That's the problem with winning. You become The Man.

That isn't just semantics. Your interests change - you become more (small-c) conservative, defensive measures become much more important, etc. because the next incremental customer is worth much less than keeping what you have. And the risk is real - everyone wants to be king.

In Apple's case, there's also that it is now a fully post-Jobs company, and Jobs was uniquely responsible for what Apple was. His remaining influence is in the heads of the graybeards who worked with him and is otherwise ceremonial. And Jobs was "counterculture", to some extent. It was more than PR - it was his personality. It is why for istance they yielded the enterprise market to Windows - he not only didn't give a shit about device management or directory service permissions or stuff like that, he considered that somewhere between distracting from and hostile to making "insanely great" devices. That was all tempered through business demands, but he really did refuse to do a lot of "normal" things that are considered table stakes today. Jobs was a strange CEO.

Cook is not. Cook is very good at his job, but he's not the type to "leave money on the table" by refusing to build something he doesn't personally care about. And at their size, it is harder for them to resist losing focus, especially without Job's unique mix of arrogance, talent, poker face, assholishness, focus and charisma.

I don't think it is possible to have a $trillion+ company that isn't exploitive. As they get bigger, they take the shape and characteristics of the system in which they're embedded.

You want non-shitty companies, grow them somewhere that doesn't reward them for doing shitty things.

Sounds a lot like remote-disable devices for cars, so the repo man has an easier job.

When those first came out, some of them allowed the car to drive, but would honk the horn to shame the driver, but now I think they all just disable the engine. Imagining the Apple version of that is entertaining... it could chose your emoji for you, blast Nickelback when it detects you're in church, or start sending your photos to random contacts until you pay up.

Sell me something and leave me alone is my preferred model.

They only time I can imagine renting something like a phone or computer is for a specific purpose, and only if there's an early out clause that would result in lower costs than a purchase. Like renting a phone for an international vacation to avoid the risk of brownshirts imaging your actual phone at the border. Otherwise it makes more sense to buy it outright and sell it afterwards.

But basically, if there is an option that doesn't result in a monthly payment or emails that I have to pay attention to, I will take that option. I guess I'm not a relationship kinda guy, at least when it comes to legal fictions.

OK, I'm picking nits.

Sam Altman is also a psychotic sociopath. He's probably pitching "Project Skynet" to Trump and Pete Hegseth right now - "Look how effective our tools clearly are! You could be using them against China, Iran, Cuba ..." [checks notes] "Um, Greenland, Canada, Democrats (especially Obama & Biden!), E. Jean Carroll, the BBC... And for the low, low price of..." [pinky finger] "one trillion dollars, we can be up and running by, let's say... 2029?"

See what Naked Face-Eating Man can do to the interior of a MechaHitlerMobile before it can get cops to respond.

How long before someone leaves an alligator or python in one?

Partly true.

Completely correct about court decisions coupled with legislation mean that the US asserts data sovereignty but will not honor it.

But Europe only grumbled about that until the US selected a geriatric grifter for executive and started providing object lessons in why that wasn't just a theoretic risk.

Honestly, so far this is going easier than Europe could have hoped. I'm sure Piggie will notice at some point and start running his yap and throwing around more tariffs, providing more demonstration as to exactly why Europe has to migrate data somewhere safe. But he's incompetent and impulsive enough that they have a window in which to migrate before he takes his last dump and some more competent fascist ends up in charge.

Sometimes I wake up and start doing new science. But usually I just roll over and go back to sleep.

So far, experiments have shown that one cannot expect people to remain as diligent after extended periods of LLM use.

This is absolutely a problem if you work in a shitty sweatshop that forces you to be a sin eater for robot code.

The way we do it is, the tools are available, but you're not required to use them in any specific way or really, at all if you don't want to. You do, of course, have to get your work done and be responsible for your code. We have a spectrum of use, from all-in cascades of agents through folks who use it as little more than a search engine.

We had a few incidents where people were caught out and couldn't explain why their code did what it did, but that seemed to be enough to warn the rest; that hasn't happened in a while. I don't see our "velocity" stats, so I don't know if/to what extent the robots are speeding us up, but knowing our bean counters we wouldn't be maintaining our spend at this point if there weren't a visible bottom-line result. I do see our bug and incident metrics, which haven't seen any impact from LLM use.

If you work in a shithole, yeah, they're going to burn you out. But that's about sociopathic management, not the robot. They'd wear you down a different way if LLMs didn't exist.

I just figured fleecing rubes was considered the retirement plan for this band of raiders and whores.

Dude's crime wasn't playing the inside, it was getting caught while not having enough dirt on the boss to make him care.

He's creating a "middle class" - they will get the info after the regular insiders, but before hoi polloi.

He should have thought of selling multiple levels of higher tiers.

For a small fee you can get your bullshit before everyone else.

Who's testing intentional bias in OpenAI or Anthoropic?

There's a handy list, probably a little out of date.

Names you might recognize of include Juniper, Citrix and Netapp.

It's bad, but Microsoft has a awfully large number of lines of code to run through Mythos or whatever (whether they need that many is a whole other discussion). A more useful metric on overall code quality would be how many bugs are being found per 10k lines of code compared to their peers (including FLOSS); e.g. if Microsoft ran 10m SLOC through Mythos to get those 570 bugs, and a smaller project ran 1m SLOC and got 57 bugs, then you could reasonably argue that their code quality is about on a par with the smaller project. It's still Apples to Oranges though, because some coding solutions are going to be much more challenging to code, and therefore more likely to contain bugs.

On the upside, we're probably going to get several months of this while everyone with access to Mythos et al runs their existing code through it and integrates into their release processes for new code, and the end result will be things being much harder for all the bad actors in the world. Even if you don't use the improved code yourself, that's hopefully going to have a significant impact on the number and size of all the botnets out there, and that's a net benefit to everyone apart from the bad actors.