I thought that PDF was some sort of open standard.

I went for a job in AI in the late 1980s and realised from the bonkers spin of the company founders that it really wasn't the 5 to 10 years away as I was being told. I went looking something that was going to deliver a result.

I came back to it maybe 6 years ago when while on the bench at a consultancy. I got into trying to do various Kaggle challenges. Then the boss got the bug and wanted to predict the answers to weird spurious money-making questions. I tried but even when there was good data, I didn't know how to do better anyone else. When there wasn't good data it just produced complete shit.

Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI built in. And it's really good. When you don't know your way around something or you've got stuck it really gets you moving again. Yeah, if it regurgitates a stupid negative example from the documentation as if it is "the way to do it", you just ignore it because you have already read that.

Now, every week I'm subjected to lectures by people who don't know how to code about how productive AI is going to make me. Working in the financial sector every Californian pipe dream seems to be an imperative, but all must verified by an adult. My IDE tries to insert all sorts of crap into my production code as I type, and then I'm supposed to be allow it to generate my unit tests.

I know it will get better, but will it be another 5 to 10 years?

Are we 80% of the way there yet?

As tech become available to help reduce your costs and drive up your profit, the same tech also reduces your competitor's costs and perhaps lets more competitors into the market. This drives down your product prices and reduces your profit.

So you invest but see no increase in productivity, but if you don't do it - you're toast.

The article describes Thomas-Johnson as a "student activist and journalist" and "whose work has appeared in outlets including Al Jazeera and The Guardian".

Are you saying that there is evidence elsewhere that he is part of some terrorist organisation? Hey wait a sec, perhaps you are confusing "Al Jazeera" with "Al Qaeda". You know Google is your friend - oh wait...

Damn. I forgot to read the article.

> DIY Phone

> Use the Comet and the Linux stack for calling*, messaging and mobile data as an alternate to your walled and closed smartphone. Contribute to the Linux ecosystem for mobiles.

So I guess this means it can, but it's not supported and you need to contribute the software. So perhaps it has the hardware, and perhaps it might work.

If you are in Iran - keep your head down.

So if posts were marked with the country of origin or VPN, that might be enough for most people to evaluate the intent of the post.

Of course things have changed. There might not be so many IPv4 addresses around to trade, but IPv6 has probably changed that. And it's probably hard to know how long an address was used by a VPN before being traded back to a telco.

Perhaps they mean to influence Iranians who activity circumvent internet restrictions :-)

> ... See you after the break.

brief pause

> And we're back ...

Unfortunately, most ads are now burnt in. The 10 second advance will skip through them, but as it's usually the host parroting the ad text and it's easy to over shoot.

In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).

As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.

I'm sure I've previously heard it implied that all the grooms who lost their jobs to motor cars became mechanics and chauffeurs. Surely this would be just too poetic.

Are you suggesting that Brenda should stay in her box?