without checking, Gates’ wealth is probably tied up in a lot of MS stock, and he could probably walk into the office and ask the intern to get him a coffee. but yeah i think mostly retired.

Linus is still active is maintaining the Linux kernel.

and yes, this is fluff, not some kind of summit

if you really want to stick it to Google you have to go for Firefox or something derived from it. Chromium gives Google a ton of leverage to push features to all of their downstreams. not sure what engine these are using, but i also prefer to use Firefox because it’s open source. if these were open source you could easily see which engine they’re using.

it’s so much worse than the normal search. i would search for “dog” or “pasta” or “house” and get a pretty good result, but this conversational shit is just plain worse. and the “conversational” aspect is useless

pretty common misconception about how “AI” works. models aren’t constantly learning. their weights are frozen before deployment. they can infer from context quite a bit, but they won’t meaningfully change without human intervention (for now)

is there such a thing as “legitimate criticism” against an entire race of people? this writer is bonkers, and you can tell from the intro. seems like the actual content of the post was buried beneath the first paragraph where a rare few would find it. maybe it was wrong or illegal to fire this guy for being a racist asshole (being a state funded org or something?), but couching it in this narrative of “cancel culture” and “a violation of the first amendment” has fashy vibes to me. institutions should be allowed to control the narrative set by their employees. i understand that as part of my company my words reflect on them, and it’s up to their discretion whether they want to continue to associate with me based on the things i say. you have every right to say racist shit on your favorite fascist-owned platform, but everyone else has the right to tell you to fuck off.

also big downvote for posting this in a technology community