boner confessor posted:

self driving cars have been operating without a safety driver since the early nineties. "it's just a few years away!" is something people have been saying for decades. when waymo is actually on the verge of putting a product to market, then it's safe to believe the technology is mature. as of yet the link you posted is just another marketing release

Detective No. 27 posted:

I am very ignorant about self driving cars. What does the driver actually do when the car is self driving? I assume it isn't a lisence to sit on your phone and text/read the news the entire drive.

fishmech posted:

It really seems like the ongoing existence of Chrome OS is tied into some executive not wanting to give up a fiefdom, as I said before it should have been folded into the Android umbrella long ago.

quote:

In 2016, mobile devices running Alphabet Inc's Google’s Chrome operating system accounted for 58 percent of the U.S. market for primary and secondary schools, according to Futuresource Consulting.

Less Fat Luke posted:

Bye Richard, thanks for the GPL but you've overstayed your welcome by a couple of decades:

https://twitter.com/jason_koebler/status/1173752412169023488

WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:

Uber should detect the type of phone you have and charge you more.

That sentence is gonna be my entire resume when i apply uber

fishmech posted:

Ugh, no, that's entirely irrelevant to why it won't happen.

It won't happen because it simply costs too much for the "game service provider" or however you want to call a company doing the game streaming shtick.

fishmech posted:

I'm noticing how you are pretending the massive latency issues aren't relevant. Why is that?

They can own all the fiber they want, it won't actually solve the fact that these things can't reach console penetration considering how there's way fewer people with viable connections to have the least issue from the latency.

There Bias Two posted:

I did the beta test for Assassin's Creed Odyssey on Stadia and it worked pretty flawlessly. It was really nice playing a game at full settings on my PC without taxing my hardware in the slightest. The tech really does seem to work well, despite the lovely business model.

luxury handset posted:

personally, i believe i am winning this argument, because, in my mind, i am attributing emotional states such as anger and distress, which are inferior, to all of my opponents

Owling Howl posted:

Not hearing a lot about VR these days. Did it manage to carve out a niche this time or was it just a wet fart?

OhFunny posted:

https://twitter.com/SkyNewsBreak/status/1198904732267319296?s=19

Uber's lost its license to operate in London again.

Kaal posted:

These games always mystified me. Either the advertising-based pots are so low or so random that most players never see a dime, or they need to be subscription-based and are effectively a new way of gambling. Otherwise you're just giving away money.

Doggles posted:

Other than its occupant is an important distinction. While a self-driving Uber killed a pedestrian, don't forget that Teslas have killed two of their drivers in separate occasions because their "autopilot" system can't see white semi-trucks when it's cloudy.

enraged_camel posted:

Any thoughts on the merits of the lawsuit?

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Kind of hosed up that news sites (and newspapers) get away with re-reporting other people's stories. Here's the original, the Verge don't deserve clicks for this.

The Verge posted:

Yesterday, Ranjan Roy, a content strategist and writer, wrote about the latter in his newsletter The Margins; one of his friends who owns a few pizza restaurants....

enraged_camel posted:

That came up in several places and it is totally fine. A ton of companies (not just tech) apply cost-of-living adjustments to salary based on employee's location. In this particular case that is a very good thing, because the last thing America needs is a bunch of techbros who make $300k move to cheaper towns, gentrify the gently caress out of them and make the cost of everything skyrocket.

Cicero posted:

Right, these are the same thing.

But the real problem with gentrification there is just zoning + lack of public housing. If that was fixed it'd be much, much less of an issue.

evilweasel posted:

Nobody lives in those hellholes for a reason.

poemdexter posted:

Does FB even have a labor union? Would the techbros even join it? All I can find online is stories about the cafeteria workers unionizing efforts.

Cicero posted:

I work at Google so I'm well aware of that stuff, that still sounds low to me.

Though, you might want to clear up whether you mean "engineers" or "in engineering", as you used both terms before, and those aren't the same thing. UX designers and engineering managers and PM's are not engineers, but they're usually in the engineering org.

Desiderata posted:

My experience is that Project Managers, UX ideation designers, and various Agile Delivery Jira shufflers and similar software hangers on are the most the most tech bro of tech bros as they both get to be full time "idea guys in the digital space", without the rigour of having to actually do anything involving code or complex problem solving themselves. They also get to spend all day jockeying for promotion, and creating laughable sub-Ted 'innovation' talks and generating terrible unworkable projects because they have so much more free time compared the engineers who are too busy making their last dumb project work.

That's just my annecdotal experience though.

Tarezax posted:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergei...gative-balance/

tl;dr 20-year-old college kid kills himself after Robinhood shows (erroneously) that he's $730,000 in debt

Senor Tron posted:

Really it's pretty lucky that whoever did this only tried to pull off a pretty obvious Bitcoin scam. Something more sophisticated and organised could have had really big repercussions.

WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:

loving lol so do I pay and get a bigger character limit? Or maybe a red check mark instead of a blue one?


Oo can I change my Twitter gender for $25?

FilthyImp posted:

Ugh great, like we needed a bunch of Riche Techbros loving housing prices even more.

Cicero posted:

For Google at least, my bet is that they'll end up following the policy they already for in-US relocations before the pandemic, where there are salary adjustments based on the local market, but they're not huge adjustments. Going from the bay area to a much cheaper location, you're probably only looking at a 10-15% pay cut.

Shugojin posted:

Saying remote workers are less productive is more of a reflection on the managers' distrust of their own employees if they aren't allowed to stand over someone's literal shoulder imo

Groovelord Neato posted:

You know generally speaking American wages/salaries are like a 1/3 of what they should be right?

gonger posted:

In the world of big tech hiring, compensation is mostly driven by supply and demand within the labor market for a given role. In other words, the value of your output is only good for establishing the upper bound of your role's pay band - they aren't going to set compensation higher than the value of output because that'd mean losing money. Individual compensation is mostly driven by "how hard is it to hire somebody capable of filling this role and how much money do we have to offer to be attractive vs. other potential employers?"

It's pretty hosed, but it's how they think about it. This is from personal experience, 8 years at a FAANG and 3 years at a unicorn gone public, with 2 years of experience as an engineering manager in charge of hiring for my team. All the numbers and policies are set by financial departments, hiring managers only have a small amount of wiggle room.

blunt posted:

blunt posted:

Of course this supposes that any of these companies (or America) actually operate under capitalism as opposed to the weird neo-oligarchy they've become.

Doggles posted:

https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1289385727180935168

quote:

Microsoft Corp. is exploring an acquisition of TikTok’s operations in the U.S., according to a people familiar with the matter. A deal would give the software company a popular social-media service and relieve U.S. government pressure on the Chinese owner of the video-sharing app.

The Trump administration has been weighing whether to direct China-based ByteDance Ltd. to divest its stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations, according to several people familiar with the issue. The U.S. has been investigating potential national security risks due to the Chinese company’s control of the app.

While the administration was prepared to announce an order as soon as Friday, according to three people familiar with the matter, another person said later that the decision was on hold, pending further review by President Donald Trump. All of the people asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.

Spokespeople for Microsoft and TikTok declined to comment on any potential talks. The software company’s interest in the app was reported earlier by Fox Business Network.

Trump on Friday night said he would ban TikTok from the U.S., and had the authority to do so by executive order or under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He was signing the document on Saturday, he said.

“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” the president told reporters. Asked when it would happen, he said: “Soon, immediately. I mean essentially immediately.”

Earlier in the day, he said that “we are looking at a lot of alternatives with respect to TikTok.”

Any transaction could face regulatory hurdles. ByteDance bought Musical.ly Inc. in 2017 and merged it with TikTok, creating a social-media hit in the U.S -- the first Chinese app to make such inroads. As TikTok became more popular, U.S. officials grew concerned about the potential for the Chinese government to use the app to gain data on U.S. citizens.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. began a review in 2019 of the Musical.ly purchase. In recent years, CFIUS, which investigates overseas acquisitions of U.S. businesses, has taken a much more aggressive role in reviewing and approving deals that may threaten national security. It can recommend that the president block or unwind transactions.

It’s also possible that other potential buyers could come forward, said another person familiar with the discussions. Microsoft’s industry peers -- Facebook Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. -- fit the profile of potential suitors, though all are under antitrust scrutiny from U.S. regulators, which would likely complicate a deal.

A purchase of TikTok would represent a huge coup for Microsoft, which would gain a popular consumer app that has won over young people with a steady diet of dance videos, lip-syncing clips and viral memes. The company has dabbled in social-media investments in the past, but hasn’t developed a popular service of its own in the lucrative sector. Microsoft acquired the LinkedIn job-hunting and corporate networking company for $26.2 billion in 2016.

Microsoft can point to one acquisition that came with a massive existing community of users that has increased under its ownership -- the 2014 deal for Minecraft, the best-selling video game ever.

Other purchases of popular services have gone less well. The 2011 pickup of Skype led to several years of stagnation for the voice-calling service and Microsoft fell behind newer products in the category. Outside of Xbox, the company hasn’t focused on younger consumers. A TikTok deal could change that, though, and give Microsoft “a crown jewel on the consumer social media front,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note to investors Friday.

TikTok has repeatedly rejected accusations that it feeds user data to China or is beholden to Beijing, even though ByteDance is based there. TikTok now has a U.S.-based chief executive officer and ByteDance has considered making other organizational changes to satisfy U.S. authorities.

“Hundreds of millions of people come to TikTok for entertainment and connection, including our community of creators and artists who are building livelihoods from the platform,” a TikTok spokeswoman said Friday. “We’re motivated by their passion and creativity, and committed to protecting their privacy and safety as we continue working to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform.”

The mechanics of separating the TikTok app in the U.S. from the rest of its operations won’t come without complications. Unlike many tech companies in the U.S. where engineers for, say, Google, work on particular products like YouTube or Google Maps, many of ByteDance’s engineers work across its different platforms and services and continue to work on TikTok globally.

Read more: TikTok Mulls Changes to Business to Distance Itself From China

On Thursday, U.S. Senators Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, wrote the Justice Department asking for an investigation of whether TikTok has violated the constitutional rights of Americans by sharing private information with the Chinese government.

A deal with Microsoft could potentially help extract ByteDance from the political war between the U.S. and China.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, applauded the idea of a TikTok sale. “In its current form, TikTok represents a potential threat to personal privacy and our national security,” Rubio said in a statement. “We must do more than simply remove ByteDance from the equation. Moving forward, we must establish a framework of standards that must be met before a high-risk, foreign-based app is allowed to operate on American telecommunications networks and devices.”