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.

Make IBM Great Again: go back to .. leasing computers?!

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.

Nobody remembers or cares that a B-2's toilet cost $23k, so the Pentagon is updating to a newer, better form of government waste that kids today will better understand.

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?

I /suspect/ it's so when you have to upload a file to a website as a PDF but you have several and it doesn't handle that well you can multi-select a group of files and it will upload a single PDF.

No idea if that's what they mean but it might actually be useful.

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.

Malware is any software that runs on your computer but is intended to serve the interests of someone else.

Calling it malware isn't so much inaccurate as it's unspecific. Not all malware is adware, but 100% of adware is malware.

Wait 'till they hear about what's being stored at 2300 Empire Ave.

Though it's pretty clear that Hollywood is in self-destruct mode at this point so it's hard to blame the property owners when the economy is headed towards only making weapons and lattes.

Too bad The Message has shifted the business climate towards death merchants.

By time October comes around there may be new demand for the microwave pyrolysis methods of reducing plastics to petroleum feedstocks.

If the editors here are to be believed California has so much solar power and plastic waste that they don't know what to do with and gasoline is already approaching $8 there due to the foolish wars and foolish taxation.

IIRC the heavy plastic chains could help with the disastrous heavy crude shortage, especially. Chemical engineers, please correct.

Yup, there's also the time factor.

There's an important study of boys at age six being diagnosed with ADHD.

At 6 yrs 1 month the odds are 50% higher than at 6 yrs 11 months.

Because they're both "age 6" but in boys that year is huge in development and all metrics are against the age-appropriate standard.

If you're on WoW or Roblox all your waking hours you will have retarded development vs. somebody who is in the world.

So you'll be more ADHD for a 15 yr old if you mostly miss age 14.

"Trust the experts" and sheet.

Nobody is that "stupid" in those departments.

The question should be what was the quid pro quo?

We can imagine what the PLA got out of it but what favor did Microsoft get?

And how high up the chain did it go? Who specifically approved the arrangement?

At least Microsoft probably has Windows 11 "backups" of the hard drives of anyone who might think of bringing charges.

Not sure if that strategy can be called stupid. Lots of other words apply.

"One Nation Under Blackmail" is a popular phrase.

Yeah, so if this is the cover story what other heat signatures might they be looking for?

It's not immediately obvious to me but something we should understand.

Detecting Zizians would help prevent these forest fires but it would be quite hard for a satellite to do that.

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.