lenerdenator

If it makes you feel better, this is a concept. They probably won't produce the vehicle they showed, especially since customers are making it known that they want regular buttons/door handles/HVAC vents/etc.

... probably.

> Him having control would be an improvement on the reality.

Oh, he does. It's unlikely that this is some AGI that spawned itself out of nothing and started doing this. If he were a decent person, he'd simply find a way to investigate this internally, fire the people responsible, and find a way to set up guardrails around his product.

The problem is, like most people in SV, Altman seems to have a twisted ethical compass. He doesn't see these incidents as an issue, he sees them as an opportunity. He has both the thing a bunch of Western governments want (a superhacker agent that can do dirty work) and a crisis that can be used to craft regulations that favor OpenAI and thus his bank account.

Well that's just it: we don't seem to apply laws in meaningful ways anymore.

Part of that is by design. The entire point of incorporating a business is to separate it as a legal entity from you, the person who owns/runs it.

Unless you can point to someone at OpenAI intentionally using their software to hack the Australian government's website, the best you can do is have some drawn-out proceeding where you charge OpenAI, the corporation, with some sort of crime, convict them (of what I don't know, IANAL) and fine them. Hopefully the fine is 1) large and 2) sticks through the appeals process.

There's no real mechanism to legally punish the likes of Altman and his c-suite over this.

> implying that morale mattered in the first place at Oracle

Is it, though?

If the goal is to exfiltrate data, I guess it is. If the goal is to make the people working in the FBI feel vulnerable - and pushing out this sample data would suggest that it is - I don't think it is. You could probably do the same with data from social media sites and data brokers.

It doesn't do nothing. It does make things somewhat harder to attack.

There was a time, 25-ish years ago, where exploits were thrown about like candy at a parade. The procedures you mention, along with other things, have made zero-days like these more valuable than gold.

That's assuming that the result of this will be to switch away from PeopleSoft.

The irony, of course, is that this will likely have a negative impact upon Oracle's reputation, which will have a negative impact upon its value, which will then be resolved with more RIFs.

It's okay. Larry got another island.

Hey, man, like... something's gotta fund the next game.

No, not TES VI. Starfield.

In all seriousness, I've not played Starfield, and I'm sure it's at the very least a serviceable game (at least by my Bethesda fan standards), but regardless, it wasn't the right game to make at that point in time, no matter what Todd thinks.

Prior to the release gap between TES V and TES VI, the longest gap there had been between new mainline games in that franchise was six years. They're now fifteen years deep.

Their only goal is to be more profitable.

Obsidian became a part of Bethesda, huh?

The Fallout TV show probably had to be the final straw for how much independence Bethesda gets to have. Boy, to have been a fly on the wall in that conference room.

"The TV show is doing gangbusters and you're telling me you don't have any F*CKING RELEASES IN THE CAN?!?! Stick Starfield, Todd, you're done with your 'art'."

Like everything else, "it depends".

There will be people who want to host things on-device. At some point, you could probably do most day-to-day tasks with a Siri-like agent, so you don't necessarily need it to be on a datacenter rack somewhere.

More complex tasks being run quickly opens up a choice: insanely beefy individual devices, on-prem hosting, or cloud hosting, whether that be some data center running FOSS models, or ones from people like Anthropic or OpenAI.

Beefy hardware for individual users? Not cost-effective. Could have people share that hardware by putting it in a data center. Do you want to operate that data center? For proven business cases, sure, why not? If you're still working out what your scale will be, maybe you ask the Googles, Amazons, or Microsofts of the world to rent you the hardware so you don't have wasted or too little capacity.

The real question is, how much value is there in a few companies that talk about how their eventual goal is to create AGI as opposed to just giving you enough intelligence to augment your current workers?

The answer is "probably not enough to justify more than one company having a valuation of over a trillion dollars, and that's generous".

30 years doesn't matter; 90 days does. If you can make enough money back over that period by enshittifying the company, you do it, even if that means selling the thing whole.

It used to be that the goal of a company was to compete in a market and gain value through performance in that market over the long term.

In the 1990s, several CEOs, including Jack Welch, realized how exactly things work. Namely, most shares are held by retirement and pension plans who employ entire companies' worth of people to find a way to diversify and hedge, and the reporting period for their earnings is 90 days. You had major chunks of corporate capital held by people who couldn't really care less about anything other than the line going up, and any way to do so within three months was valid.

Once a company has achieved a certain market position, the long-term and non-financial aspects of holding shares (pride in the company, an interest in the market they competed in, etc.) are unimportant, and the customer's opinion stops mattering as much. You can assume that enough customers will stay around through sheer inertia no matter what you do, and that includes breaking up the company and selling it for scrap.

Since most shareholders aren't really attached to any one company's holdings, they plan for customers to leave when companies do anti-consumer things, and if a company is broken up, they just take the earnings per share on that break-up and plow it into something else that sounds like it'd be profitable.

You have to do business with people who are operating in a spot below that market position if you really want them to care about pleasing you as a customer.

Remember: Cable TV started out as ad-free.

I don't bother paying for ad-free versions of any video service. At some point some analyst will say "but you could make $.000000000000001 more per share if you just put in a few ads" and that will be the end of it being truly ad-free.

Is it anti-consumer? Absolutely. Is finding ways to cut-in ads in a service marketed as "ad-free" arguably fraud? Yes. Does any of this matter so long as number go up and retirement funds keep raking in the money? No.

That's my point. ZIRP never should have happened.

Now we have a bunch of people who think that ZIRP was the norm. The industry's full of people who would not, and could not, have made their fortunes if they had to have gone to a bank to get another loan at 5% to make companies like Uber work. At some point, the answer would have been no, and they'd be just like every other failed business person instead of a member of the Cult of the Founder.

This is what lots of people forget.

Android is not a Linux desktop or server distro. It is not about you getting to put what you want on the hardware you bought for free.

Operating systems are hellaciously expensive to maintain and that only gets worse in markets with rapid hardware improvements, as the smartphone market was up until maybe the late 2010s. Google is not a charity. SV did not come into national prominence for making investors $0. There is no money in giving maybe one in one-hundred smartphone users (and that's being generous) a bunch of code, for free, so that they can put it on their gizmo and talk to their nerd friends at their hacker meetup.

When they pitched Android as "open", they meant that carriers and device makers could load it up with all of the revenue-enhancing bloat that they wanted. In return, Google got a device that would let them hoover up all of the data they could ever want in order to build better ad service profiles for those using the devices. That is, after all, their business.

For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder. At some point, though, the free stuff turned into a revenue opportunity that had to be exploited. And so, it will be.

There's "dropping the ball" and then there's "not reaching out your glove to catch it to begin with".

It'd be interesting to see which one is happening here.

It's less about access control and more about corporate behavior control. When you ask a contractor to come fix something about your home, you don't have to clarify to them that they shouldn't also be snooping around the bedroom drawers and taking pictures to be stored somewhere.

You shouldn't have to go and create zero-trust environments for things to operate in because tech companies can't be trusted to be honest and transparent about how they handle your data. It should be a given that they're up-front about what they do with it within the various terms and licenses, and easy to enforce those terms.

Those that cannot behave in such a way should get exactly zero of your business, even if the product is free and you can set up ways to block any sort of intrusions.

Depending upon where, exactly, you moved to in Missouri, I don't think you'll necessarily see the drop in crime and corruption you might have hoped for.

And I say this as a life-long Missouri resident and Mizzou grad.

OP here. Wondering why this was changed to the St. Louis Public Radio link over the Kansas City one.

Shouldn't do that, either.

Mind and marketshare are currency in this space. Either these people are honest and deserve your trust and business, or they don't. They've been mischaracterizing the way they've been handling your data. Shut them off accordingly until they make things right.

> Their resistance to Israel isn't irrational either.

The extent is.

If you look at the kind of person who makes massive donations to politicians and initiatives that are about massive tax reforms (think Missouri's recent ballot question about introducing a state sales tax and eventually sunset its income tax) you'll notice that a lot of them are very wealthy people who have very, very few people that they have to answer to in their lives. The one exception, it would seem, is the tax man, and they absolutely hate that.

Market forces like inflation aren't a person exerting control over them. They're the results of humans acting within social structures. These people have control over social structures; they're the elite. They can counter that market force with some other market force. Taxes? That's cold, hard math. There's no way around it, no feeling of agency to be had. So while it might be harder to avoid, it's not the financial effect that they worry about, because they have enough money to weather that. It's the feeling of obligation and powerlessness in the face of others that they can't brook.

Let's say pre-COVID.

Should have been this high years ago.

The country - particularly this industry, information technology - got addicted to cheap cash. Worse, people didn't want to pay any of it back in tax, so bond yields are going to go up on the debt that was issued to cover deficit spending.

Should be interesting to see how this impacts the AI hyper-scalers. They were already burning through cash like a furnace and were running out of people to borrow from, thus the IPO hopes.

It'd be interesting to know how much of that they put second to "Americans seem to like using our hardware as targets for firearms, reciprocating saws, spray paint, and garbage bags" in their list of corporate concerns.

Bear with me here: we could do all of them.

You can get these companies under control. You just have to, y'know, try.

That's just it, though: we don't hold humans accountable.

Incorporation is a way to split a human's financial assets from the company they run so that they don't lose everything when the company is successfully sued. Corporate governance boards often have the C-suite executives they're meant to govern on the board. The average person does not have the financial resources needed to take on most companies in court, no matter how justified the suit might be. Companies force arbitration clauses in license agreements at will. Companies like Meta settle with the government for pennies on the dollar in massive lawsuits.

Effectively, at the scale many tech companies work at, there is no effective legal way to hold the company accountable.

I take it this is the one that tosses out Rosetta 2 on macOS?