It seems like every other top level reply in this thread is people poking holes in it based on their personal speculation about the details.

I can’t get over people saying “any day now bro, just give it a month” to shut down any kind of nuanced discussion on the topic, or to downplay the fact that damage is already happening today

That’s not what the claim was though, was it. Someone said Excel also mangles files and your counter seems to be that no it doesn’t because you’ve got users who use it. But the one thing does not automatically follow from the other.

SOURCE: Sysadmin for several companies,

So, not actually an Excel power user then.

To anyone thinking “LibreOffice still has issues”, here’s the LibreOffice donation page to help them fix it up and be rid of MS Office forever.

companies whose global revenues exceed €750 million, effectively targeting larger U.S. tech companies

For me the brass-neckedness of this is that as soon as it comes to tax, all the big “U.S.” companies are actually Irish, Bermudan and Caymanian companies.

Generally (for most countries that do this, I haven’t researched Poland) the point is that traditional (non-digital) companies have always paid import duties, usually much higher than 3%, when goods are physically imported. Digital goods by their nature have effectively been skirting the system for a few decades and paying zero tax, and it’s not good for local businesses to be in a situation where they’re paying a bunch of taxes locally but foreign businesses competing in the same market get to just skip it.

The $750M requirement is likely because the amount of paperwork required for a small business to correctly calculate, process and pay that tax would be prohibitively expensive for them to sell their service to Polish customers, and they don’t want a situation where small businesses just straight up refuse to sell in Poland.

I’ll raise you

iOS is still worse, because you’re then confined to whatever is in the App Store, which Apple take a 30% cut of.

For the benefit of those reacting based on the headline and one-sentence summary, yes it’s a pain, I agree with the mob that it should be the user’s choice what they install, BUT, the headline is badly written, in that it implies that the app itself has to be verified, and also many commenters seem to have also inferred that it means an Apple walled-garden style Play Store lock-in which also isn’t the case. (a better headline might have been “sideloading of Android apps from unverified publishers”)

You can still publish and run apps from outside of the Play Store, but publishers will need to get a verified key from Google to sign them with. Google don’t have any visibility of what the app actually is, they just issue you a key and you do whatever you want with it.

(EDIT: fuck me, don’t shoot the messenger, just because you don’t like what Google is doing. I even opened by saying I agreed that the user should be able to choose, knowing full well that the sort of person who doesn’t read past the headline also would interpret correcting it as a defense of Google… guess I’d have been better off just quietly leaving y’all to get angry over things that didn’t actually happen)

also, dentistry is more accessible in the UK; free treatment is available to a bigger chunk of the population, and private dental care is cheaper as well.

So, in terms of severe complications stemming from lack of dental care, the US is worse, but the obsession with straightening & whitening means that people who have got it together enough to appear in the media generally have superficially nicer teeth.

It’s like most things in America - if you’re doing ok then it’s great, and if you’re not then the rest of the country just pretends you don’t exist.

Before Google came along, most search engines were manually curated. I’m disappointed that nobody’s had any success bringing that concept back. They always cave in and take the cheap route by trying to make the general public & algorithms rate things, which of course instantly gets gamed to uselessness.

Sure but (and this goes to the other person who replied with much the same thing) there’s an order of magnitude of difference going on there, plus usually when someone says something wrong on a forum others usually show up to correct them.

AI responses have so far been very clearly a step down in reliability, so don’t be treating it as a binary.

Let’s say I scraped a guide you wrote about something you spent a lot of time researching, and then republished it as a Kindle eBook for $5 with my name listed as the author, whilst at the same time the site you posted it to went bust due to losing all its traffic to Google’s AI summaries. Would you consider it petty to object? After all, I’m increasing its audience for you.

Written grammatically correct English you are, which what LLMs thrive on is.

At least A.I might preserve some knowledge.

Big oof when you realize that literally nothing an AI tells you can be trusted, and you still have to find a proper source for it.

Yeah. The vinegar is rich in hydrocarbons, which improve the fuel/air ratio during combustion whilst also keeping the engine smelling nice.

Even if it’s not malicious, it’s still a case of a company sitting on more cash reserves than most small countries, and just choosing not to do better on their moderation systems.

Same here. It’s popular to rag on leetcode-style technical interviews, and yet it’s astonishing how many CS grads with 3 years experience we get in who can’t seem to get through even the most basic “reverse this array”, “find the longest substring” type questions in the language they claim to be strongest in.

People sign up for CS degrees because they see high salaries, but don’t realize those salaries are for the high achievers who have been coding since the age of 10 and are writing code for fun in the evenings as well. Then they flood the market, only to discover that no companies have need of someone who cheesed their way through college, have never written more than a few hundred lines of code their whole life, and have no useful skills to offer.

I’m probably going to cop a few downvotes for this, but in my whole career the only software engineers I ever met who were worth a damn were people who loved it for its own sake, and would be doing it regardless. So, if your feelings about the field are such that you’re thinking you might be better off doing a trade, you’d definitely be better off doing a trade.

Good luck either way.