial sector. Things are still loosely enforced on workstations meaning that it is up to IT departments to lock things down. Some companies take this very seriously and some do not care.
It’s not just you. I expected the article to compare it to Tesla’s trajectory, where they proved out the hard part of the technology (batteries vs reusable craft), but then faltered after a dozen other companies followed their playbook, but had better product instincts.
The current administration forced Europe to invest heavily in aerospace, and they’re doing just that. SpaceX’s approach to R&D is reproducible. They have a 10 year head start, but that’s not a huge amount of time when the goal is colonizing the solar system.
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