I think it is both a partial contributor but also overstated for the reason you mentioned. The main culprits IMO are over hiring during the zero interest rate period as well as the never ending increases in the supply of CS graduates.

This is like saying that people are going to the gym with power armor, so personal trainers should dramatically increase how heavy the weights are for their clients.

If that helps the clients learn to control the power armour, and if they can later get a job as a power armour operator, then I don't see what the problem with that is?

They won't be fit to work as body builders, sure, but presumably that's not what they were going for when they strapped on the power armour.

Same as CS graduates aren't going to enter a work force that writes code by hand, and shouldn't expect to. The job market requires power armour operators, not muscle heads.

Professional programming without AI assistance is a thing of the past. Much like stablehands or squires or farriers.

You can still do it as a hobby though. You know, for fun. If you want to. It's like knitting!

In a world where trainees are sent directly from the gym to the front lines to fight in power armor against power armor-equipped opponents, they probably should.

If that was the world you lived in, would you go to the gym to learn it?

The question is, what are you trying to learn? There are still going to be problems "power armor" can't solve, like what to move where.

If you want to build strength, the gym is the right place to go. If you want to move large, heavy objects, you get a truck (or power armor, I guess).

Ideally, the people operating the large powerful vehicle are in fact trained in how to use it safely, because trucks (and power armor, and LLMs) can do a lot of damage if used incorrectly

Or that people are doing their driving tests using FSD

It really isn’t. The threat model is someone who can watch you type a sudo command, and has physical access to your computer to try to brute force combinations, or a way to access a backup of your hard drive or passwords file.

Knowing the length narrows down the search space some, but a meaningfully long password basically makes that knowledge useless, and again, it’s only useful if the approach they take is to try to physically possess your computer or obtain an encrypted backup.

A far more likely effort is going to be a spear fishing email, especially since if they have physical access to you they probably know a lot about you, and what services to spoof to get you to give them passwords, and so on.

Even weak passwords is almost a nonissue. No one gets even millions of tries against most passwords due to lockouts, whereas credential stuffing is a perpetual security nightmare.

Uniqueness is the number one thing that matters. The modal attack is a remote credential stuffing attack by someone trying millions of email/password combinations from a database.

As a general rule, if you have an adversary that cares that much you’re probably doomed.

Presumably they’re capable of buying a $5 wrench to physically use against you.

Unless they want to compromise you secretly.

Then spear Phishing is almost certainly more economical.

Or just plugging a device into your laptop while you’re not looking and stealing all your session state for browsers.

Fortunately I'm using Qubes OS, so this attack will not work.

They’d still need to have access to the device, so it shouldn’t be a problem unless other passwords are the same as your device password.

Also what demos are you doing that require sudo access to your local machine? That’s already pretty niche.

One thing to note is that pretty much every other password field shows length, and the fact that sudo is so much more paranoid reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1200/

Seriously, what does sudo even protect anymore, and when are you typing it with someone looking over your shoulder?

If you have a Linux or Mac desktop, the login password prompt has the same design choice regarding showing characters and is much more likely to actually be used in front of someone. In modern Linux development, you shouldn’t be using sudo most of the time, and on ssh machines, you shouldn’t have a sudo password.

And even if someone did see it then they’d have to get physical access to your machine. If someone has easy physical access to your machine and wishes you harm, then knowing the length of your desktop login is probably the least of your worries.

The funny thing about this is that pre modern cities featured in modern media are always surrounded by unformed grassland because it makes the shot more dramatic and it’s easier to do than showing lots of little farms growing in density up to the city walls.

Bret Deveraux linked to estimates that 70% of producing clothes is spinning, 20% is weaving, and 10% is sewing.

We tend to think of weaving as the time consuming thing but that’s because the spinning wheel had been around for a while by the time the Industrial Revolution happened.

Unfortunately, it’s not as strong a case as you’d think. One of three cases has to be true: either she was disabled and unable to work, disabled but able to fulfill job duties, or not disabled at all.

In the first case Mongo can likely fire her once FMLA is up (notice that the termination is 12 weeks after she started leave). Disabilities aren’t protected if they leave you unable to perform job duties, which is what Mongo will claim. Notice how the complaint tries to say additional leave is “reasonable accommodation”. Mongo will claim not working at all means you’re not fulfilling job duties and that she used up her FMLA.

In theory if you become unable to do your job due to disability you should get disability insurance, which is mandatory in NY, but it sounds like Prudential rejected the claim, hence the letter from the doctor there.

In the latter two cases, then Mongo will claim that she could come back to work and asking her to was not violating any ADA laws, and that they would have been willing to make e.g. scheduling accommodations for any treatments and so on to accommodate a disability that doesn’t prevent her from fulfilling core job duties.

Israel doesn’t have a plan to clean up the mess. What is the end goal here? Seriously. They’ve invaded and now what?

Options are: 1. Regime change, which I have seen no effort to attempt to effectuate 2. Withdrawal, which seems unlikely at this point. 3. Permanent occupation, which seems like the default. It may end up falling short of full genocide but it’s definitely violently upheld apartheid at a minimum.

If the third option is “cleaning up a mess” then that’s uh… pretty bad.

Israel's plan is, and has always been, to settle the whole of ethnically cleansed Palestine. Their strategy in Gaza was to promote the mess (propping up Hamas, imposing life conditions calculated to fuel anger, dismissing any long-term truce offer from Hamas) in order to have the excuse to "clean it up". Now they're in the last phase of the clean up, they just have to resist the (weak) indignation of the EU and US leaders.

If that was always the goal, how do you explain Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and removal of Jews living there?

From Wikipedia:

In October 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser, Dov Weissglass, explained the meaning of Sharon's statement further:

"The significance of the disengagement plan [from Gaza] is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. That is exactly what happened. You know, the term 'peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."

Addendum: In 2005, Israel evacuated approximately 8,000 to 9,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza. Since then, there was an increase of approximately 250,000 settlers in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) since 2005 - or roughly 28 times more than the number evacuated from Gaza.

No, I think you should reflect a bit more. If they have to sacrifice a few settlements in Gaza today to be able to create 30 times more in the West Bank tomorrow, it makes perfect sense. And, it doesn't mean at all giving up Gaza for good: in fact, soon after that, they closed Gaza under a total siege that lasted 20 years, until they found a good excuse to retake that one too.

In chess you sacrifice pieces. Only a really naive player would think "well, if he sacrificed that piece, that proves he doesn't want to win the game".

Israel’s disengagement plan was a huge topic of internal debate before being approved by the Knesset. Arguments for it were about demographics and security. I don’t recall any proponents of the plan saying that it was a temporary measure (though some argued Israel could easily regain control if required, as a backup), so that seems like a farfetched explanation.

Indeed, Wikipedia gives security challenges and demographics as the main drivers:

[WP] According to Sharon, the disengagement plan was aimed at addressing Israel's long-term security challenges by shifting the country's resources to focus on strengthening the areas that "will constitute an inseparable part of the State of Israel in any future agreement" with the Palestinians.

So this was the immediate motivation: to give up some small, expensive and challenging settlements to focus resources on occupying more land in a more important place. Notice: not an ethical argument, not a peace offer. No. "Let's use our resources to take from the same people more, better land somewhere else."

And of course Israel managed to spin this with the US in such a way that basically they got a green light to settle as much as they wanted of the West Bank.

There have always been people, in Israel, who had the long term goal of annexing the whole "Greater Israel". They might not be a majority, but that doesn't matter because they have no meaningful opposition, as most Israelis are indifferent to Palestinians and to the idea of equity and justice.

And what's happening now is clear. There's no military goal whatsoever to the ongoing flattening of the Gaza strip. The purpose is only to make the place unliveable and to kill time in wait for the final green light to the ethnic cleansing.

What they mean by "cleaning up the mess" is killing, starving or displacing all Palestinians in the Gaza strip and developing Israeli settlements while simultaneously expanding into the west bank as well.

Israel has been open with their goal - the complete and total annihilation of Hamas. So yes, option 1, regime change.