Crashes are now rare in general. When I was a kid, it seemed like there was a major air crash in the US almost annually. I may be wrong, but I don't remember a full-sized airliner (bigger than a regional jet) having a catastrophic crash in the US since shortly after 9/11 when that Airbus lost its tail and crashed in NYC. (Being a natural pessimist, I find this outcome hard to believe and would have lost a good deal of money if I had bet on it.)

However, there still continue to be a large number of hard landings, runway slideoffs, engine fires, cabin fires and other emergency situations where the passengers still need to evacuate quickly because their lives are at risk. (Not to mention the "Miracle on the Hudson".) The safety briefings are still relevant in all those situations.

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.

Eric S. Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which inspired Mozilla to make their browser open source. For some reason, this means they name their extended support releases after him.

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.

I'm sticking with stone knives and bear skins.

is why I'm sticking to just toggle switches and blinking lights.

Microsoft
Micro-Soft
Hugely-Hard

I don't know why your reading comprehension is so bad. I would have totally preferred it if any of them knew how to drive a manual or wanted to learn how. But they didn't. How does that make *me* sexist?

The biggest deterrent: Girlfriends and/or wives. They don't know how to operate one, and they have zero interest in learning how. Now you have all sorts of logistical problems.

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.

America will retake the lead in AI the same way we did with EVs: Just ban the ones from China. Problem solved.

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.