God wouldn’t have given us all these coal deposits and oil fields if he didn’t want us to strip mine and frack our way through life leaving our planet a used up husk!

Come on man, Speaker phone, video calling, Snapchat, and just the fact that most of them seem to choose text messaging over phone calls.

Do young children even hold phones near their heads anymore? I rarely see a kid less than their early teens doing anything but FaceTime or games. And after that point, video chats, texting, and doom scrolling.

Even my 15yo daughter never holds the phone against her head.

While I 100% agree with the fact that even modern things can be fixed with some knowhow and troubleshooting (and spare capacitors or the like), there’s a few things at play: `

• people generally don’t have this skill set
• electronics tend to be made cheaper, this means they may fail faster but also means they can be replaced cheaper
• it costs real money for tech support that can fix said issues, often many times more money than the thing costs to replace `

As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff. Even in the retro sphere, the math starts to side towards fix because of the rarity, but it’s not always clear.

As a DevOps manager who regularly talks with development about hiring/architecting, and works at a Fortune 500. Here’s our short list:

• kubernetes/containers (like deep knowledge, not just “I ran helm once”)
• CI/CD, and IaC + GitOps
• golang/rust/dotNet… modern statically typed and compiled languages are greatly preferable. Python/bash/PHP is clutch, but it’s also easy to pick up if you know the above, and honestly I kinda just assume it at this point.
• actual complete understanding of Git.
• solid full stack development experience/understanding
• cloud experience (AWS or Azure mostly, but GCP is close enough)
• thinking/problem solving skills

Honestly, I’ve seen so many people with AI experience of some sort, it’s not a difference maker. It’s fairly easy to learn and no Fortune 500 is hosting their own LLM unless that’s the point of the business. If you actually understand the stack and how things relate, it’s huge.

A big part of hiring is understanding what the person knows and how well they know it to know if they can apply their wisdom to other things. You know some day AI is going to burst, something better than Blockchain will happen, Rust or Golang will be superseded, a new cloud provider will appear, etc. I need to know you can apply your understanding and knowledge to some new challenges using tools that aren’t even concepts now.

I’ve heard lots of good things about Ghost. I’ve also hosted Grav for a while and it’s pretty solid. You can do Wordpress, but I’d stay away as it gets bad fast and there are better alternatives. If you needed even more scale, Mediawiki is selfhostable too.

China’s government is absolutely bankrolling the AI efforts there, just as the US government is openly bankrolling efforts here in the US. It would be dumb for them not to. The Cold War of AI is upon us.

I’m not sure western AI companies will go bankrupt due to China’s models winning, though. There are plenty of security focused “we can’t use foreign AI” things that would keep them afloat, especially as not everyone needs the absolute most cutting edge AI for their stuff and many US and EU companies are self hosting tuned models for their customers needed.

There’s, of course, the fact that most of it at the moment is a giant bubble that will eventually pop as the next big thing takes its place in importance for world dominance. Will AI continue to find a place in the tech stack? Definitely. New models, tweaks for niche use cases and huge benefits for specialized industries, etc. Will newer tech and processes usurp it over the long run, absolutely. That’s just the way Tech has always worked.

It’s a typical instruction delivery speech structure:

1. Okay, let me tell you how to ____

2-n. <steps to do the thing>

n. And that’s how you ____

(Optional) n+1. Any questions?

Hence the text in panel 4 completes the pattern.

I’m sure “and Canada will pay for it!” Just like the Wall.

Hey a chrome alternative!

• New product is part of OpenAI’s broader strategy to capture data on users’ web behavior

Oh, so same thing as Chrome, got it.

The number of tabs I have open from sites I’ve clicked on, started reading, said “eh, I’ll get back to this later” and never have, says no.