> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.
Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.
The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.
I feel like hiring is all a bit broken. Roles get flooded with applications, it's chance whether your CV gets through, then there's hiring rounds that seem designed to make you quit the process before they have to filter you out.
They're still around, even if Musk is excluded. Torvalds springs to mind pretty quickly. I think society is increasingly adverse to people having personality flaws, than it is in favour of people having strengths such as technical knowledge or ability.
Better to have a bland guy running McDonalds who can't stomach eating the "product" than some passionate chef doing his best to improve mass market food but rubbing people up the wrong way.
It's failure of capitalism if the money goes to the guy in the shiny suit instead of the person, or team, who can actually innovate. I don't want to be too melodramatic, but maybe this is all part of the fall of the empire.
Isn't this terror-ists winning? When people give in to terror?
When we had the IRA active in the UK everyone would be proud to carry on as normal after any incident, to show that life would go on as normal despite their efforts. This doesn't seem normal.
I'd imagine a similar ballpark to any other day-to-day government spending. It might affect perception around the absolute number on the balance sheet, but it won't significantly affect the proportion of spending.
Might vary depending on where you are and where you're applying to. I'm from the UK, spent a year and 500+ applications applying to remote or Gulf roles. Turned up nothing.
One thing that struck me was, when you look through the board and the committees, it's full of scientists, finance people, doctors, academics. There's maybe a couple of technologists - ML, IT delivery.
If they've got anyone with a background in cyber security I can't see it.
> We have never seen any evidence of any UK Biobank participant being re-identified by others.
This data contains sex, at least month and year of birth. I can't see any sensible security-oriented technical person coming out with a line like that.
I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.
Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.