Don't use genAI to approve comments, either. Only use it to flag potentially problematic comments for human review. The harm of people temporarily seeing a problematic comment is far less than the harm of removing comments that shouldn't have been removed.

For me, the first noticeable encroachment of bleakness was when we stopped having offices and started having to work in cubes.

My dad had a private office, and his secretary had one too. Both offices looked out over a lake, and were large rooms. My dad had an informal sofa area by the window, and the secretary's office was slightly less grand but still had plenty of space. He earned about the same as me inflation adjusted. His secretary obviously far less, though they both got a gold-plated final salary pension on top.

What are the chances of that happening today for anyone not in the C-suite?

I never had a private office until I started working from home. My pension comes out of my salary and all the risk of markets falling etc falls on my shoulders.

Right, as a percentage of the total employed population, the benefits of your dad's job were much more rare than yours are today. Remember how many more people were working in manufacturing and agriculture at that point. This is a flattening. I'm also betting you make significantly more dollars, inflation adjusted, then he did.

For one thing, the rich were as rich in proportion as today. That alone would need to be reversed.

Looking at the early scenes in the matrix, I think it must be nice to have a little cubicle, rather than the hot desk situation we have now

Oh, man, my sympathies.

I had a great job at a company that later switched to an open office layout. I found it so intolerable that I quit a couple of months afterwards. There's exactly zero chance that I'd accept a position where hot-desking was a thing. I can't imagine any job being worth that.

My first few white collar jobs were miserable experiences - stress, temperamental bosses, lack of agency, etc. It got better but that took years of effort, at which point I was already thinking about leanFIRE, compelled by AI (this back in 2018) and climate concerns.

You mean the 80s?

I also miss smoking my pipe in the office, surrounded by rich mahogany.

I honestly don't know what anybody means when they say "AGI". There are too many incompatible definitions floating around for it to be a useful term.

If the term means "a human-like intelligence", then I don't think it's not going to happen within my lifetime. Probably not ever, but "forever is a very long time".

Any time I have a work-related verbal discussion, I follow it up with an email that both explains what I took away from that discussion and describes any commitments made by anyone participating in the conversation.

I developed this habit decades ago, originally as a butt-covering exercise (having a written record of what I think was said can be very useful). However, the real value wasn't that at all -- instead, it was clarity. I can't even begin to count the number of times that a misunderstanding was discovered by doing this.

As a bonus, it helps me keep track of what I've promised to whom.

I couldn't agree more. Release notes like that are informationally identical to a release note that just says "New release."

I use release notes to help me decide whether not to update to the new release. I would prefer that no release note is made at all over that kind of thing. At least that's being honest about not wanting to say what the changes were.

But what if that release really only included bug fixes and speed improvements?

What bugs were fixed? What was made faster? If I was experiencing some bugs or slowness, I would be happy to see my issue may have been addressed in the release. If it says the issue was fixed, and I still see an issue, that’s a reason to send some feedback again.

> Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold.

Likely? How likely is it? I've never had a computer stolen, nor has anybody I personally know. So it doesn't seem to me like it's all that likely.

Personally, I find whole disk encryption to be more risky than it's worth. I much prefer encrypting things on a file-level instead.

OP might mean "laptop" instead of computer. Or more specifically, laptop that is regularly taken out of the home.

I'm with you. If someone wanted to steal any of my computers, they'd have to break into my house. Possible, but also statistically unlikely, as I live in a reasonably safe community and lock my doors. I don't see the benefit of full disk encryption on a bunch of computers I keep in my home. For the special case of a laptop that is frequently taken out of the home and used in public, where thieves might be? Sure, encrypt it.

I knew a guy whose laptop was stolen and it had a major companies game engine source on it - which was not open source (he had done some contract work for them).

Personally I used LUKS encryption on a system76 laptop for 7 years and it worked fine - still going in fact. I was always worried about it failing especially after an update, but that never happened.

For backups to offline media I still do use file-level encryption though.

That's why I understand businesses requiring full disk encryption on their devices and on contractor devices, because in their case they are fine with losing data as they have many copies of it elsewhere.

In a small business, I've been responsible for buying laptops for a while.

In about 300 person-years, we've had two laptops stolen. Both were stolen while the staff were on trips abroad, and the staff were both rather careless IMO.

He says this is a rant, but it isn't. It's a thoughtful criticism of a common but bad practice. But I'm very sympathetic to the criticism since this has long been on my pet peeves list.

Could be. But you can't excuse murder by saying that other people murder more.

I guess they didn't harm enough people the first time?

> As a company, we’re committed to playing an active part and constructive role in addressing these issues.

No, you're not. You're committed to shoving this stuff down our throats as much and as hard as you can get away with. You need people to use this stuff heavily because you're dying for a ROI on money already burned. That's it. Everything else is just sales and PR rhetoric.