It's 2026, you should not be using command prompt (or batch.) In powershell ls is a built in alias to get-childitem and has been for years, and in recent versions of windows you'd have to go out of your way to get a command prompt (you would have to open a powershell terminal and then run cmd.)
On one our linux machine filesystem became strange, probably because somebody mistyped `ls /bin` as `ln /bin`. I think docs say hardlinking folders is impossible or maybe /bin was a symlink.
Someone was saying "can we just not with April fools" this year because everything is so grim and dire in the world... but I think this is such a perfect level we need. I could go for more whimsy like this.
This one was good. It was pretty low-stakes and not anything that would impact anyone. For a while there, companies like Google were announcing products that sounded like a good idea, but turned out were just them trolling everyone over things people had been requesting for a long time.
IMO a made up "artist conception" picture on an article like this would have been perfectly appropriate, we've seen worse (think of the whole NEOM thingy).
This article/post mashes together two different things and gets both wrong.
"The American market has not been free" because companies use call centers and friction to retain customers? That is the free market. No regulator forced Comcast to have bad hold music. They did it because it's profitable and because switching costs are real economic phenomena, not government distortion. Rent-seeking has a specific meaning in economics: capturing value through regulatory manipulation, not through being annoying to cancel. What's described here is just transaction costs. Coase wrote about this in 1937. The complaint is literally "firms optimize against consumers in an unregulated environment," which is the free market working exactly as designed.
AI as "the great equalizer." Equalizing what? AI agents that negotiate on your behalf get countered by AI agents that negotiate against you. The asymmetry doesn't vanish, it escalates. The company still has more compute budget, more training data on customer behavior, and more incentive to invest in adversarial optimization than you do. You get a chatbot. They get an enterprise deployment tuned on millions of interactions. The gap widens.
China "wants AI as a public utility" is doing enormous work with zero evidence. China wants semiconductor independence and geopolitical leverage. Qwen is open-weight because Alibaba wants cloud customers, not because the CCP is running a charity. Commoditizing the model layer serves Chinese hardware and cloud interests exactly the way the post itself explains ("commoditize your complement") then inexplicably frames as altruism.
The punchline the post avoids: every historical example of "friction removal" at scale (Uber, Airbnb, Amazon) concentrated wealth upward, not downward. The middlemen died, the platform owners became billionaires, and consumers got cheaper goods produced by worse labor conditions. No mechanism is proposed here that changes that outcome. "An AI on a box under my desk" doesn't redistribute anything. It just means the rent extraction happens at a layer you can't see yet.
Rooting for the collapse of the US economy as a feature rather than a bug is a take that only lands if you already have enough money to survive one.
> This is why I have always said, that a degree in CS is useless without some degree of passion towards it.
I would add I don't know how anyone can do any degree and career without some sort of passion for it.
For me personally, not only do I need passion but I have to have some sort of belief in the product and/or company I'm working for. In the early 00's I worked at a company, not software related nor was I working as a developer, and didn't like what I was doing nor did I believe in the product, it was lacking in so many areas where they were trying to frame it fit in the product market. I left after 3 years and did something completely different.
The appalling thing about Spotify DJ/Radio is that it starts playing songs that cost them less to play, and intentionally leaves out songs that cost more. Regardless of what input you give it, it will fall back to the same slop for each subgenre.
Then I'm reminded that it's not a know file or directory.
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