Yes it's true, we can't escape the interconnected web of dependencies.

I guess my real gripe is that there are too few cloud hosting companies, and the few that exist are too big. We need many more medium-sized ones so that a single outage doesn't do so much damage, and so they have to compete against each other for business to keep their incentives properly oriented.

Or maybe he was quoted out of context.

When you use AWS to host your businesses website, and/or all the data that your business processes, and/or whatever back-end web-facing APIs your business uses, no amount of "fault tolerance" is going to keep you afloat when AWS goes down.

If we want to blame the victim, the correct accusation is: "you shouldn't outsource your critical business infrastructure to a huge megacorp that can survive without you."

I never buy games from EA, and this is one of the reasons why.

Personally, I am looking forward to a world full of Cronenberg creatures.

This is both a "power corrupts" situation, and a "necessary evil" situation.

Without collective bargaining, corporations egregiously exploit their workers. This will always happen, reliably, every time corporations exist, no matter who runs them, because the imbalance of power is like the ring of Mordor. Even pure-hearted Frodo will fall to corruption eventually.

So, employees need collective bargaining in order to receive fair and decent treatment, and the only way to get that is Unions.

Once unions establish themselves, however, THEY wind up being corrupted by power as well. The union administrators make quite a lot of money at their jobs, and they sure don't want that to dry up, so once things are going well for their workers they have to start asking for "even more" in order to justify their continued existence. Including asking for things that are unreasonable. They may also engage political and/or economic leverage to basically force people to be members of their union whether they want to or not. More people = more power = more money and so on.

So it is easy to point at this end-result, which is clearly bad, and say "see? Unions are bad. We should reject them." But without them the results are even worse. Much worse. So, they are necessary evils. The best we can do is group up and muster collective leverage (by voting and etc.) to push back against the evils of Unions, while still benefiting from the good that they also do.

Aside: business owners have a direct financial incentive to hate unions whether they are evil or not. So they will usually advice against abiding unions, regardless of any other detail, and will naturally overplay the evils and downplay the goods in order to make their case.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the general lack of open positions, leaving people facing fears of income stability and reigning in discretionary spending.

Maybe that few-years-old gas-powered car that is still perfectly functional is preferable to a pricey upgrade to a shiny new car with fewer gas stations and longer refuel times.

The emotional satisfaction of living an environmentally-friendly lifestyle is going to take second seat to practical realities, especially during uncertain economic times.

From Sony's perspective, the ISP is the absolute *best* target here. Not only is the ISP a bottleneck through which almost-all copyright infringement happens now (thus making it the perfect place to greatly block it), but Sony gets to make some other business incur all the costs and consequences of enforcement, including eating the profit loss, while Sony rakes it in.

Sony doesn't care in the slightest if entire households are harmed because one member infringes in secret, nor if that harm is actually very grievous since Internet access is now essential for daily life (and even having a job) in most of the developed world. If families starve on the streets because of this, they think that's great, as it will serve as an example to all those other evil pirates!

So, they will keep pushing for this with all their might, because they have a mountain to gain and nothing but legal fees to loose. Maybe they will lose a little public goodwill, but they are too rich to care about that.

Sony did this twice, as I recall. After being hit with a class action lawsuit and forced to do reparations, they just went out an did this a second time. And got hit with a class action lawsuit a second time, too.

Probably most of the decision-makers who were involved in those decisions have moved on by now. It's probably safe to assume that this is a different Sony. Does that mean they deserve a benefit of the doubt? Absolutely not, since all evidence here indicates that the new boss is the same as the old boss.

Sony cares about profits, and will trample families and laws underfoot to achieve them, just like all the other big businesses who are rich enough to get away with it.

Agreed. The promise that limiting renter's choice to a single provider would result in beneficial cost savings was one of those lies that everyone knows is a lie the moment they hear it, yet everyone with decision making power pretends it is the truth (and many other adjacent parties just thoughtlessly repeat it).

Similar to "this merger will allow us to eliminate wasteful spending on competition and thus offer higher quality service at lower prices, without firing anyone!"

Or "disallowing third parties from making repairs will keep our clients safe"

I could go on, but I wouldn't be saying anything novel or revelatory.

There are other forms of crazy that also motivate self-cutting. Some forms of dissociative identity disorder include strong feelings of being fake, as in not a real person. One might think they are a robot or an animated manikin or similar. Of course this sounds unrealistic (and unlikely) to most of us because we don't experience this. But for people who suffer these episodes, they are extremely disturbing.

So they cut themselves to see their own blood. It helps alleviate the anxiety of the condition. Seeing their own blood helps ground them in their sense of being an actual living creature. Apparently, feeling the pain can help with this too. Though if episodes are lengthy, one cut isn't enough, because the blood dries and resembles plastic, which adds more fuel to the fire.

On a different spectrum, as I understand, there is "sympathy-seeking" cutting, where people cut themselves so their injuries will be seen by others who will then offer support and sympathy and attention. Our society tends to take a pretty dim view of this one, seeing it as mere selfishness or immaturity. Which it may be, in some cases. But in cases of extreme feelings of isolation, loneliness, rejection, etc., the emotional imbalances are enough to drive on to depression and suicide, so it can actually be indicative of a serious condition, and a legit cry for help.

I have read about religious cutting as well, as in "stigmata," where a person internalizes an expectation that this should be happening to them (from their religious upbringing) and experiences cognitive dissonance when it doesn't happen for too long, and wind up doing this to themselves with only semi-awareness so they can then surprise themselves at the discovery of the injury mere moments later.

"Ok class, the next time anyone disrupts class with an outburst like that, they will go into detention. Furthermore, any time any one of you does this, you are all getting extra homework assignments for the day, that will affect your grade."

Back it up with action.

Of course, I have never worked as a teacher and have no idea what the problem with this is. I wonder if someone with my "punish disobedience" attitude just wouldn't succeed as a teacher, these days.

Hey Mr, Altman, nice to see you posting on Slashdot. I find it really strange, however, that you can't seem to type capital letters. I mean, you are clearly too well-educated to misunderstand their use. And certainly wealthy enough to afford a working keyboard or phone. Is it some idiosyncrasy on your part? Like, someone who is customarily as busy as you just doesn't have the time to waste on things like holding shift or tapping capslock as you type along?

In any event, I am working on some LLM-powered tools as hobby projects and am exclusively using Google since they offer me perpetual free access to their key LLMs through their API. The use restrictions are more than ample for development projects. So, if you want to win over developers like me, you might consider a competing offering.

Thanks for reading!

Really no, jobs are not "there to make you miserable." That isn't the goal. Jobs exist because someone wants or needs that work done, and is willing to pay for it.

Employers don't spend gobs of money on the entertaining practice of making others miserable. They are far too stingy for that. They spend the money because they expect that they will make even more money off the work you do.

The "misery" aspect is just a side-effect of the fact that humans experience disutility of labor, and employers will only spend the bare minimum they have to in order to convince people to do the work.

It's totally reasonable to want your job to be non-toxic. It's totally reasonable to lobby and pass laws and join unions and negotiate for better working conditions to make you job as enjoyable as possible. AND it is totally reasonable to complain about jobs that are more miserable than they actually need to be. Because jobs aren't "supposed to make you miserable" so much as "supposed to benefit the one who pays you."

Employers are being more demanding now. The string of layoffs ever since the Fed raised the interest rate to fight inflation (with layoffs being an explicitly stated desired effect as part of the anti-inflation process), combined with the current disinclination to hire new talent, has employees under pressure. They don't want to risk losing their jobs because it will be hard and take a long time to find a replacement.

So, naturally, employers are feeling their power returning to them and using it to exploit, over-demand, abuse, and generally take advantage of their employees.

This is the totally-predictable outcome of human nature. It's in our DNA to abuse power once we get it.

Some time ago I read an article right here on slashdot about how it was very common for people to ask ChatGPT for shopping recommendations. I think that pretty much makes this inevitable. The opportunity here is practically jumping around screaming to be exploited.

Personally, I think any talk of nobly resisting this temptation is wasted air. Ads are going to happen, at a minimum on the free tier. It's just how the world works. But, I WOULD like to push for: only show the ads when users request product recommendations. Work that into the answer pipeline, instead of making an annoying extra presence on the screen constantly forcing you to fight to keep your concentration on the thing you care about. If it is subtle enough, people will continue trusting ChatGPT and asking it for product recommendations, even if the answers come through a targeted marketing pipeline instead of the "heart" of the LLM.