This is true in a lot of case.

The other case is where the fund managers and 'market makers' are not tied to the individual companies, they also don't care about long term performance. They only care about the ROI, on their position.

If a 'savvy' analyst determines the latest round of layoffs will mean a huge jump in earnings per-share for the current product cycle, and knows that is usually 2 years or so long. They just put a tickler in to sell 18 months out; before retail an state pension funds work out ACME has nothing in the pipe line and will soon be going to market with quick application of lipstick on their current products up against likely superior offerings from competitors, and it will end in tears. Or that the current round of enshitification is going burn thru the remaining customer loyalty they have enjoyed jeprodizing their future market position or whatever the case may be.

They simply don't care because they can make a profitable trade today. They are 'owners' and 'investors' but they don't have a traditional sense of ownership and concern. I come back to the problem not being 'capitalism' or even hard nosed capitalism ie 'you don't work you don't eat', 'you don't produce value nobody will buy' but rather on of to great a number of abstractions and with them to many perverse incentives.

I have said it before i really do think the 401k system has broken not just markets but our society. Your point "so essentially the retirement accounts are yes votes and not ownership oversight" is DEAD ON!

Not to defend China - its amoral indefensible blight on the planet - but the average Chinese citizen being one 1/3 as productive is not the only way the math works out. It certainly can be the case that we are not measuring productivity accurately and/or are using the wrong metrics as a proxy.

For on thing productivity is a measure of progress toward a goal, does China have the same goals we do? I am not sure "Biggest GDP" is really what Xi is after.

I think looking at Europe is good example. They are mostly capitalist but the best parts of it also using the petrol chemical cheat code. Germany is struggling, they have trouble even trying to allocate and spend their own stimulus packages. The rest of the EU make the US debt spiral situation look solvable ;-) by comparison and the bond market does not share that view.

I think you could say that hard-nosed brand of capitalism is what has carried us this far and why we don't look like France right now. I mean seriously compare the BLM unrest, or Jan 6 (if you like) in the US to what is happening in France right now. There is no comparison, in terms of how destructive and destabilizing it is/was. Take away all the various politicking and window dressing about what is going in France right now and it boils down to - a large segment public accustomed to increasing socialism is upset the government won't give them nicer stuff, and government that is by no-means opposed to affording people lots for entitlements pushing back on doing so because those in office recognize it isnt sustainability affordable.

The problem isn't capitalism and it isn't how 'hard-nosed' that capitalism might be it is an ownership and direction problem. Capitalism as described by someone like Adam Smith assumes self interest but it assumed the owner of the capital would be in control of it. That is if you are the owner of a company you want it to continue to grow for at-least-your-life-time but probably that of your children and grand children. Today the CEO is employee and the owners are largely inactive shareholders (they don't vote on much, read board meeting records etc) they are not interested in how the company will perform 20 years from now they are ONLY interested at most in how it will perform between now and maybe the next dividend date. The CEO is only interested in the current quarter and perhaps next, he does not plan to be there longer than 18mons in anycase and is perfectly happy to move on if the quarterly bonus are not fat.

Ross Perot tried to explain this to the public when he said 'Giant Sucking Sound'. Anyone with a brain could see 'trade modernization' was going to create massive windfalls for ownership short term as the divested expensive American workers, real-estate, and regulatory environments and bought cheap labor in Mexico and further afield; but anyone with a brain could see what that was going to mean 30 years on.. Well here we are. An America that can't make things, and I don't think has bright economic future at all, unless we make some PAINFUL choices today to course correct. Because guess what AI datacenters dont care where they are at and models/IP will always be stolen by whoever wants it enough. In the end you have to make things - physical things - people want.

yes but people instinctively understand mechanical devices wear out. There is/was no natural reason to assume that about software. For the first decades of computing most of the public encountered that wasn't the case, quite the opposite in fact in 1995, the COBOL program you wrote in 1965 still worked fine. The DOS program you bought in 1985 still ran on Windows 95 just fine (well it was as likely to work as it ever was on any given DOS machine ;-) maybe more).

Software right seem to people like book, and their experience with books had been they were quite readable sometimes across several generations if they were cared for and protected (see the family Bible).

The rule here should not be that you can't 'sell' clients for your game server. I don't think the government should dictate the business model, but it really should make sure consumer understand WHAT specifically they are getting and not getting in exchange for their dollar.

There should be some limitations that come along with license terms that are not open ended, that is you are providing a binary(ies) or source code that will run on a given platform, ie a computer with a given instruction ISA and operating system with a given set of libraries and syscalls. If there is something else you need to make 'effective use' of the product that isn't either provided or made availible by a disinterested third-party, like a server component, vendors should be required to be up front and in your face about that.

This ^^

We do not live in a command economy. It is not the role of congress to decide what business models are appropriate. It is the role of congress to make sure free citizens are able to make informed decisions.

What is really need here IMHO is good warning labels like what is placed on a pack of cigarettes.

WARNING - This software does not function without access to components not included, with no certainly of future availability or access pricing.

WARNING - This product contains digitial rights management, the license terms represent an open end RENTAL agreement, revocable by the issuer not a sale.

Require those to appear DIRECTLY above the check out button for online sales, and be on the face of boxes and printed manuals if they apply.

That supposed newer software has fewer vulnerabilities than older software.

Broadly speaking that is likely true, you python backed REST service with SPA front-end, is not probably going to suffer from memory saftey issue like the C based CGI program it replaced. I'll grant you that, but I don't see any evidence at all out there to supposed it is not as target rich in terms of authorization/authentication/business logic flaws as anything it replaced.

I don't have experience with BOA but I do have system experience in other megabanks and I can tell you most of them have a front-end/backend architecture where the system of record that actually does settlements has quite a lot of isolation in front of it and separately enforces transaction rules. If for example you found an IDOR in the web banking application and you swapped your account ID in an internal transfer for an account not your own which you discovered by whatever means as the funds source to one of your other accounts as the destination, it *might* let move the money. The system might treat you like you have the money for the rest of the day. So you might be able to pay other people within the institution etc (where they can roll it back) or take money from an ATM. However when the backend processes all the transactions from the day to do settlements it will be REJECTED by some old hunk of COBOL or maybe...Java..

They will clean it up and come after you.. That is real reason a lot of these bugs don't probably get exercised. It isn't that people using the public components of these systems don't see interesting things breeze by their browser consoles or even burp suite instances, they probably do, they just know even if it worked they are 100% going to be caught; and their Jubilee would last about a day before turning into something that looks more like Revelation.

I meant to say "What really smells is the why DIDN'T the pipeline/workflow"

My question is how do they actually know anything is fixed?

Fundamentally hiring contractors to write a lot quick patches, has the same problems as having AI write a lot quick patches. We are talking about systems that have man-years of development and maintenance in them newly on boarded contract workers lack the context and social authority to make invasive changes.

They only way you could get thru a really large volume of scatter shot patchwork across the enterprise is if you let people read a bunch of AI summaries of the issue, and work from that. That then leads you with a lot of code reviews and merges to do, as the new bottleneck those people also need to understand what they are looking at to really be sure it is right, so again what do they read an AI evidence summary and just sign off, if not that is just the next bottleneck?

What really smells is the why did the pipeline/workflow just have claude-agents authoring the patches too? I think I know the answer, Anthropic probably told them 'No' even though really it is the smallest and after all the analysis work is done best specified part of the job. Real architects don't get blame the framers, when the building collapses because the dimensions of the materials were unspecified, and real mechanical engineers don't get blame the lather operator when the crank shafts wear prematurely because they did not account for unavoidable heating while machining and the effect it would have on the metal surface. That is what Anthropic wants here though, they want to be able to say it was the guys writing the patches and the people who approved them that screwed up, even as their faulty tools fed them bad information and reviewers were handed an impossible volume of work.

This seems like a massive CYA on the part of Anthropic and it is really disingenuous. If it works they get to claim they are heroes that enabled what would have been impossible to achieve before, if it leads to any serious problem, its the fault of those 'contractors' and or the reviewers who did not take their responsibilities seriously, without mention of how unrealistic that likely was.

Try GPT-OSS or one of the 4-bit quanitized qwen3.8 variants

Sure that is a tiny expense compared to salary. However $200 a seat is still quite a lot of spend if you have 1000 employees or so.

Now suppose for 800 of those 1000 you could put a *slightly* better Ps on their desks. Maybe the dollar cost on those is $1200 more than basic mini pc to run a browser you were buying them anyway. Figure you replace those at most every 3 years, you are already ahead! If you can stretch that five years way ahead. Don't like the capex, and prefer opex for accounting - lease the PCs

Bonus your are not sending your data to the AI labs, or paying even more for ZDR or whatever upsell option where they pinky-swear they won't swipe your stuff.

This step one in the inevitable campaign against open models and FOSS agent/harness systems.

These bit AI labs are better but for Joe public gpt-oss/qwen3.8/deepseek/granite4 are good enough for a lot of stuff. All of them will work on $600 GPU installed in PC from this decade. The open models will only improve, the layered specialist models will become more efficent. The GPU hardware and memory prices will come down eventually.

$200+/monthly subscripts just are not going to make economic sense for the majority of personal and general office worker users. - That is unless Anthropic/OpenAI/X can keep self hosted AI out of the public's hands.

You think that is really more of a marketing stunt to be employed beyond the race capture all the big pharma contracts before OpenAI does? I don't..

This ^^^ much more succinctly stated than my comment above.

Once the change volume is so large no 'people' would ever do bisect there really is no point in having it. I don't think it is 'useful for the agents' either because they might as well just run the tests, consume stack traces and fix the glitch given the way they work and how they have to bring the repository context in to make the fix. All wanking about with 400 rounds of source control operations does is burn more tokens.

For vibe coded projects, might as well go back to 1988 style and do your version control like tar -cvf myProj.1.tar myProj ... tar -cvf myPraj.2.tar myProj ... once an hour :-). When something breaks call do a diff between the current repo and the last one where changelog.txt says the feature was implemented, to narrow the scope of the debug operation.

Interesting how these guys are not dog flooding their own stuff.

I have seen a lot of OpenAI training material recently and Anthropic materials that seem far more designed to set tokens on fire than accomplish everything.

Notably everything it encourages you to do is around building 'workflows'. They almost always heavily utilize source control (especially git). With a lot of dedicated agents that because they are dedicated have to re-read the repository content every step of the way thru the CI/CD pipe. It is almost like they are trying to get their customers to set as many tokens on fire as possible.

The other effort part of it of course is to build a lot of CYA gates. Where 10 different people have to sign off on things they were supposed to 'fully review' but realistically because AI is removing them from so much of the process and the entire point is to do more faster they can only ask more AI some questions about things and hope, so it all gets pencil whipped. I think this actually to make sure that no mid-level manager actually gets in trouble. After all the moment some Director Of Product development gets called on the carpet and loses his quarterly bonus, they might actually say my teams will not be using Codex to do ... in the future, but that won't happen as long the blame can be laid upon some fantastically over burdened test engineer or project architect. OpenAI and Anthropic probably know maintaining the asymptotic growth in token spend to justify their datacenter investments means helping 'customers' ensure that if they footgun themselves with the products, they are always blame the people and the fix is always add more AI.

It does raise a lot questions now doesn't it.

We'd have to decide what has person-hood as well. Like does the model have person hood or the agent. if it is not the model but the agent, what are we allowed to do to the agent.

Can I change the model from Fable to Opus, or do I have to get the current agent's consent first?

What If I don't need the agent anymore. Can I delete chat? Is it "my laptop my choice?"

Right; that is really what this is about. Nobody there seriously thinks pile of matrix math has feelings.

They just don't want their training data poisoned.