They used to be gross, alright. Probably still are.
There was a PR campaign ("on their behalf" ? :] ), posting on certain websites in the first year of their launch or so.
(This was before the fraud in which Brave were taking donations in the name of someone else, without anyones consent.) It involved posting things like "Come home, white man" and other dog-whistles on image-boards along with the brave-lion logo imagery on a consistent, regular basis.
There's probably archives of these threads and people calling out they were very obviously automated and calculated. Who else at this point would even care to do it for them?
Eich got kicked out of Mozilla for his views not aligning with everyone else, so him weaponizing his own views like that isn't exactly what some would call unexpected. He might also not know the extent of which his PR goons go to promote his stuff, but come on now... the whole image is planned. There's a reason they choose to 'break a few rules' and they want their browser image to be that of a 'strong authoritative male leader' specifically. It appeals to a certain demographic also, wonder who... /s
I just think it's super fucking lame and plenty of people smell that shit a mile away. Which explains why plenty of people say "fuck no" without even knowing half of this shit.
The moment you read “crypto mining in the browser while you browse” should be an immediate red flag that you should run away. Absolutely no need to respect him even when he was the creator of JS. So what.
I think it has a potential to raise a lot of the salaries of blue-collar positions in middle America, and then create demand for the trades over the next decade or so.
I find it unlikely that white collar positions will be switching drastically to blue collar unless they’re already on the fence about it or they’re not middle to high up in the white collar ladder (six figures+)
Despite how obtuse the current administration views are, this has been true for decades. The churn of new papers and hype around medicine/biotech is nothing new.
Says nothing about endemic reproducibility crisis of the social sciences.
Since student loans have been basically guaranteed (bankruptcies can’t erase student loan obligations, in an attempt to push rates lower) and tuition steeply rose, academic institutions’ ratio of administrators to students has skyrocketed to a bureaucratic mess, leading to a flywheel of higher education costs and incentivizing research for money’s sake over impact to the field.
Real impact would be reproducing notoriously iffy studies, but that doesn’t bring in the dollars.
Its just another layer of potential misdirection that BBC themselves, and many other news orgs, perpetuate. Im not surprised.
From first hand experience -> secondary sources -> journalist regurgitation -> editorial changes
This is just another layer. Doesn't make it right, but we could do the same analysis with articles that mainstream news publishes (and it has been done, GroundNews looks to be a productized version of this)
Its very interesting when I see people I know personally, or YouTubers with small audiences get even local news/newspaper coverage. If its something potentially damning, nearly all cases have pieces of misrepresentation that either go unaccounted for, or a revision months later after the reputational damage is done.
Many veterans see the same for war reporting, spins/details omitted or changed. Its just now BBC sees an existential threat with AI doing their job for them. Hopefully in a few years more accurately.
Defaulting to China stealing IP is a perfectly reasonable first step.
China is known for their countless theft of Europe and especially American IP, selling it for a quarter of the price, and destroying the original company nearly overnight.
Its so bad even NASA has begun to restrict hiring Chinese nationals (which is more national defense, however illegally killing American companies can be seen as a national defense threat as well)
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted, this is well known knowledge and many hacks in the past decade and a half involved exfiltrating stolen IP from various companies.
Agree, I think the high cost of full time hires for entry level software jobs (total comp + onboarding + mentoring) vs investing in AI and seeing if that gap can be filled is a far less risky choice at the current economic state.
6-12 months in, the AI bet doesnt pay off, then just stop spending money in it. cancel/dont renew contracts and move some teams around.
For full time entry hires, we typically dont see meaningful positive productivity (their cost is less than what they produce) for 6-8 months. Additionally, entry level takes time away from senior folks reducing their productivity. And if you need to cut payroll cost, its far more complicated, and worse for morale than just cutting AI spend.
So given the above, plus economy seemingly pre-recession (or have been according to some leading indicators) seems best to wait or hire very cautiously for next 6-8 months at least.
"I think the high cost of full time hires for entry level software jobs (total comp + onboarding + mentoring) vs investing in AI and seeing if that gap can be filled"
I think it's more to do with the outsourcing. Software is going the same way as manufacturing jobs. Automation hurts a little, but outsourcing kills.
The numbers say otherwise. The US is outsourcing about 300k jobs annually, with about 75% of those being tech. The trend has generally increased over the past decade.
Even then why hire a junior dev instead of a mid level developer that doesn’t need mentoring? You can probably hire one for the same price as a junior dev if you hire remotely even in the US.
The fact something is profitable (even vices) does not mean it requires regulations, unless the regulation in mind is direct or indirect cap on profit margins?
The missing regulation is some kind of tax or other disincentive against e-waste. I believe the premise of the GP is that such things can only be profitable if we chose to ignore their environmental impact.
...and consumption/dispersion/degradation of the finite/rare/precious resources used in the manufacturing process, which we could also factor in, if we wanted to be serious.
E-waste like this exists because it's legal and profitable.
I believe that we as a society don't want e-waste (at least I don't). And when the society does not want something profitable to be done, it sets regulations.
If it wasn't illegal to steal your neighbour's car and sell it, then it would be profitable. But we as a society don't want it to happen.
Ah yes, the secret design of pistols which go off at the slightest bump (its a lottery, only 1 in 1,000 chance!)
Revoke contracts, investigate the leadership who accepted the contract, and hold Sig criminally liable given they have internal documents from years ago acknowledging the fact.
Universal human rights violations only exist so far as men with guns are willing to threaten them.
If we had to choose a world with guns or a world without, then a world without is the obvious choice. Its the SUV problem. SUVs are safe! From what? ... other SUVs.
Of course we can't have a world without guns, so it's all theoretical.
I agree its a popular excuse, however unlike the blockchain craze there’s legitimate use cases of productivity improvements with AI.
And if you can (in some cases) substantially increase productivity, then logically you can reduce team size and be as productive with less.
With the right prompting, you can cut a copywriting team in half easily.
My business has one copywriter/strategist, who I’ve automated the writing part by collecting transcripts and brand guidelines from client meetings. Now she can focus on much higher quality edits, work with other parts of the strategy pipeline, and ultimately more clients than before.
I can easily imagine a corp with 100 junior copywriters quickly reducing headcount
The problem is people (not sure if it's coping) present an argument that either it can perfectly replace someone 100% or it's an useless fad.
Even increasing the average productivity by 10-20% is huge and in some areas (like copywriting as you've mentioned) the gains are much bigger than that. Of course there's also the argument of the infinite demand (i.e. demand will always overshadow any gains in supply caused by AI) but evidence is never provided.
Also a portion of their Azure spend was some clever accounting they did if memory serves me
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsofts-historic-plunge-why...
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