There's a Twitter rumor that deepmind achieved RSI very recently.

Either way, to count Google out entirely is really foolish.

Or the entirety of China. People forget that progress is incremental until it's not. Then some revolutionary insight or capability comes along that disrupts the whole field or market.

Yes, labs with more (human) resources may have a bigger chance at being the first to gain and implement such an insight, but it's not a given that they will.

Money equals power. If you have the wealth you have the control. Any politicians are owned by you as you simply threaten to buy their opponent. The public can be brainwashed by a trillion dollar advertising industry. You own the platforms everyone communicates on. You have inprecented resources to bend the world to your will and your only competiton is other people equally wealthy.

Yes.

Other plumbers

And electricians, and carpenters, and masons, and Water Dept. employees, and ...

A buck per?

You could just buy cartons of cigarettes and chop off the butts, at that rate.

And for the illogical conclusion: buy factory equipment to make just the butts to minimise your running costs and limit supply chain dependency.

I joke, but this is surely what would eventuate.

There was a line in Discworld about some people in Ankh Morpork taking to breeding rats to collect the rat catching fee.

> There was a line in Discworld about some people in Ankh Morpork taking to breeding rats to collect the rat catching fee.

That is maybe based on Hanoi rat massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre

And there I was, honestly thinking Terry Pratchett had come up with it all on his own.

Thanks!

"Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome."

Pixel 9a, Firefox.

Never even imagined I would have a problem. HN is my "is the internet working?" check.

The few technical blogs I posted, that's exactly what I imagined -- some guy would have the same problem, find my blog, and I'd save him and his company a day or two of work.

And now they're making money on it, and that sits really well with me.

but that some guy was reading your blog, so you were building a reputation and maybe a personal brand or position of authority on some subjects.

now, it's like you are working for free for gen-AI companies.

No, I wasn't building a reputation. My blog was pseudo-anonymous.

I was working for free already, when I posted the things.

You seem to be talking about users. They're talking about creators.

I don't think users know who DHH is, or care who DHH is. Probably like 0.01% of users have read a blog post, let alone a political one. (Maybe they all are, I haven't read any)

Disagree there; anyone who installs Omarchy does it because a social media creator they like suggested it, and there’s only a few degrees of separation between those creators. This isn’t like Slackware’s popularity in the 90s, peer to peer, this all top-down. I’d call it hype-driven, if they didnt have a neat product (which I’m not a customer of).

Also have to disagree with you there... there are other ways to find out about distros besides social media or people suggesting it. Back in the day, one of the only ways people even found out about new distros was through sites like Distrowatch who just reported on the facts of the distros and never tried to market them to people.

Exactly. I mostly read about distros right here in the comments.

I had no idea DHH was political. I don't follow Linux YouTubers, why would I?

It still feels like they are supporting a notorious neofascist.

Mostly you install steam, install game from inside steam, and it just works with nothing further.

A far cry from 15 years ago.

Legally, I agree.

Morally, I think it's totally wild to care if some totally unrelated real world thing gets named after a twenty+ year old cultural icon of a TV show as an homage.

They're attempting to profit off their business. The office thing is a theme.

I can’t imagine having so little empathy that you can’t put yourself in the shoes of the creator of the IP. They didn’t even bother to tweak the characters. It’s not “inspired by” or riffing on a theme, it’s a straight ripoff being used to market some AI product. Do you think anyone who created The Office would want to be associated with AI, something that’s threatening to drive them out of a job?

What pisses me off the most is it’s just so damn lazy.

No man, if it's a "straight ripoff", it would be a TV show.

Not an programming application.

Right, because a Temu backpack with Darth Vader on it isn’t ripping off Star Wars either

And not everyone on the internet is a man

Honestly, making Ricky Gervais upset might be the most redeeming thing in this product.

The HHS secretary during that time wasn't RFK, it was Xavier Becerra.