Month: July 2024

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    Linked – Junior tech workers can’t find jobs. Are coding boot camps in trouble?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    The job market for people who can write code has fallen apart. Partly because of AI and partly because companies over-invested in engineers and tools that never could be as successful as they thought. (Remember when we were all going to be hanging out in the metaverse?) Of course, the people running these companies weren’t held accountable for those choices, but I’m past hoping that will ever happen. 

    So, now the mantra will be “learn AI,” at least until that market isn’t everything companies are currently promising and we go through this whole thing again. 

    It’s best not to get comfortable with anything in the current tech marketplace. The skills in high demand today won’t be those in high demand five years from now. If you’re entering college and embarking on a technology major, the tech will be changed by the time you graduate. 

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    Linked – AI Will Save Lawyers Time – But Does Anyone Want That?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    If the number they quote in the article about gaining four hours per week is accurate, that’s a massive change. In the last few months, many people in the industry have mentioned fixed-rate billing. It’s been an option for law firms for a long time, but it’s only gotten slight traction so far. 

    That might be about to change. Justifying the current economic model and investing in AI tools that save this much time will be quite challenging. The risks involved with “finding” more billable time are too high. I know; I’ve worked as a consultant before, and while it sounds great that finishing projects ahead of time frees you up to work on other projects, when those other projects don’t come in, you wind up short on your billable hour requirements and those tools that were supposed to make your work-life better, suddenly make it a lot worse. 

  • Cloudflare Enters the AI Data-scraping Fray

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    As I read the post, I found it most interesting that so many customers have made it clear to Cloudflare that they have no interest in letting AI tools use their website content to train large language models. I hadn’t given it much thought, but I also don’t run ads or use my blogs as a side hustle like many others do. It’s easy for me to be uncaring about whether some information I share is being used to respond to someone’s AI prompts without linking to the site. I might feel differently if I depended on traffic to make this endeavor profitable. 

  • Shared Links (weekly) July 7, 2024

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: < 1 minutes

  • Google is also not Living Up To Carbon Emissions Promises

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Like Microsoft, Google claims it will still run all of this using clean energy by 2030. However, the current emissions data do not indicate that this is possible. The need for energy will not go down, and these companies will not walk away from the trillions of dollars invested in AI already.

    This is happening while we watch the earliest recorded Category 5 hurricane because of the extremely warm water temperatures in the Atlantic.