They'll be lucky to get C student, recent college graduates, useless air thieves to apply. Apparently, just like in India.
I don't even work for companies that use Infosys, let alone work for Infosys directly. I'm not opposed to using consultants, but Infosys, Tata, and WiPro are blacklisted for me. I find it hard to believe I would have executive level buy in to create quality enterprise software systems if they are already willing to use these companies. For a while I just used this as a red flag to investigate the company further, but after consistently being disappointed with what I found I just treat the usage of these outsourcing shops as a complete deal breaker.
I am a big fan of the idea of the H1B program and believe immigrants are the primary thing which has made and continues to make our country great, but companies like Infosys are a blight on our society with no redeeming value I can see.
Even if the technology were ready right now at this moment, adapting it to replace half of all jobs would still take more than ten years.
While I agree with his general message about AI disruption, you are absolutely correct that his ten year prediction is ridiculous. A loss of perhaps 10% of jobs within 10 years may be more realistic, but it is quite obvious this VC's statements are just intending to grab headlines.
Most humans, especially Americans, already hate automated service of any kind. Being served by an actual human is a luxury that American consumers are not willing to pay for.
FTFY
Given time I'm sure you could find thousands of examples of automated and mass production products and services which are not as good as labor intensive alternatives. From furniture to food to customer services. In each case customers certainly prefer the human touch, but in nearly every case they are unwilling to pay for it. They may say they are willing to pay more on customer surveys, but that rarely materializes into actual sales.
Also in this case, automated voice answering systems are just one small part of the upcoming AI overhaul. Online self service is a far more likely channel for these changes. There can certainly still be some human operators for difficult to solve cases, but even a replacement of just half of a service department's staff is a significant job loss.
as service jobs are proving much harder to automate than the manufacturing jobs that disappeared a few decades ago
But just like pirating music is much easier than creating counterfeit CDs, the automation of services jobs will be nearly effortless compared to what it took to automate manufacturing jobs. No need to buy millions of dollars of robotics equipment, just add the service-bot module to your Salesforce subscription and 90% of your service team can be let go. It is obviously more difficult to create this level of AI than it was to create manufacturing robots, or else we would have had them a few decades ago as well. But once we do have them the disruption will be an order of magnitude faster.
The way things are going now with speech and visual pattern recognition, there are numerous industries which could see this level of disruption in a decade or two.
The situation is not quite similar. Aerodynamics proved that heavier-then-air vehicles would be able to fly due to the effect of lift. So there was theoretical proof, making the actual building of the plane a 'mere' engineering effort.
We also have proved human level intelligence can exist because our species exists. Once again, the situation is nearly identical.
Pretty sure the parent was saying Facebook would ignore the lies of Democrats as this whole "fake news" thing is mainly a left-wing censorship campaign.
I'm also pretty sure you are correct about his intentions, but considering that is an absurd opinion I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah. One thing I was wondering - does this mean that they'll become an online arm of the 'RESIST' movement, or does it mean that they'll stand up to actual international thuggish regimes, like North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pali Authority, et al?
We could get the best of both worlds and have it be all of the above.
If degrees are so meaningless, why did you bother getting a "Bsc in Math and Post-grad in Computer Sci" later on?
I think that, whatever your answer, it proves that there is a good reason for them.
His answer to that question can be found in the title of his post: the obsession with degrees in the society. My career path was similar, where I started working with no degree and then received a BS/MS after about 10 years in. I learned nearly nothing in the BS, and barely anything for my MS (my thesis research project was a good experience), but those degrees had a big impact on my career. Not because of what I learned but because they check off boxes for HR and for hiring managers who like their software managers / architects to have MS degrees. I have found in the financial industry, which pays quite well, they find those things important.
But I did not go to a great school for my BS, and the MS program was at a school currently ranked #73 nationally, so it's very likely a degree from a more prestigious university would be useful even to those who learn well independently.
But really the most absurd thing here in this entire discussions is that people like you talk without having a clue and not even knowing the law, not understanding when it's applicable, not understanding why it was created, and yet criticizing it.
That is a lot of assumptions there buddy. It must be tough to get your head so far up your ass while on your high horse.
Anyone can call themselves an engineer. They just cannot claim to be a licensed civil engineer in Oregon. That is the law. There are plenty of engineering professions which do not require licensing in the first place. Go ahead and Google this case, and instead of finding numerous news articles citing experts defending Oregon you will find a unanimous voice calling the law suit groundless.
If you claim you're a doctor and you're not then you can get in trouble. That's not idiocy, it's protecting the expectation of a profession.
I can claim I'm a doctor if I have a doctorate degree. In fact I will declare myself Doctor of the Obvious, and therefore qualified to point out the absurdity of your post. I perhaps cannot claim to a medical doctor licensed to practice medicine in my state when about to perform a medical procedure, but I can certainly call myself a doctor. It is all about context.
Same goes for being an engineer. This is such a ridiculous application of law I am surprised Slashdot is a large enough sample size to even find a single post defending their position.
Capitalism will work better if sellers are forbidden to discriminate among buyers. It would be even better if buyers were forbidden to distinguish among sellers
First off, you are confusing capitalism with a free market. They explain different aspects of the economy.
That said, you then created a straw-man argument by providing what you consider a perfect free market and then shooing down why it is not economically realistic. I made no claim that a perfect free market is an achievable or even desirable situation. I merely provided a quid-pro-quo pithy aphorism to highlight different techniques each side of any economic exchange uses. If buyers want to take advantage of quick and easy access to price comparisons, they are hypocritical to also complain when sellers take advantage of similarly available information to perform price discrimination.
I'm confused. Exactly how does my asking another store for their price on a product somehow make it okay for a single store to charge different prices to different people for the exact same product?
If it helps to use an analogy, take offense and defense in any sport (sport may be a poor choice in Slashdot, but its the first that came to mind). Offense and defense and the rules which govern each both exist to create a competitive balance within the sport, but the techniques and rules used by each are almost always quite different. For instance if a linebacker tackles someone it is okay, but if an offensive lineman does the same it is a holding penalty.
Maintaining competitive balance does not mean everyone plays by the exact same rules. Each side plays by whatever rules are deemed necessary to maintain competitive balance.
In the case of a seller and buyer relationship, both sides are trying to maximize the value they extract from each sale. Buyers comparison shop, and sellers price discriminate. They are different tactics which are both used to level the playing field.
When you give up your right to check the Internet to find out what their competitors are shopping then I'll agree we should fight their ability to investigate you when setting pricing.
Nah. It's quite easy to ignore how we treat old and sick people, too. So what you're suggesting is we'll end up with a system that sure is good for people who have small illnesses (take an antibiotic, sleep a few days), but the truly sick might have several month delays in getting care.
Not really. There are slightly sick and truly sick, young and old, etc VA members too, so the order of magnitude difference between the VA and a universal single payer system still hold.
The only thing we know for sure is that on a global scale single payer systems perform better. On a dollar for dollar basis the difference is even more drastic, with single payer systems being an order of magnitude better than our system. We have worse health care outcomes than most OECD countries, but spend more than double per capita. We can quibble about why the VA has been mismanaged, but there is no honest debate about whether single payer systems have outperformed our system in nearly every metric (they have).
So what's different? Why is it so great in some countries, whereas the single-payer systems that exist in America (like the VHA) are so problematic? I think healthcare is just a hard problem.
Visibility. It is quite easy for most of the population to just ignore how we treat our vets. There are less than 10 million VA enrolled veterans which is only around 3% of the population. And veterans are not spread evenly throughout all socio-economic groups, so many more affluent groups are quite separated from groups where veterans are more common.
This makes it much easier for problems to go unnoticed. If 350 million people were being serviced by a VA like organization, there would be far more pressure to improve.
If CEO's were actually replaced with robots, it would be because the "old boy's network" has been transitioned to a network of AI executives. The hardest thing to replace about executives is their existing network of contacts. Their decision making could be transitioned to machines, but they lose the ability to sidestep regulations, waiting queues, red tape, or whatever by calling their old Harvard college buddy. I work in the financial industry now, and just two weeks was in a meeting where the IRS was holding us up and we had to go to our CFO. It wasn't his knowledge which removed our problem, it was an old coworker who is now claiming we are at the top of the queue (we shall see). This happens quite frequently.
What will really make AI CEOs take over is when they start disliking working with companies not run by AI. Once they feel a meat bag cannot be trusted as a business partner, human CEOs are toast.
The most popular distribution of the most popular OS kernel is wrapped in a tightly controlled ecosystem in which everything you can do, which by default isn't much, is tracked and logged.
What percentage of operating systems in the world are running in an open and "free" environment as per FSF definition? Less than a fraction of a percentage? How can you consider that winning?
AmiJoJo is mostly referring to servers running Linux, not consumer devices. Either that or he/she is just wrong.
But the diet soda drinkers were more likely to have diabetes (9% diabetes among the people drinking 0 diet soda, and 26% among those drinking 1+/day)
Most likely, these people were drinking regular soda, got diabetes, and then switched to diet soda. The diabetes was damaging the blood vessels and leading to stroke and dementia.
As you allude to, those cited statistics are meaningless. We would at least need to know how the percentage compares to those drinking 1+ non-diet sodas. Of course even more importantly we would need to see the figures when adjusted for eating habits, exercise levels, and prior drinking habits.
Perhaps it is just a semantic argument, because when I hear someone is a soda drinker I assume at least a few sodas a week, if not an average of at least one per day. I guess that should be called a regular soda drinker instead of just a soda drinker.
And to the OP's point, every regular soda drinker I know that I can think of who is not obese almost exclusively drinks diet sodas. It is just too hard to consume an extra 150-300 calories per day via drinks and still be in good shape.
It does seem as though overweight people tend to *always* be drinking diet soda, though.
Certainly most people drinking diet sodas are overweight, but most people who like the color blue are also overweight (hint: because most people are overweight, at least in the US). I would be surprised if you know many regular soda drinkers (about one drink per day) who are both in good shape and primarily drink non-diet sodas.
Me: I don't want your clouds, why should I waste my bandwidth and endure slow access times when I can store my files and my backups locally?
If you're storing your files and backups locally, then you don't really have "backups", you just another copy of data that will be lost in the fire/flood/tornado, whatever.
When I read his comment I can't tell if he was mocking anti-cloud IT folk or actually is one. It's too hard to tell.
Are you taking into account benefits? Sick time. Vacation time. Employer matching 401k.The peace of mind that comes with stability.
You still get all of those benefits when you move between companies. If you're in demand enough to bounce between companies, you can negotiate for more PTO. I have been at my company for 2 years and I have the same PTO than my counterpart with 14 years seniority only because I negotiated to get the 5 extra days you get with 10 years experience up front.
And the piece of mind of knowing you can easily find another job with similar pay is much better than the illusion that seniority will save you from layoffs.
It's mostly millennials who buy Apple's products. Without them camping in a line around the Apple store when the new iSuck comes out, Apple would be out of business
Millennials make up about 30% of iPhone owners. Half are Gen X or older, and the rest are kids. Millennials are certainly not the majority of Apple customers. iPad demographics are a little older than iPhone users, as are most other non-phone products.
However, for the most part, the party/ideology from the left in the US that promotes itself as the party of diversity and tolerance, is ONLY tolerant of viewpoints they hold and not only will put you down for what you think
Ah, the old intolerance of intolerance argument. The paradox of tolerance is that if society is tolerant of intolerance, you ultimately allow that intolerance to destroy tolerance in that society. Ultimately tolerance is useless without the right to not tolerate the intolerant. (you might need more than two hands to count the double negatives there)
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody here who would work for Infosys?
They'll be lucky to get C student, recent college graduates, useless air thieves to apply. Apparently, just like in India.
I don't even work for companies that use Infosys, let alone work for Infosys directly. I'm not opposed to using consultants, but Infosys, Tata, and WiPro are blacklisted for me. I find it hard to believe I would have executive level buy in to create quality enterprise software systems if they are already willing to use these companies. For a while I just used this as a red flag to investigate the company further, but after consistently being disappointed with what I found I just treat the usage of these outsourcing shops as a complete deal breaker.
I am a big fan of the idea of the H1B program and believe immigrants are the primary thing which has made and continues to make our country great, but companies like Infosys are a blight on our society with no redeeming value I can see.
Even if the technology were ready right now at this moment, adapting it to replace half of all jobs would still take more than ten years.
While I agree with his general message about AI disruption, you are absolutely correct that his ten year prediction is ridiculous. A loss of perhaps 10% of jobs within 10 years may be more realistic, but it is quite obvious this VC's statements are just intending to grab headlines.
Most humans, especially Americans, already hate automated service of any kind. Being served by an actual human is a luxury that American consumers are not willing to pay for.
FTFY
Given time I'm sure you could find thousands of examples of automated and mass production products and services which are not as good as labor intensive alternatives. From furniture to food to customer services. In each case customers certainly prefer the human touch, but in nearly every case they are unwilling to pay for it. They may say they are willing to pay more on customer surveys, but that rarely materializes into actual sales.
Also in this case, automated voice answering systems are just one small part of the upcoming AI overhaul. Online self service is a far more likely channel for these changes. There can certainly still be some human operators for difficult to solve cases, but even a replacement of just half of a service department's staff is a significant job loss.
as service jobs are proving much harder to automate than the manufacturing jobs that disappeared a few decades ago
But just like pirating music is much easier than creating counterfeit CDs, the automation of services jobs will be nearly effortless compared to what it took to automate manufacturing jobs. No need to buy millions of dollars of robotics equipment, just add the service-bot module to your Salesforce subscription and 90% of your service team can be let go. It is obviously more difficult to create this level of AI than it was to create manufacturing robots, or else we would have had them a few decades ago as well. But once we do have them the disruption will be an order of magnitude faster.
The way things are going now with speech and visual pattern recognition, there are numerous industries which could see this level of disruption in a decade or two.
The situation is not quite similar. Aerodynamics proved that heavier-then-air vehicles would be able to fly due to the effect of lift. So there was theoretical proof, making the actual building of the plane a 'mere' engineering effort.
We also have proved human level intelligence can exist because our species exists. Once again, the situation is nearly identical.
Pretty sure the parent was saying Facebook would ignore the lies of Democrats as this whole "fake news" thing is mainly a left-wing censorship campaign.
I'm also pretty sure you are correct about his intentions, but considering that is an absurd opinion I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Don't be so partisan. While I agree Republicans are by far the worst abusers of fake propaganda, Democrats aren't completely immune to the problem.
Yeah. One thing I was wondering - does this mean that they'll become an online arm of the 'RESIST' movement, or does it mean that they'll stand up to actual international thuggish regimes, like North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pali Authority, et al?
We could get the best of both worlds and have it be all of the above.
Wait, you stopped watching TV 20 years ago, and replaced it with watching TV?
Yes and yes. But instead of the TV dictating my schedule, I watch TV on my own schedule.
No one ever told you about VCRs 20 years ago?
If degrees are so meaningless, why did you bother getting a "Bsc in Math and Post-grad in Computer Sci" later on?
I think that, whatever your answer, it proves that there is a good reason for them.
His answer to that question can be found in the title of his post: the obsession with degrees in the society. My career path was similar, where I started working with no degree and then received a BS/MS after about 10 years in. I learned nearly nothing in the BS, and barely anything for my MS (my thesis research project was a good experience), but those degrees had a big impact on my career. Not because of what I learned but because they check off boxes for HR and for hiring managers who like their software managers / architects to have MS degrees. I have found in the financial industry, which pays quite well, they find those things important.
But I did not go to a great school for my BS, and the MS program was at a school currently ranked #73 nationally, so it's very likely a degree from a more prestigious university would be useful even to those who learn well independently.
But really the most absurd thing here in this entire discussions is that people like you talk without having a clue and not even knowing the law, not understanding when it's applicable, not understanding why it was created, and yet criticizing it.
That is a lot of assumptions there buddy. It must be tough to get your head so far up your ass while on your high horse.
Anyone can call themselves an engineer. They just cannot claim to be a licensed civil engineer in Oregon. That is the law. There are plenty of engineering professions which do not require licensing in the first place. Go ahead and Google this case, and instead of finding numerous news articles citing experts defending Oregon you will find a unanimous voice calling the law suit groundless.
You are wrong. Get it through your pompous head.
If you claim you're a doctor and you're not then you can get in trouble. That's not idiocy, it's protecting the expectation of a profession.
I can claim I'm a doctor if I have a doctorate degree. In fact I will declare myself Doctor of the Obvious, and therefore qualified to point out the absurdity of your post. I perhaps cannot claim to a medical doctor licensed to practice medicine in my state when about to perform a medical procedure, but I can certainly call myself a doctor. It is all about context.
Same goes for being an engineer. This is such a ridiculous application of law I am surprised Slashdot is a large enough sample size to even find a single post defending their position.
Capitalism will work better if sellers are forbidden to discriminate among buyers. It would be even better if buyers were forbidden to distinguish among sellers
First off, you are confusing capitalism with a free market. They explain different aspects of the economy.
That said, you then created a straw-man argument by providing what you consider a perfect free market and then shooing down why it is not economically realistic. I made no claim that a perfect free market is an achievable or even desirable situation. I merely provided a quid-pro-quo pithy aphorism to highlight different techniques each side of any economic exchange uses. If buyers want to take advantage of quick and easy access to price comparisons, they are hypocritical to also complain when sellers take advantage of similarly available information to perform price discrimination.
I'm confused. Exactly how does my asking another store for their price on a product somehow make it okay for a single store to charge different prices to different people for the exact same product?
If it helps to use an analogy, take offense and defense in any sport (sport may be a poor choice in Slashdot, but its the first that came to mind). Offense and defense and the rules which govern each both exist to create a competitive balance within the sport, but the techniques and rules used by each are almost always quite different. For instance if a linebacker tackles someone it is okay, but if an offensive lineman does the same it is a holding penalty.
Maintaining competitive balance does not mean everyone plays by the exact same rules. Each side plays by whatever rules are deemed necessary to maintain competitive balance.
In the case of a seller and buyer relationship, both sides are trying to maximize the value they extract from each sale. Buyers comparison shop, and sellers price discriminate. They are different tactics which are both used to level the playing field.
When you give up your right to check the Internet to find out what their competitors are shopping then I'll agree we should fight their ability to investigate you when setting pricing.
Nah. It's quite easy to ignore how we treat old and sick people, too. So what you're suggesting is we'll end up with a system that sure is good for people who have small illnesses (take an antibiotic, sleep a few days), but the truly sick might have several month delays in getting care.
Not really. There are slightly sick and truly sick, young and old, etc VA members too, so the order of magnitude difference between the VA and a universal single payer system still hold.
The only thing we know for sure is that on a global scale single payer systems perform better. On a dollar for dollar basis the difference is even more drastic, with single payer systems being an order of magnitude better than our system. We have worse health care outcomes than most OECD countries, but spend more than double per capita. We can quibble about why the VA has been mismanaged, but there is no honest debate about whether single payer systems have outperformed our system in nearly every metric (they have).
So what's different? Why is it so great in some countries, whereas the single-payer systems that exist in America (like the VHA) are so problematic?
I think healthcare is just a hard problem.
Visibility. It is quite easy for most of the population to just ignore how we treat our vets. There are less than 10 million VA enrolled veterans which is only around 3% of the population. And veterans are not spread evenly throughout all socio-economic groups, so many more affluent groups are quite separated from groups where veterans are more common.
This makes it much easier for problems to go unnoticed. If 350 million people were being serviced by a VA like organization, there would be far more pressure to improve.
If CEO's were actually replaced with robots, it would be because the "old boy's network" has been transitioned to a network of AI executives. The hardest thing to replace about executives is their existing network of contacts. Their decision making could be transitioned to machines, but they lose the ability to sidestep regulations, waiting queues, red tape, or whatever by calling their old Harvard college buddy. I work in the financial industry now, and just two weeks was in a meeting where the IRS was holding us up and we had to go to our CFO. It wasn't his knowledge which removed our problem, it was an old coworker who is now claiming we are at the top of the queue (we shall see). This happens quite frequently.
What will really make AI CEOs take over is when they start disliking working with companies not run by AI. Once they feel a meat bag cannot be trusted as a business partner, human CEOs are toast.
The most popular distribution of the most popular OS kernel is wrapped in a tightly controlled ecosystem in which everything you can do, which by default isn't much, is tracked and logged.
What percentage of operating systems in the world are running in an open and "free" environment as per FSF definition? Less than a fraction of a percentage? How can you consider that winning?
AmiJoJo is mostly referring to servers running Linux, not consumer devices. Either that or he/she is just wrong.
But the diet soda drinkers were more likely to have diabetes (9% diabetes among the people drinking 0 diet soda, and 26% among those drinking 1+/day)
Most likely, these people were drinking regular soda, got diabetes, and then switched to diet soda. The diabetes was damaging the blood vessels and leading to stroke and dementia.
As you allude to, those cited statistics are meaningless. We would at least need to know how the percentage compares to those drinking 1+ non-diet sodas. Of course even more importantly we would need to see the figures when adjusted for eating habits, exercise levels, and prior drinking habits.
Perhaps it is just a semantic argument, because when I hear someone is a soda drinker I assume at least a few sodas a week, if not an average of at least one per day. I guess that should be called a regular soda drinker instead of just a soda drinker.
And to the OP's point, every regular soda drinker I know that I can think of who is not obese almost exclusively drinks diet sodas. It is just too hard to consume an extra 150-300 calories per day via drinks and still be in good shape.
It does seem as though overweight people tend to *always* be drinking diet soda, though.
Certainly most people drinking diet sodas are overweight, but most people who like the color blue are also overweight (hint: because most people are overweight, at least in the US). I would be surprised if you know many regular soda drinkers (about one drink per day) who are both in good shape and primarily drink non-diet sodas.
Me: I don't want your clouds, why should I waste my bandwidth and endure slow access times when I can store my files and my backups locally?
If you're storing your files and backups locally, then you don't really have "backups", you just another copy of data that will be lost in the fire/flood/tornado, whatever.
When I read his comment I can't tell if he was mocking anti-cloud IT folk or actually is one. It's too hard to tell.
Are you taking into account benefits? Sick time. Vacation time. Employer matching 401k.The peace of mind that comes with stability.
You still get all of those benefits when you move between companies. If you're in demand enough to bounce between companies, you can negotiate for more PTO. I have been at my company for 2 years and I have the same PTO than my counterpart with 14 years seniority only because I negotiated to get the 5 extra days you get with 10 years experience up front.
And the piece of mind of knowing you can easily find another job with similar pay is much better than the illusion that seniority will save you from layoffs.
It's mostly millennials who buy Apple's products. Without them camping in a line around the Apple store when the new iSuck comes out, Apple would be out of business
Millennials make up about 30% of iPhone owners. Half are Gen X or older, and the rest are kids. Millennials are certainly not the majority of Apple customers. iPad demographics are a little older than iPhone users, as are most other non-phone products.
However, for the most part, the party/ideology from the left in the US that promotes itself as the party of diversity and tolerance, is ONLY tolerant of viewpoints they hold and not only will put you down for what you think
Ah, the old intolerance of intolerance argument. The paradox of tolerance is that if society is tolerant of intolerance, you ultimately allow that intolerance to destroy tolerance in that society. Ultimately tolerance is useless without the right to not tolerate the intolerant. (you might need more than two hands to count the double negatives there)