How I live now, while not a particularly good movie, really sat with me. The lack of understanding of what's happening around them, as the government has crumbled there is no civil order to communicate with citizens. The parts where they traverse the abandoned motorways, encountering highwaymen and rape gangs... it all left a really weird feeling.
> I can't imagine someone using an RP2040 in a real product
Why not? It's a great chip, even if it has some limitations. I use it in several of my pro audio products (a midi controller, a Eurorack module, and a series of guitar pedals). they are absolutely perfect as utility chips, the USB stack is good, the USB bootloader makes it incredibly easy for customers to update the firmware without me having to write a custom bootloader.
I've shipped at least a thousand "real" products with an RP2040 in them.
Given the way the RP2040 is set up, I cannot conceive of a proper secure boot chain for it. So, for basically everything I work on professionally, it's a non-starter. I think the key in your use case is that "hackability" is a feature, not a potentially life-threatening risk.
They very much are, right now. Lots and lots of big layoffs, the FAANG/MAGMA companies have completely dropped the halo effect they had over the industry. Everyone had to chase them on comp to get the best people; now they're ejecting people left, right and centre and there's no incentive for the smaller players to try and keep up with the competition anymore, because the competition in gone.
I've definitely noticed this myself when I was working my last job (quant finance in London, startup fund). We were getting premium talent applying for roles that we never dreamt of getting before then. A lot of them were ex Meta, ex google, ex Palantir etc. Guys who were very good but went to work mindless jobs for big tech for that 300k pay package. Now they're asking for half that, and desperate for a job.
I was under impression that only a few prop trading and HFT firms in London pay around the 300k mark, with FANG-type companies offering roughly half. Start-ups slightly below that but with generous stock options, if that’s your bag. Maybe I’m miscalibrated?
Yes, miscalibrated -- a TC of $150k would be low for a FAANG company, unless you're just talking about entry level pay. Once you're a year or two in, $200k+ is typical.
Open up any young female "influencer" video on YouTube. Look at the graph of which parts of the video are most played (hover over the playback bar and it pops up). Notice how the spikes in viewership line up with any nudity/bikini/suggestive angles.
Literally 90% or more of the viewers are just there to look at half-naked bodies. Exactly what the article is talking about.
I don't think anyone could pretend that "I just run a fashion channel" or "I just post videos from my kids gymnastics sessions" doesn't know who's really putting views on their videos. It should be blatantly clear to anyone, especially the creator who has more in-depth tools to monitor their audience. These people 100% know what they're doing and they're willing to keep going.
Honestly, there might be some value in a simple (free) desktop/mobile GUI wrapper that just deploys a “your web presence” container somewhere.
The often maligned “setup wizard” UI a lot of us remember from not so long ago actually was kinda neat in many ways.
Run “I want a website app” and click through a few simple menus that ask you questions to get you set up with a domain, email, hosting, etc. The defaults would be a selection of ideally smaller/non-FAANG providers, with some power-user menu or some shit gated behind a checkbox.
Then it just saves a document with your new CMS/etc logins, and away you go.
I guess you could even make a few bucks off it by using referral codes or whatever to fund development cost.
Good. There no reason to rewrite undergrad calculus books every semester besides money grabbing. The math hasn't changed in 100 years and there shouldn't be an incentive to write an updated version of the book for the 50th time.
The language changes, but more importantly students backgrounds and facility with the English language changes. Not that dumbing down the text or replacing old timey words should cost much, but cost disease and all that.
Granted, but they definitely do not change enough to warrant a new edition every year. This can and has been experimentally confirmed by countless students even before Library Genesis simply by showing up to class with an old edition of the textbook and still learning the material fine.
I'm calling bullshit on this based on personal experience.
At the height of this panic, there was talk of the bugs spreading to the UK, and that is was prevalent on tourist-heavy rail lines coming from France.
I used to take the train that goes through Gatwick airport up to Victoria, to go to work every day. Within a couple of days of seeing the headlines, I spotted several bedbugs on the train, including one time, one was just sitting on my bicep. They were definitely bedbugs, before you start questioning it, I managed to rake a photo of the one on my arm before smacking it off and changing seats.
Coincidence, maybe. But I've never seen a bedbug before and never seen them after. So I'm not completely willing to write this off as a conspiracy theory.
Bedbugs were spotted in touristic area of France since many years and were slowly growing. Bedbugs were already a real problem and in 2023 became a real concern Mainly due to olympics games coming.
But there was absolutely no reason to "panic", just to be concerned and fight the problem.
The reason of the panic was social media. And manipulation of social media is just one step ahead.
America has always been famous for the fact that everything is extremely cheap. But now I'm seeing videos of people at Costco/Walmart showing the prices of stuff (often while finding an old price label and showing there's been a 50-100% increase over the last year) and it's actually way more expensive than what I pay in the UK.
Only on the same way that DNA is a cheat for constructing organisms. After all they are universal recipes for organisms. Study enough DNA sequences and splice together a sequence and you can theoretically design any mythical creature you can think of.
But if someone grew an actual dragon in a lab by splicing together DNA fragments, that would still be a major feat. Similarly, training a neural net to play grandmaster level chess is simple in theory but extremely difficult in practice.
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