nimbius

this is relatively unremarkable for those with an understanding of wage, labor, profit, price and capital.

capitalism will always seek to reduce labor cost. during the epoch of neoliberalism it achieved great strides in this by reducing labor power through union busting by both thatcher and reagan in the UK and US respectively. it has also effectively curtailed any increase in the minimum wage for nearly 20 years as well as reduced protections, regulation and prosecution for wage theft and overtime pay violations which it maintains as exclusively as civil matters while ensuring theft itself from a merchant in turn is always a criminal matter through the primacy of private property.

to learn more i recommend reading Marx's "Das Kapital," albeit its rather academic. Engels "wage labor" is also a good read to understand why housing is so persistently unaffortable but helps to understand why any other good or service slowly becomes so as well.

the effort is being driven by a handful of tech and social media companies who have suddenly realized they cannot close the pandoras box of AI.

without a meaningful headcount of real users, advertisers will begin to push back on cost or even reduce and eliminate spending on social media altogether.

by proactively identifying real humans, you prevent the collapse of major social media outlets. by tracking their age and location directly, you restore that which AI took away from advertisers in the first place.

age verification makes sure surveillance capitalism continues to function.

"hey guys remember that screen technology that came out seven years ago and has had plenty of time to mature? Well our 65 year old CEO just discovered it and has found a way to make it stratospherically more expensive than its ever been before!"

anyone with twenty years of devops experience is likely to abhor Diallo's hot take and for good reason.

AI is being sold as a developer, as it is being sold as the do-everything alternative to traditional processes and methods. it is not being sold as an intern or a junior, but a real developer.

turning the tables and gaslighting devops professionals into believing the issue isnt an emerging technology with overwhelmingly heavy handed marketing and profitless operating strategy thats been shoehorned into seemingly everything and promises anything, but somehow their own oversight, will destroy whatever "vibe code" market you think you have at the cusp of a global recession.

had this AI been a real programmer chances are great they would have (intelligently) foreseen the possibility of damaging a production environment and asked for help.

to play devils advocate: you could hire a junior dev for a fourth of whatever the AI token spend is, and have likely avoided this issue entirely. sure, a greybeard is going to need to pull themselves away from some fierce sorting algorithm challenge for a second to give a wisened nod, but you would have saved yourself an inexorable amount of headache and profit loss in the longer run.

>It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.

Has anyone else shared this sentiment? If so Redmond needs to lean in hard.

this is an absolute killing blow for Microsoft if it gains real traction. You made developers your cornerstone eight years ago for nearly 8 billion dollars. you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids.

Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.

> Pricing oil in Yuan because, I guess, the US is somehow not protecting the UAE doesn't make sense because China won't be there to protect them either.

It is an admission that US protection was always a paper tiger. Perhaps in the 1960s it meant something, but Iran has shattered the illusion that Washington has any credible defense of the country.

> The US can just say, well fine you can sell your oil in Yuan. But we'll just blockade the Straight and seize oil priced in Yuan or something.

The UAE primarily sells its oil to China, which is its largest export partner, followed by countries like India and Japan. the United States cannot do this without not only obliterating energy markets for an ally, but strengthening alliances between china and india. It is likely that should the US attempt such a move, China would respond with retaliatory technology tariffs and a reduction of agricultural trade.

> Who exactly does the UAE need protection from? Iran? China's ally?

the UAE did not "need protection" from any regional military threat until the United States used regional peace talks as cover to launch a surprise attack against Iran. the UAE would still likely be an OPEC member state had the US not unilaterally chosen to obliterate global energy markets for no consistent or clearly defined reason.

> there's just never any follow-up or perhaps imagination that the US could just do something too.

This conflict was well defined as geopolitical suicide for nearly forty years; its what kept the peace. All simulations and tabletop exercises predicted such an incursion would send global energy markets into panic, trade markets into recession, and produce no meaningful advancement of either regional security or regime change. Iran is backed by powerful allies and has shown numerous times it can meet each US escalation with yet more regional attacks. We have tried escalation and failed, burned through a decade of advanced missiles fighting cheap drones, and have no defined objective politically or militarily for this conflict.

Cursed by mighty Redmond to roam the market wasteland until death, one of the seventy some odd beleaguered CoPilot products is now being lashed like a haggard burro to the dying light of a once prominent development platform that, upon itself, were pinned the hopes and dreams of a commercial software juggernaut to capture the hearts and minds of developers all around the world.

exactly. this sounds like a third path where the UAE charts its own course, and that course increasingly looks paved in Yuan.

OPEC cartel membership didnt gain it access to Hormuz, and the US petrodollar promise to protect UAE states from aggression in exchange for trade in USD could not be upheld.

If youve never experienced costco or been a member, this is difficult to understand but there is an undercurrent, nay, a prevailing sentiment of savings value and above all else things like rebate and cash back. Costco has established transparency for the consumer so pocketing the money is an egregious offense for most customers.

- credit cards offered by costco offer generous cashback

- most costco food items include discount pricing thats predictable and visible in the price itself. the decimal value of the price can even determine if the item is being phased out.

- even costco memberships are broken down into savings and the staff will gladly quantify your expenditures and potential cash back should you change or upgrade a membership. unused membership portions are even refunded.

- the refunds. no questions asked, for virtually anything, any time. this is where the costco member expects tariffs to be refunded as well.

unpopular opinion: this can be explained by the social and monetary economics of the gaming ecosystem as a whole.

- Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library.

- console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan.

- steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.

Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.

- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.

- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.

- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.

- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.

- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.

this is nearly 20% of the company being laid off.

blech...too much windows. bring me the Linux version and i might care ;)

i live in a small midwest town and had the privilege of watching it slowly atrophy into near nothing over time. the steel mill closing, 2008 market crash, fentanyl crisis, covid, both shopping malls turning into liminal spaces frozen in 1994.

The real nail in the coffin was watching the Sears in the mall turn into a casino about a decade ago. Having failed their people at all other prosperities and futures, politicians turn to the last grift in their arsenal and roll out legalized gambling before packing up and leaving town or retiring.

having failed the digital future, ransacked it for every last penny, politicians again in 2025 turned to the supreme court to legalize online gambling and in doing so obliterate a generation of young adults. in another decade i expect a political movement to "hold these scoundrels to account" similar to Facebook, long after any meaningful reform or regulation could have been made and the industry itself is on the decline. just one last grift for the government that enabled it in the first place.