There’s stupid from top to bottom here.

The company is stupid for allowing an AI full root access to their entire setup.

The provider is stupid for only generating full-access API keys. They’re even stupider for storing backups with a volume, so deleting the volume (zero confirmation via API key) also insta-deletes the backups. And they’re stupidest for encouraging users to plug AIs into this full-trust mess.

And the company is absolute stupidest for having no backups other than the provider’s builtin versioning.

The problem is it’s not just ‘form a union’. In most cases unionizing means joining a much larger union that covers many hundreds of companies. And it will mean that all questions of compensation or discipline then have to go through a union contract. It means more paperwork and less flexibility.

If there is trust between workers and management, then workers often don’t see much benefit to going through all this. And that’s why the guy said every shop that went Union deserved it, because those shots all tried to save money by screwing their employees and so the employees fought back and unionized which ended up costing the company more than if they had just paid the workers correctly in the first place.

In most cases here unions are fairly large organizations where the larger union covers dozens or hundreds of companies. So it wouldn’t be like ‘Bob’s maintenance shop union’ it would be like ‘international brotherhood of machinists union chapter #1234’.

And when that is done, the relationship between the workers and the company changes. The union will negotiate a specific contract with the company which all workers and all jobs then are covered under. This provides a lot stronger protections for the workers, but can also be less flexible in some cases. And of course the worker has to pay dues to the union, it’s usually not that much but it’s not zero.

Point is, if the workers are happy and have good relations with management then they often see no reason to go through all this.

On the other hand when management starts turning the screws and tries to make more profit out of the worker compensation, then it’s absolutely time to unionize and workers are even more seeing that.

I once was on a tour of a non union maintenance shop, in an area where most similar shops were union. One of the people on the tour asked the manager about this.

His answer- ‘Every shop around here that’s gone union, has deserved it. I pay my guys above average, I don’t flip out when they take time off, and we have decent health insurance. My workers are happy- when the union comes calling it’s the workers who tell them to get lost.’

If WotC is going union, they probably deserve it.

The name has been there for almost 20 years. If harm was going to happen, it would have already happened, would already be happening.

Consider drugs- if I invent a new drug, I have to run studies to ensure it’s not harmful. But if the drug’s been on the market for 20 years with many millions of doses consumed, I can look at the people who’ve taken it to see if it’s harmful.

What you’re saying is the drug’s been on the market for 20 years, there’s no reported harm in that time, but we should pull it off the market anyway. That makes no sense.

Can you find one single person anywhere at all who’s said ‘I’m disabled and the name GIMP is offensive’? Surely if the name hasn’t caused offense in the last two decades, it’s unlikely to cause offense in the next two decades?

You misunderstand me.

If someone with a physical impairment says that using this word in software is harmful TO THEM, I will ABSOLUTELY believe them at face value and probably agree with the name change.

Can you find me such a person? THAT is what I was saying in my post. I don’t see any evidence of actual offense happening. I see people trying to avoid offense, but no actual disabled people taking offense.

You want documentation that gimp is offensive?

‘Gimp’ as referring to someone with a disability, is offensive. That’s not the only use of the word.

Or are you on the camp that we should rename IDE connections ‘master’ and ‘slave’ because a dark-skinned person might have a problem with that?

Pretending to not understand when an acronym spells a word

I understand exactly what it means. I am pointing out that it has more than one meaning.

The point of my original comment (which you apparently missed) was that GIMP has been called GIMP for years/decades… if in that time nobody has actually been offended by the name, then why is it important to change it now?

Let me give you an example- let’s say I make a piece of software called Web Output Parser, or WOP. Obviously ‘wop’ is a potentially offensive term, as it was once a slur that refers to people of Italian descent.
If my WEb Output Parser is used by millions over 15+ years, and not one single Italian-descent person reports offense, am I under some obligation to change the name to avoid a future offense that hasn’t occurred in almost two decades? Does the fact that the pejorative use of the word has gone out of common vocabulary make any difference?

That’s why I say it’s performant. Renaming GIMP would cause a problem for millions of people who use, modify, and distribute GIMP, all to avoid an offense that hasn’t happened in almost 20 years.

Do we have any actual documentation of anybody who might be called a ‘gimp’ actually being offended by the name? Or is this just more performant bullshit?

Every time one of these changes is made it creates confusion for thousands or millions of people. And it creates a reload on other software packages and dependencies to change the name.

It is no different than software changing and interface for the sake of changing it. You are forcing your users to relearn something they already know which has a real cost in time and potentially in dollars.

Gimp does not refer to people with movement disabilities. It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. You want to make things less offensive, double down on what the acronym stands for rather than changing it.

This is absolutely a thing. I remember reading a story about this, this was years ago, but this guy worked for the air force of some nation in heavy conflict. One of the most used weapons in this war was an anti-radiation missile, it would loiter for some time until it detected an emissions target then lock on and destroy it. Whenever they needed to use radar, they would hotwire a bunch of microwave ovens to work with the door open, then plug them in with like six extension cords plugged together. The missiles would lock right onto those microwave ovens and blow them up. He was joking about how the enemy would boast they destroyed 15 aircraft that week on the ground, when his force only had 10 aircraft to begin with.

Please understand that this is not due to any sort of bubble. Especially not with memory.

OpenAI has themselves purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory production for 2026. The negotiated in secret with two different manufacturers, announcing the deals on the same day. Neither manufacturer was aware of the other, and both have said if they were they would not have made the deal as it sent a significant percentage of the world’s memory production to one customer.
More interestingly, the deal was not for memory chips. It was for finished wafers, which themselves have to then be sliced into hundreds of individual chips, which each need to be tested and packaged in the black casing we call a chip. As far as I am aware, OpenAI has no capability to do this. Which means they may have purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory output only to throw it in the garbage and keep it from their competitors.

My understanding however is that this deal was for 2026 production. Go to next year, there may be an improvement.

Amen to this. There’s a very few couple of good ones, but for the most part the Old guard Democrats really need to go enjoy their long overdue retirement and let some new people with new ideas and new energy carry the torch.
The old playbook isn’t working anymore. It doesn’t resonate with voters. It doesn’t address the major problems with our country.

This is why software patents were a horrible idea. We were all warned.

Still, I thought the whole objective of AV1 was to avoid any incumbrances.

Thing that bothers me is these guys are claiming to have patents over AV1.

The whole point of av1 is it supposed to be free of this bullshit.

I don’t understand. I learned in school that America is the only important country in the world.

I think this doesn’t go far enough. The problem isn’t just okcupid, problem is the data. Any company they sold face data to should be required to delete it, it should be treated as receiving stolen property that must be returned. The users of the site did not consent to have their faces shared with the database companies, so the only true redress for the users is to get those faces out of the database.

East Coast here, it’s not even midnight for another 4 minutes!

I think this is true with a lot of companies. Microsoft is a good example. Whoever is responsible for the current state of Windows 11 should be turfed as rapidly and efficiently as possible both for the good of Microsoft and to send a message that this sort of thing is not wanted anymore.

I really can’t believe this got the green light. GitHub has, or perhaps had, the trust of most of the open source world. It was used by everybody. This is so fucking short-sighted, it’s signing away your stock portfolio for a popsicle. Whatever couple bucks they get from this ad is worth absolutely nothing compared to the trust and good will they have flushed.

Would absolutely love that. Just split the two. Unknown Worlds cut loose, existing publishing agreements severed, they walk away with a developed game and their IP. Free to contract with Krafton or anyone else to distribute the game, or they could just self-publish pretty easily.

Sadly I doubt that will happen but we can always hope.

Quite true there is absolutely a place for both in all situations. And it’s why I hate absolutists who think gui’s are some sort of disease. GUIs are discoverable and intuitive, You can lay out all the options for the user so they know what they can choose and make the right choice. CLIs are powerful and scriptable, easy to automate.
Neither is bad.