And some companies (like mine) just have their SDEs do the SRE job as well. Apparently it incentivizes us to write more stable code or something

Pretty sure they can. Or at least, they can deny you entry into the country if you decline to unlock it for them.

Just now. I was reading this thread and grinning at other people's misfortune so my wife decided I should join them and bit me 😵

I think it might take a lot longer than 20 years for plastic to fully die down

Wooooooosh!

Actually, star trek might be. In their lore, things got a lot worse before they got better.

What is gay underwear? Like a specific brand?

Maybe that reputation was well deserved in the past?

Some stores require you to use the app for order pickup.

Sounds like a store to avoid like the plague.

I think 20 years ago they said it's set to heal by 2050...

But... that requires the internet to research

So, before the invention of the camera, the most valuable and most popular creative skill was replicating people on canvas as realistically as possible. Yes, we remember famous exceptions like Picasso, but by sheer number of paintings the most common were portraits of rich people.

After the cameras took that job away, prevailing art changed to become more abstract and "creative". But that still pissed off a lot of people that had spent a very long time honing a skill that was now no longer in demand.

What we're seeing is a similar shift. I think future generations of artists will value color theory, composition, etc. over specific brush stroke techniques. AI will make art much more accessible once enough time has passed for AI assisted art to be considered art. Make no mistake: it will always be people that actually create the art - AI will just reduce/remove the grunt work so they can focus more on creativity.

Now, whether billion dollar corporations deserve to exploit the labor of millions of people is a whole separate conversation, but tl;dr: they don't, but they're going to anyway because there is little to stop them in correct economic/governance models.