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thewebguyd

6,804 karma · joined March 22, 2024

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thewebguyd··on Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
That also own one of the 2 major mobile operating systems, with Gemini tightly integrated and all of the data they can gather from that. Why do you think OpenAI wants to do hardware? Owning delivery is going to be important, and right now, Google and Apple own the delivery mechanisms (to consumers).

They may not capture enterprise use, but I don't think they have to. That's only one piece of the market. AI that's useful to consumers will still get delivered via a smartphone, and Google is in a great place to capture that.

I also don't think LLMs have to be a "winner takes all" situation. Value isn't going to come from having direct access to a chatbot or selling API inference, value is going to be in the form of a specific product (for most, devs aside here). Something a consumer, or a non-tech business can buy off the shelf and plug and play. A "ready made" customer service agent system, a "ready made" BI platform using AI, etc.

For consumers, that's probably going to look like whatever is bundled and tightly integrated into their mobile OS of choice.

thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
It was a thing for a while in the early 2000s, mostly as a preppy status symbol. It was pretty much iconic SV founder uniform for a short time.
thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
The supreme court doubly proved that again recently ruling that the police have no specific duty to protect individuals or even respond for that matter.
thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
> You're obliged to maximize their earnings.

You're not though, legally anyway. Courts will generally not second-guess a board's business decisions so long as the board acted in "good faith" even if that decision results in loss for shareholders, or does something that does not maximize their returns.

Board just has to link the decision and the long term health of the company. But it's just that, health of the company which is legally distinct from the health or short-term desires of individual shareholders and investors.

thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
Interestingly enough, Apple at one point had that attitude even under Cook.

> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI,” Cook said. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”

That was back in 2014.

But I do agree, it's time to normalize telling shareholders where they can shove it. If they don't like it, they can sell.

thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
> I am no lawyer and I do not understand what is proprietary to Apple here, it just does not sound that big a deal to me.

The special technique is the IP. In hardware manufacturing, the process is the IP and can be considered a trade secret, so even if that supplier does metal finishing for a ton of different clients, Apple's specific "recipe" or whatever is a legally protected trade secret, they would not be allowed to do it for anyone else.

Apple is alleging a little more than going and asking the supplier to do it though, in the lawsuit they are alleging the former employee leveraged their own relationship with the supplier to present the request as if Apple had approved it (to use their wording "Misleading the partner to believe they had Apple's permission to do so").

thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
It's probably not as much of a joke as we want to believe, given the current administration in power and the potential 5% stake in OpenAi via Kushner's firm, and how SamA can just pull the "national security...Chinese labs something something" argument along with some bribe money and potentially make this whole thing disappear.

With the corruption so blatant and on public display now, and with how much the labs have been trying to sell "too big to fail" to the government, the standard rules no longer apply when it comes to anything involving these labs.

thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
Could be any of the usual big names I'd suspect? Box, something from Atlassian, or maybe some home rolled thing on top of S3 or GCP?
thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
From the filing:

The stolen files, NAMED: >DisplayNotes.key — "several hundred pages" on Apple's custom display power development program >Architecture analyses. Fabrication decisions. Testing results >Engineering data for an UNANNOUNCED Apple product: 'touch, display, and power systems" >Final.key + V2.key — compilations of two undisclosed Apple R&D projects >and those are "only four of the dozens of proprietary documents Mr. Liu stole"

Also

>OpenAI "directed a trusted Apple partner [name redacted] to perform [Apple's proprietary metal finishing] process for them, knowing it was proprietary to Apple... because they were involved in this partnership while at Apple."

So apparently yes, OpenAI is very interested in Apple's hardware. I don't see any references to software secrets in the filing, it seems to be entirely about hardware.

thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
You aren't supposed to have a full conversation with Siri, it's an assistant not a chatbot. Tell it to do a task, and it does the task. In those leaked system prompts/instructions Apple pretty explicitly wants to avoid conversational engagement to stop the whole "AI friendship" crap from happening.
thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
Ah, probably why he thinks its such a great idea to have ChatGPT make a podcast about your children to listen to instead of, you know, talking to them.
thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
The difference is there's no laws around your home decor, but there is a clear legal framework around trade secrets. Apple's allegation is that a vulnerability was exploited to access some of the data as well which, if true, carries potential CFAA criminal charges.

For trade secrets, it only requires "reasonable measures" even just having an NDA is enough, even if the rest of your security is wide open. Just because someone found a loophole or grabbed files before their access was revoked doesn't make it legal (under trade secrets law).

Almost certainly the employees at some point in their tenure at apple signed some duty of confidentiality, or some acceptable use policy, etc. which is grounds enough for illegal misappropriation. "You didn't lock down their access enough" isn't a valid legal defense.

thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
OpenAI has been talking about making hardware for a while now, and most likely they are going to attempt a smartphone.
thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
No. Unlocked door != legal entry. "Breaking" in B&E doesn't require any physical damage. Pushing open an unlocked door or entering a place without authorization counts. If I leave my home to go to the store, and leave the door unlocked and someone walks in, they are still committing a crime.

There are also no tenant protections for criminal intruders, squatter protections require a claim of right like a disputed lease or a holdover tenancy, or continuous possession over many years. Someone that just walks into a residence is an active trespasser and can be arrested for criminal trespass or burglary.

thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
Huh? Apple is literally working through legal channels, the article is pulled from the court filings which are public record. OpenAI is the one making blog posts.
thewebguyd··on Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
Yeah Apple does have a history of doing these things. There was Palm, where Jobs told them if they didn't stop recruiting Apple employees he would destroy Palm with patent lawsuits. Jobs was also one of the main architects behind the no poach cartel in SV between Google, Adobe, and Intel, and Apple.

More recently there was Nuvia, which the lawsuit was dropped, and Rivos, which was settled.

thewebguyd··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
Their products/services are ubiquitous not because they are good but because they got where they are today by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics.

On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product, etc. and you are now at double or more the price of an E5 license.

On the consumer side with Windows, they secured their monopoly via internet explorer, and predatory OEM contracts to prevent machines being sold with anything else. Now Windows is just an ad-delivery network disguised as an OS. People don't leave Windows because its still, through those shady backroom deals, the default OS on every off the shelf PC, and because of existing software.

Microsoft has zero incentive to build a good product now, they already won. People use it because they have to not because they want to.

thewebguyd··on LLMs reward expertise
Such an event would have to be pretty catastrophic at this point to slow down the inertia. Perhaps the tech debt will just pile up until someone's product implodes, or there's a massive safety issue that causes loss of life, or some big hedge fund goes bust.
thewebguyd··on Devtools must be open source
The idea that IT should lock down editor configs treats software development like a factory line where workers should be interchangeable parts. Maybe it is, but I disagree. Software is a craft, and a developer's environment is an extension o fhow they think. If pairing is hard because of someone's custom setup, the answer is to use tools designed for collaboration, not mandating a specific editor config. Check out the code locally.

Personalized tools is how you eliminate friction, it'd be a misallocation of priorities to take that away.

As an side, vim definitely allows user scripts.

thewebguyd··on Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers
> because doctors’ offices seem to have random numbers they call you from

This is a huge issue with scam/security awareness education. Too many legitimate orgs use the exact behaviors we tell people to avoid. Same thing with email, can't tell someone to never click links in emails when services keep relying on magic links, third-party notification domains, etc. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC do nothing because scammers will just typosquat.

In the phone number example, most of those numbers too are unlisted outbound numbers, you couldn't even google them to verify.

Half the battle is getting legitimate organizations to stop acting like scammers in the first place so that shady behavior becomes an obvious red flag again.

thewebguyd··on GCC steering committee announces AI policy
Because discourse around AI has devolved into eschatological thinking. The stakes are potentially high where the ceiling might be superintelligence and the floor total economic collapse, humans will just default to apocalyptic thinking. All discussion ceases to be technical and instead becomes religious.

Once people have convinced themselves that the stakes are existential, any nuance or moderate thinking feels like complicity.

So now because of that, a perfectly reasonable policy about copyright gets reframed as a battle for the future of humanity becausae we are no longer discussing tech, we are discussing what amounts to opposing religious beliefs.

thewebguyd··on Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
> any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset

Then we certainly shouldn't be passing laws mandating age verification. If parents want to abdicate their responsibility over their children, it's not the role of government to enshrine that abdication into law and take over the duty of parenting from them.

If regulation is to be had, then it should take the form of mandating websites and services provide privacy preserving tools for parents to use, if they want to use them. If they don't, that's on them. Everyone else needn't suffer because a subset of the population has chosen to offload their responsibility into the government and web services.

thewebguyd··on The growing threat of Docusign phishing attacks (2024)
Docusign could put a stop to a good chunk of these but they choose not to. They know attackers are abusing their free trial service to send these out using docusign's own domains. Just gate the trial behind a sign-up/sales call.
thewebguyd··on Darktable
> it’s just that editing and organizing are so tightly coupled that it’s difficult to use something that just ignores one.

This is especially true for professional workflows. I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I shoot anywhere between 15 to 20 weddings/year + a plethora of other sessions (family, portraits, etc.).

The asset management (and plugin ecosystem) are nearly just as important as the RAW processing tools itself. Lightroom (Classic) is even wired up to my gallery delivery service (Pixieset) + ImagenAI for first pass edits.

I've tried and used Darktable in the past. It's already completely capable of being my RAW processor, but it's everything else that's missing that makes my end to end professional workflow possible. The processing/editing tools was never the problem that keeps people locked into Lightroom. It's the decades of plugin development & the asset management features.

thewebguyd··on Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver to Windows
> Many or most of those 95% who are just using Windows for PC games and using a web browser would be well served by either trying out or having a tech-savvy neighbor help them try out a Linux distro like Bazzite.

This is true until you consider what that exact casual market looks like. Mainstream casual PC gamers are overwhelmingly concentrated in live service multiplayer AAA games with kernel level anticheat. Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, etc.

So it's kind of a hard spot where yes, 95% of casual windows gamers would in theory be much better off on Linux but the Catch-22 is the games that market is mostly concentrated on is the single category that still does not work on Linux.

It's not like Windows is an OS they love, it's just a mandatory anti-cheat wall, but its a wall Linux can't breach yet.

thewebguyd··on Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver to Windows
Somewhat. There's still a ~20% ish performance impact for DX12 titles on Nvidia, but on any newer/recent card it basically just brute forces it and ends up being fine unless you are an FPS chaser and have an issue with getting, say, 140 FPS instead of 168 FPS. That'll matter if you play competitive PvP games, but otherwise you probably won't notice (depending on the game)
thewebguyd··on The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade
> do you actually need the Pro machine and you could instead go with a MacBook Air that you keep for far longer since your doing basic tasks

This is probably the case for a lot of people, but Apple is smart with their lineup and there are several what I'd call "not pro" features that are gated by the MBP (and iPad pro) which is unfortunate.

Primarily, 120hz screen, SD card reader, HDMI port. None of those are really "pro" featuers, they're just basics I'd expect on any premium laptop.

That being said, 3 years is a tad on the aggressive side for an upgrade cycle for a laptop. I just upgraded my M1 last year, and this M4 Pro will easily last a year or two longer before I feel a compelling need to upgrade, outside of getting RAM constrained. Use case is photo+video production. So for me, a 5 year cycle would be about right.

But also depends on how you spec it out. If you are just buying the base model, then 3 years makes sense. If you spend extra to max it out, you'll be able to hold onto it for 6+ years.

thewebguyd··on The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade
Except in this case, you can still choose to own it at the end of the lease. The total lease price (if you buy it at the end) is the exact same as the retail price, there's no interest and no extra fees.
thewebguyd··on The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade
Yeah everyone's naysaying this but it seems like a no brainer?

There's no interest, no fees. The total lease price (if you buy out at the end) is the same as the retail price. There's no downside to it at all.

If you are someone who upgrades annually, you're now paying ~$599 split over 12 payments vs. ~$1199 up front and either trading in or trying to sell your last gen privately. It works out to about even on a trade-in->upgrade every year cycle, only you don't have to fork over the $600 up front.

thewebguyd··on iPhone Upgrade Program
Yeah, especially considering most people already do this in some fashion but through their carriers (at least in the US) w/ carrier financing + those extra $10/month "upgrade anytime" programs and they end up paying more than what leasing from Apple will work out to.

Especially if you're someone who upgrades every year. 12 month option on a 17PM works out to ~$599 for the year vs. $1199 each year. $599 is roughly what you'd pay for each years new model assuming you trade in your previous gen each time, so at worst it's even with what an annual upgrader was paying already, at best you might make out a little better (assuming you are just doing trade-ins and not private sale).

There's no interest or fees, and you get to buy it out at the end if you want to own it, and the lease price is the same as the retail price, I see no downside.

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