Four-day week trials, for example, keep showing productivity holds or improves — Iceland ran the biggest pilot, the UK had 61 companies in their trial, Microsoft Japan saw a 40% boost. The data is there.

Yet I know a CEO who suggested implementing a four-day week if the least productive 10% of workers came in an extra day instead. Just bonkers.

The extreme cognitive dissonance in these types is so odd - on the one hand, they claim that CEOs are these money-hungry evil tycoons who want to get as much out of their employees as possible, yet on the other hand, they also claim 4 day work weeks are supposedly so amazing and effective and improve productivity.

So .. why wouldn't these horrible CEOs who want to leech everything possible out of their employees gladly/immediately choose to implement 4 day work weeks, when they would supposedly make their employees more productive for the same cost? Why would they refuse to take that?

I'm not sure which types you have in mind? The most strident critics of CEOs I know say they're not just money hungry; they're power and status hungry, and will happily trade off additional money for opportunities to show that they're high status or exert additional power over the little folks. If that's what you value, directing your employees' lives for an extra day every week may be worth leaving a lot of money on the table.

If their goal is power and status, 4 day work week, at lower wages, frees up capital to hire more humans to control.

Option A: 800 employees working 5 days per week.

Option B: 960 employees working 4 days per week (and producing more than the 800)

You're assuming they'd prefer to control more people, but what if they prefer having more control over less people?

I had a boss like this when I worked at a call center, he would swing a golf club around (he was short and I think he wanted to feel like he had a weapon, he never hit any balls in the place) and he would go out of his way to offer overtime to the poorest and most hard off people and wanted to see how much OT he could get one person to work.

It was his little game to manipulate people that couldn't help but say yes into a situation that left them no time to live a life.

The stats were much worse for such people, and those stats had a direct impact on his pay, but if there was a sadistic option he always took it.

Same guy had a "water drinking contest" so he could watch all his employees throw up for a day off.

Reminds me of the incident with the colors.js npm package, where the maintainer sabotaged his own packages in protest against big corporations using but not supporting open source.

I get the reasoning behind it but I can't condone it. Regardless, in the end it's the developers' responsibility what tools they use and how they use them.

I don't get the reasoning behind throwing a fit when you give your work away for free. Open source is open source. Not "you owe me because I gave you something free".

Perfect argument!!!

Ai has become indispensable but maybe not at all cost. My company just had a company-wide meeting to talk about how they're restricting who can use which models and instructing us the "be more responsible with company's tokens". And it's not an small company by any means.

I think using AI to help you write or rewrite something you want to convey is fine, the difference is using it as a replacement of thinking instead of a tool.

The screenshots part is crazy.

If you're not able to convey it maybe you haven't spent long enough thinking about it?

Helping you "write or rewrite something you want to convey" is already using it as a replacement of thinking.

I think it depends upon the effort involved.

Think the difference between AI saying "This paragraph seemed muddled and lacks a clear point. Consider rewriting it." vs "Here, I rewrote this paragraph to focus it more on bridging the previous and next paragraphs."

The problem with this as a metric is that it is loosely defined so it becomes quite easy for a person to twist it to justify almost any level of AI usage as "well, it is still more effort than <X>".

Is hiring a <professional> for a <task> a replacement for thinking?

If the task is thinking yes, obviously.

If the task is ghost writing, absolutely.

I promise every last single person would rather read your actual thoughts than some clanker slop.

Evolving from enshitification to enslopification, a true race to the bottom.

These and the Deepseek ones that were were cost reduced recently are perfectly capable models for the vast majority of light work and more.

It's funny thinking the US companies are hiking prices and Chinese ones do the opposite, it's obviously an strategy, but pretty funny

How are these "capacity constrained" Chinese companies running inference without Hoppers and Blackwells ?

Huawei Ascend AI Accellerators. DeepSeek V4 model architecture was optimized for Chinese hardware.

They can (not entirely sure how 'grey' market this is) either have subsidiaries outside of china (eg: singapore) that provide the inference and/or just rent it off the public gpu clouds.

Making their own NPUs for inference probably, you don't have to buy NVidia for inference. Google doesn't.

It's def good advice.

I've been doing something similar with Firefox relay to have proxy emails that I can regenerate if needed, it worked well but not for every site. Recently I've been testing SimpleLogin and it worked every time, it's by Proton.

So according to Anthropic, China is very bad at AI but they play dirty and that's not fair, so daddy has to help them.

It's the same old story with big companies, they want a free market to do whatever they want and bully or buy whoever they want with their (loaned) money, but when they get free-marketed themselves, it suddenly becomes a country-level issue and the government has to step in to keep them on top.

The story about recovering the account rings very close to me. At least they had coworkers cheering for him, I feel teams are shrinking so much that we'll end up with just the LLM of choice to pat our back with "good work" and "you're absolutely right"

Co-workers cheered while managers were sharpening their axes. One doesn’t do such “heroics” without approval, making the system look incompetent and broken and then apologizing for it without being decapitated in the public square for everyone to learn the implicit lesson. Anyone cheering for him publicly should watch their back, too.