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 You know some day AI is going to burst, something better than Blockchain will happen, Rust or Golang will be superseded, a new cloud provider will appear, etc.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.

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.

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.

I’m feeling called out here.

I think the IDEA of Elon back then was charismatic and energizing. He was seen pushing space flight and EV’s forward into the future. Watching a video stream of the first Falcon flight to land the booster back on Earth was exciting. The fact that their stream was on the internet and full of interesting detailed real time telemetry and video was something new and different and felt like the future.

But watching Elon the man talk and stumble through even early interviews and press conferences was not, and to this day, I find it painful to watch. A great orator he is not. But then neither is Trump, I suppose.

Sure, but Elon isn’t charismatic in the slightest.

Sometimes I’ve found a site that gets partially blocked and causes a fuss. There’s an option to allowlist domain(s).

Also, some sites try to use ad domains to serve legit traffic, and some use legit domains to serve ads, so it’s not perfect, but it works pretty darn well overall.

PiHole is DNS based ad blocking and local DNS for everything on your network. So, even things that can’t run their own adblocker.

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.