Pingk

Technological innovations have never meant less work for the worker. It's the bosses/company that benefit from being able to squeeze you that little bit more.

Want to do less work? Join a union and campaign for a 4-day work week or something. If the productivity benefit from AI is real, there's no reason you shouldn't be paid the same for less time because your output is the same/better.

Sony chose to use the words "purchase" and "buy" on their pages, and hide some sneaky text in the EULA that changes their definition to remove the implication of ownership.

They know that using terms like "rent" or "lease indefinitely" would reduce their revenue, so they squirrel away legal gotchas that no one ever reads to cover their arse. It shouldn't be allowed.

Just because something is legal doesn't make it ethical. Sometimes the ethical thing to do is ignore the legalities, which is why people are fine with advocating for piracy in cases like these.

In some European countries, yes, but other countries like the US have different laws. The UK doesn't have a classification for a speed pedelec, just the 25kph class.

Not related to the story, but that your go-to example of converting to a for-profit organisation is a hospital is horrifying to me

You do it to yourself, you do, and that's why it really hurts.

> Importantly, the company did not mandate AI use (though it did offer enterprise subscriptions to commercially available AI tools). On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.

This isn't a good idea regardless of why it's being deprecated.

If it's no longer being maintained then put a depreciation warning and let it break on its own. Changing a deprecated feature just means you could maintain it but don't want to.

Alternatively if you want to aggressively push people to migrate to the new version, have a clear development roadmap and force a hard error at the end of the depreciation window so you know in advance how long you can expect it to work and can document your code accordingly.

This wishy-washy half-broken behaviour doesn't help anyone

Western employment has survived because automating and outsourcing labour has pushed people to take up knowledge/services work.

If AI is somewhat successful at automating knowledge work, what feasible job could exist that doesn't require your mind or body?

Services like healthcare and plumbing aren't going away of course, but there's not enough demand to support an economy on those jobs.

In my opinion the whole economy needs a rethink regarding what our actual goals are as a society, and maybe AI will force that conversation to happen, but I'm sceptical if it'll be a well-considered consensus.

There are plenty of non-US index funds, like EU, UK, Japan and others. There are also indices that track smaller companies rather than just the S&P500 or Nasdaq.

Or diversify in both directions - small US, and big and small international funds.

This is often made worse as a result of hiring outside consultants. Firstly they don't have the institutional knowledge you have when starting a project, but they also aren't incentivised to properly document and hand over their knowledge at the end since that means less future work.

This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.

Except it's getting so difficult to find the companies producing the more durable alternative, so everyone is forced to buy the flimsy piece that falls apart

The article doesn't mention if tips are included in their calculation (I suspect not).

Are Uber/Lyft still cheaper after a 10-15% tip?

Given that no models are profitable for the parent company afaik, it's only a matter of time before the money-squeezing begins

It's cheaper and more profitable to make thing out of plastic rather than something more durable/sustainable, and companies lobby against strong environmental regulations so they don't need to care about improving.