If the USA and Russia team up, it gets pretty precarious here in Canada. One to the south, one to the north, and if the USA grabs Greenland, to the east and west too.

My boss did the same thing. A team of experts working on our SaaS applications for 20 years, constantly improving it to be more secure, more maintainable, more usable, more performant, better organized, better documented, more thoroughly tested, more accessible, more suited to what users needed, more adaptable, using the most appropriate technology stack, protected from various attack scenarios, fully standards compliant, efficient to deploy, etc., and we just found out he vibe-coded a total replacement in secret all on his own in a couple of months using Claude and all written in JavaScript, and he is putting it live and retiring what we built. He wasn't even going to tell us until he had migrated the last customer over to his thing, so he's been letting us all work on projects that he had no intention of using, just to buy time until his slop was done.

No, I've just witnessed US elections for many decades and seen how they tend to go.

Saddam's Cheesecake Factory will be a monument for the ages.

I'll never understand why the USA takes months and months to build up to an election and weeks to count the results afterwards. Other countries take a few weeks for the campaign and have the whole thing counted within a day of the polls closing.

Absolutely. Two and a half decades of software development and the boss just vibe-coded me out of a job, using my code to do it. The bit about always suspecting you're autistic but never having any reason to investigate (until now) really hits home. Until now, whatever I am has been useful. Now it feels like no one has any use for people like me.

It slowed around 2010 while Intel sat on its arse for quite a few years, but then transistors started shrinking again. This page has a chart suggesting the law has pretty much continued to hold. But we know that can't continue because things really are starting to hit physical limits now.

A lot of that AI will presumably be rented from the companies that persuaded your boss to fire you and use their tools instead. So it's an odd kind of protest, that starts by paying those companies more money.

I do like the idea of software engineers collectivizing and prioritizing work on projects that don't have good enough open-source options, particularly where it targets the nastier companies in the SaaS space. But there's nothing new about that work; what's new is that we have a lot of people motivated to take software in a new direction, who miss being able to take pride in the quality of their work, and who may be more receptive to acting collectively than these people have traditionally been. I know whenever I've proposed any kind of collective stance at my workplaces I've been met with blank stares, silence, and developers nervously looking at their feet. Maybe that can change when more people have recent experience of what happens when you don't act together.

If we want to do something new, how about worker-owned cooperatives which actually offer good-quality software and support with ethical terms of use? Build it and sell it to the companies paying for SaaS, and make your software and support deal more attractive than the one they're being gouged for. The support is particularly important when anyone can dash off some software using AI. Make your company worker-owned, nonprofit and cheap, market it professionally, offer good support and maintenance, and make a living doing it.

Do you address people as "little buddy" in real life? Do you find it motivates them to consider your views with an open mind?

Sign your letter "Joe and Eileen Bailey".

Pass laws that severely hamper their control

Can't Trump simply veto any such laws?

If Ron dug a little deeper he'd realize that the reason he and the rest of the Republican Party ran on transphobia was because they had no positive achievements in government to be proud of, but instead have made pretty much everything about the USA worse. And that is the real reason they're losing.

Besides, he led the transphobic charge. But like every conservative who preaches about responsibility, when things go wrong he'll blame anyone and anything except himself.

But… he’s kinda missing the larger point: that people are not just focused on optimizing for the most efficient use of memory. They’re not just optimizing for what’s best for “the global supply chain of RAM makers.” They have other concerns — and other uses beyond AI — as well, such as their own sovereignty and control over their own tools and systems.

And Sam Altman is actively hostile to these concerns, because he's not just optimizing for efficiency, he's optimising for control.

And if tech had been proceeding since then as it did for the previous 30 years, you'd expect a whole lot more power for your $15 $35 now.

The aim of those buying up all the RAM is to prevent people owning devices capable of serious computing, so we have to rent what we used to have back from them, with added censorship and surveillance. Sam Altman has been explicit about how he wants no one to own RAM except companies running data centres. The Raspberry Pi becoming unfeasibly expensive is just an example of that forced transition from owning to renting playing out. When it was introduced the Pi cost $15 $35. We're in a different world now.

Because he's unreasonably powerful and having a direct negative impact on all our lives.

Everyone sees it. Those in power want it.

In the first round of attacks the password was apparently today's date. Updated firmware won't protect them from policies like that.

Ah, but how about a dubbed version spoken by American robot voices, where the foreign actors uncannily mouth American words? Wouldn't that be a joy and a gift to the world? Eventually we might even be able to replace all foreign actors with a young Harrison Ford.