Anyone here have data on whether the likes of gitlab have been impacted in the same was as github?

I don't want to start too much of an off-topic thread within an already off-topic thread, but this isn't a particularly charitable reading. The article itself is mostly laying out information around data centres' resource usage with little prediction for how things would play out. I think statements like:

> The water footprint is equivalent to the minimum annual domestic water needs of roughly 500,000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa

Are clearly just intended as illustrative, rather than a claim that 500,000 people in Sub-Sarah Africa will go without water as a result of AI data centres.

I think the articles head isn't particular good, but it's a fairly moderate take and it's closing message isn't an "AI dooms natural resources" one at all:

> AI within planetary limits is achievable. The report’s central argument is constructive. Capability and stewardship can grow together, but only with measurement, transparency, and shared responsibility across the ecosystem.

At any rate, I definitely don't see any reason this article should be flagged? There's obviously criticisms you can make of it, but that's true of almost any opinion piece that finds itself on the front page here.

Demis Hassabis and Google's Deep Mind are all British in terms of location/talent, but they certainly aren't from a coorporate perspective (Deep Mind work might happen in London, but it is owned by Google, as US company)

(I don't know a lot about nuclear/aerospace industries, I'm guessing there more location centered just in virtue of being based around physical things, but I could be wrong)

The tricky bit I think though, is deciding what actually is boring, since really we should factor complexity in too.

I work a lot with data in python, for in memory data, the most popular choices are:

- pandas - pyspark - polars

Pandas is the most established, although has a lot of technical limitations, as well as complexities.

Pyspark is definitely an "industry standard" choice, but now you're dealing with distributed computing when you probably didn't need too.

Polars is the simplest in terms of API and not being distributed, but then is the newest.

I can easily imagine a discussion where three engineers all agree that they should choose the "most boring" tech, but all choose a different option.

Do other people have more notifications enabled? More friends messaging them? Or just a lower threshold for what counts as too many?

My personal favourite:

> Before the industrial revolution, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose.

Over a long enough time span, the industrial revolution has certainly improved living standards but the industrial revolution itself was l, for many, an absolutely horrific time to live. Life expectancies in cities plumetted and we saw the birth of workhouses.

It's such an odd example to choose for trying to suggest "technology x will help everyone in a non-complicated way". He might as well have picked the atomic bomb.

- C: Users often praise the simplicity of the language

- C++: Users often praise (not always praise?) the large feature set for a low level language

- Python: Folks talk a lot about "batteries included". Although in all honesty, I think having good interaction with other low-level languages is Python's secret feature.

- Java: Really leans in hard to object oriented programming

- JavaScript: Haha, you have to use it!

Not sure I'm really disagreeing with you though, but I think Java promoted its portability much more than it's ever been used (obviously there are cases like Spark which uses the JVM portability).

I agree, I think those things are definitely worthwhile learning. But I don't think that it follows we should test for them in interviews.

It sounds like you've done some pretty impressive work around graph algorithms, but if a job doesn't need you to do this, testing for it is a little silly. (If it's a criteria you're explicitly hiring for, I think that's clearly different)

The example I've heard given is accounting and spreadsheets. It made accountancy cheaper, but people then started asking more questions and analysis became a thing.

Rather than just taking the reduced spend as profit, companies wound up increasing their accountancy spend overall.

You were able to demonstrate that you were enthusiastic and knowledge about programming as a whole, which is probably more helpful than what they were originally trying to test for.

It's partly that refactors themselves have benefits, but I think more that the benefits to refactoring aren't visible to something like product-owners, feature tickets, etc.

If teams are refactoring to ensure the health of the overall software, it's a tell-tale sign that developers are happy making recommendations for good software, and that those recommendations are being taken seriously.

I think Martin Folwer might have actually coined the term "software rot" - either way, as an issue it happens most severely when a team either aren't motivated or empowered to build their vision of high quality software. When a team can follow their judgement of excellence, that's usually a great sign!

(and yes, obviously this can go to far, there are probably some teams who rewrote all their stuff in Ruby then Node then Rust and now something else to be "agent native", but in the coorporate world, I see a lot less of this than teams who just don't feel like they have permission to improve things)

I'm not sure, I'd say two things:

- I think "mere difference of opinion" suggests disagreements can't be on serious issues, as if there's something trivial about "x things racism is acceptable a y doesn't". I don't know that I'd agree? Differences in opinion can be on major issues and are important. - Pushing to invade and annex countries is a real thing, which I said in my comment above, I don't know that interferences like Vance in Hungary are pushing to invade countries though? Other things the US doss might be, but I'm not sure it comes into play here?

I think the first part of this is political alignment right? What are "fascist and extremist political parties" is not politics with a very different alignment?

I think your second point is a really good one though, the Barack Obama and J D Vance examples are both soft power usage. But in the case of Vance, it comes alongside a state using military force to bully its way through issues, that's a very significant context difference I didn't really acknowledge earlier.

I think the real difference now, isn't so much that the US is applying more pressure on european politics, but that it's politics is so much further away from most european countries than even five years ago.

The importance of trading blocks (as in Obama's example) is a pretty standard view. The support for antidemocratic strongmen (with Vance's support of Orban) is a lot less, even now.

There's some winners though, people dumping AI stocks are mostly buying stocks elsewhere, Apple being an obvious winner[0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/28/apple-sec...

I don't really use youtube natively a lot anymore, but I used to with Google's "personalised ads" turned off. I don't know if you've tried that, but the ads Google serves you if you opt out of personalised adds are sketchy, creepy and mostly not child appropriate (a lot of medical stuff, plus adverts for mail order brides etc). Back then I opted in to personalised ads because being tracked seemed a better option to me than being served inappropriate material without my consent.

Anyway, that's a long rant, but my point is, there's edge-cases and weird contexts in which I can imagine people saying something like "of the options I see as likely to happen, I'd most like to be tracked".