Also a field disproportionately affected by it so still kinda biased
boonhet
joined 1 year ago
If THEY want you to use AI then of course they better be paying for it.
If YOU want to use AI then IMO it's completely fair to pay for it yourself and just work less assuming your output stays the same.
The article makes it sound like people are opting to use AI for simple tasks, burning tokens just because they can. I'm gonna have to agree with the person above that it'd be stupid for a company to pay for that and especially stupid to encourage it.
Now, for the 40h thing: Not such a huge thing in the software engineering world, at least in some parts of the world. The average person has 2-3 hours of being truly productive in an average day. It's why you have things like ping pong tables and playstations in offices and in some companies I've worked at, it wasn't really a problem to leave before 5 PM after getting in at 10 AM and having an hour long lunch. So the hours worked to hours paid balance is already a bit fluid. Of course it comes with the expectation that when shit hits the fan, you work overtime.
It's how all contracting works around here.
Government RFP states that they'll pay 25€ for an hour of software engineering work at most, for an example. You already know nobody is breaking even on less than AT LEAST 35€ an hour considering the salary + other expenses of having an employee, and yet companies send in proposals. How? Because they'll just bill more hours to make up for the difference.
Similar things happen in the private sector, but to a smaller degree because the rates are higher to start with.
None of it is on paper for anyone whatsoever. But you just know that if your company has been getting the same hourly rate from a vendor for many years, they're probably invoicing you more than an hour per hour as their engineers get more experienced and inflation goes up.
The flip-side is that sometimes I'll overthink a task, completely restart it realizing I wasted an entire day on it and it should've been 2 hours. I'll then take some hours off, the bill ends up being between what I think it should've taken and what it actually took me.
Most countries in the EU don't allow for consumer rights to be overridden by an EULA.
Similarly, I can't have a contract with you to murder me. It's illegal and me being a willing participant in it does not make it legal, even if I sign a contract.
An EULA is legally binding, but only the parts that aren't in conflict with consumer rights, meaning most of any EULA is going to be invalid.
It was a very different car. If you wanted the absolute largest, you bought American. Even in 2026, Range Rovers are small compared to what GM has to offer, but in the 1980s, the difference would've been even bigger since the Suburban and its derivatives have grown less. Go back to the early 80s or 70s and the Range Rover wasn't even offered with 4 doors yet, it was even smaller.
Put it this way: A Volkswagen Golf estate is now about the same size as the first 4 door Range Rovers. A regular Golf is a tiny bit shorter than the original Range Rovers (2 door). Current VW Passat is significantly bigger.
There are over 300 companies with over a $50B market cap. The money is there.
That doesn't mean they all have $20B in cash to spare, OR the expertise to pull it off. Even China is still playing catch-up and nobody else is even trying because to get started in 2026 would mean poaching a bunch of people with nasty non-compete clauses to even get started planning.
There are documented cases of these same 3 companies colluding to constrain supply, even openly discussing what the target price of DRAM should be. Some of the people who were found guilty got their fines or even prison time and then came back and got promoted.
Even if the rest of it wasn't (it sorta is), Masayoshi Son is clinically insane
It's just a Volvo. Volvo specialists will maintain it. They'll also maintain Lynk&Co probably.
Or their incoming RAM and SSD prices went up 500%. Hard to tell.
The big 3 are known for being a price fixing cartel.
Any individual company could make more money by scaling up production. But they don't because they already know the other 2 won't.
So in your analogy the actors have all agreed to only work 10 hours a week and it's nearly impossible to become an actor without having tens of billions to start
I mean that's how fines work, yes. You want something, you'll have to sue.