Blackwater would like a word...

Of course you also just described most corporations too...

Question is do they *not* have those? Looked up a couple and they seemed to be equipped on that front...

I think the expense is more like the long standing manufacturers accustomed to charging a boat load of money for a resistive heat loop in the seat. Then optimizing it so they *always* ship that loop, but enable/disable it to still charge a boat load of money for it. Then when they realize they can turn it on/off at will, then they want to charge *monthly* for it. All for a resistive heating setup that they deem really so cheap as to put in all the cars, but they want the 'premium' pricing to continue.

Rinse and repeat for a great deal of stuff in cars they do to drive massive margins. For the low margin stuff, they just make it disproportionately worse than they need to for cost, almost to punish the entry level buyer so they'll know better if they ever get enough money to pay for the premium stuff.

This is consistent with what I've heard second hand, that in Meta they don't really have any vision so instead they are just telling as many people to vaguely 'do stuff' with it as much as possible, in hopes that someone lucks into a hook for Meta to actually "get in the game" in a way similar to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or even Microsoft have found an "in".

There's no particular actionable ideas, so throw everyone in random directions and hope you end up owning someone's "hobby" effort that catches on in an unexpected way.

For simplicity, we say it "requires" a Microsoft account because the UI does not give you an option unless you keep track of today's "trick" to skip the Microsoft account. And this "magic" has evolved over time, so it's not even that "an advanced user is given a clear supported way to bypass", it's that the loopholes shift to make sure this remains a pain to make people give up and just make the damn account already.

It's plainly stated, this is a business direction. Microsoft wants to use your Windows interaction as an upsell and subscription opportunity. The revenue associated with the license itself barely matters.

I doubt that AI will particularly drive changes, since the whole point would be that the LLMs don't care and can work with the languages as-is.

The languages evolve and go away because of human motivations. Maybe a toolchain had a proprietary lock and associated with a business that went south. Maybe the language was a bit overly verbose and people didn't feel like dealing with it. Sometimes it's more like fashion than reason with how they go unpopular and back, maybe because some rabid fan implements a massively useful framework or something.

But LLMs don't have preferences to really assert. To the extent that you have any LLM consideration, it's perhaps to be terse for sake of preserving tokens, but comprehensive library function goes a lot further than syntax concerns to help that, and I don't think the actual language output is a huge portion of the expended tokens anyway.

A theme in the LLM dealing with code front, a *whole* lot of people who never got into coding saying a whole lot about the matter of LLM dealing with code...

To some extent, I get it, a manager who was always intimidated by code manages to get a little project to come out almost like he wanted without the manager actually knowing how to code, and that's exciting. But they always start pontificating on what their success means on projects that they themselves can't make happen even with an LLM, but imagine that whatever it does for them, it should work even more wonders for the coders, or else that if it can do a basic project now, then within a couple of months it'll just do whatever they imagine.

Why bother? LLMs doing the job they are supposed to works just fine targeting a human readable language, what do they imagine the gains to be? The whole point is that the LLMs deal in human friendly material.

This seems to be a pointlessly 'futurist' ambition for showing enthusiasm for LLMs rather than some goal with practical implications.

Even when I see someone having reasonably 'good' luck with their LLM usage, they end up with something a little wrong that, if they would just go manual for a second would be a super quick tweak. But they are committed to the prompt interaction, they keep trying back and forth with prompting and not getting exactly what they want, or something else changing at the same time. Leaving it human readable means you can do that quick manual change without trying to try to induce an LLM to make a precise change, which LLMs even at their best are prone to not manage.

I think he suggests how they operate and perhaps their resultant product quality, not their relative performance business wise.

There were the accounting violations before, and now we see that a significant chunk of that revenue was allegedly on the back of ultimately illegal activity.

They tend to play fast and loose with various facets of running their business compared to others, and it shows in their quality, which isn't exactly great.

However, they do tend to come in much cheaper, and if you deem 'white box' type systems adequate, they are the only ostensibly American company to be found in that game.

Sure, that's one thing, but the impression I got here and in a few examples in my personal life is people think they can resell the use of an LLM to get money for a service they didn't otherwise know how to do.

Specifically, for example, someone saying they could now sell software to people despite not knowing how to code by just typing the prospective customer requirement into an LLM and sending back the output and making money. It doesn't really work that way, but there are people who seem to simultaneously believe it can and yet also believe there is a business opportunity to sit between the customer and a chat prompt without any additional expertise..

I am shocked at how many people think they can resell the services of an LLM agent as a side hustle. If it works out, then there's zero reason to go to *you* for the same LLM they can just use themselves. If it *doesn't* work, well, you've got problems.

Think it's less about games in the browser, and more about just a marketing gimmick to cater to 'gamer sensibilities'

I think if anything they vaguely pitch about controls to keep the browser from taking precious resources away from games or something..

Note I pointed out how they tend to *exclusively* grab credit as if they are the *only* ones that matter. There is a role for 'leadership', but the leadership role is more often than not lucked into by either being born into money, or having rich friends rather than particular skills.

In terms of "strategic" direction, this is all too frequently bullshit, with wishlist thinking rather than insight. One example, an executive laid out his strategy, and after peeling away the rambling, the core "strategy" was "increase price per unit, increase units sold, and reduce costs". The leg of making this work was left to vaguely "the team has to innovate something that makes the product a must have", no inkling or suggestion as to what such an innovation might be, but now that he offered the direction "innovate", now it can happen, as if people weren't constantly trying to do so anyway.

So when it predictably failed? Well, unfortunately his team was unable to execute on his brilliant strategy. If it had passed? He would have had the courage to toss aside conventional wisdom that you have to balance volume and price and expense and lead the company to amazing success, and the guy who actually came up with whatever mythical thing only did so because that guy ordered him to "innovate".

Decades in the industry has had me working closer with these "leaders" and the closer I get the more reinforced the impression becomes: these people are egotistical glory hogs that got their position thanks to their family or having the right college friends, or being a background character in a popular product or company and milking that for sucker companies that see a brand like Microsoft or Google in a resume and assume that person must be the most awesome person ever.

I have met good leaders, but they tend to also have the chops to do actual work in the field they lead, even if they don't do it anymore. A good leader needs to have developed some innate understanding to have an vaguely accurate gut feeling for how the organization is doing, to know who is actually doing well or not, knowing how to correct a team that has gotten wrapped up on stuff that doesn't matter. Most leaders are essentially gifted their position by other leaders that don't fully understand things and it becomes a lottery for who gets success and sometimes global recognition like Altman, or who just everyone gets to see as a blatant fraud, like Milton.

Given the way the 'OpenClaw' fanaticism has gone? Absolutely. They are very excited about the prospect of letting the LLM generate everything up to and including API calls to post content to forums and such.