402 karma · joined June 19, 2015
Given the product judgment shown in this particular release, it doesn’t seem to be out of the question.
1) If you have the Codex desktop app installed, and you update from within the app, it replaces itself with the new chat-demoted-to-an-overlay app called "ChatGPT" and renames your existing ChatGPT app to "ChatGPT Classic."
2) If you get the new ChatGPT app and replace your current app with it, you don't get a "Classic" app and there's no way to download it.
3) They really named an app "Classic." Naming your app Classic is putting a bright red sign on it that says "this app will be abandoned soon." They might as well have called it "ChatGPT Sunset."
If this is all true, that is certainly...one way to do product management.
I know it's hard to believe that not every organization is sociopathic, because many are (the larger, the more likely to be). But not every one is.
Not saying that intended addictiveness is not common, but let's not normalize corporate sociopathy.
It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing!
It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different.
“You say I can pick one flower, but you get upset when I take a bunch. That’s inconsistent. Check and mate.”
But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes. Everyone knows this, but sometimes they seem to find it inconvenient to admit it. Not that effects of the qualitative change are always bad, but they are often different, and worth considering rather than dismissing.
That is definitely an opinion.
For a company of Anthropic's size, this may very well be a death sentence, even if their work has nothing to do with the military supply chain. They could have just canceled the contract, but they wanted to go full Darth Vader on them to prove a point in case anyone else thought about "negotiating" "voluntarily" with the federal government.
Hegseth trying to play “I’m altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further” just shows this gang’s total lack of comprehension of second-order effects.
(Now Anaheim, there they're kind of hosed. No space to expand.)
Collective action problems are just the worst.
As a parent, I believe I speak for many when I say [citation needed].