This would be an interesting article 4 years ago. Now I think it's old news and we've got the War Department spending $50bn on a new autonomous warfare wing.
Cook was a steward of Apple as an offshored manufacturing behemoth. I'm looking forward to where this reset goes. Hopefully better and American made products.
The privacy focus is why Apple is dominant today, keep that up.
Pricing is based on customer value and restriction of customer options.
If we're paying $1000 for a Chinese phone that we'd pay $2000 for, we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world. As we get closer to that point, the urgency to onshore is increasing.
Exploitation when we can get away with it is in our social nature as humans. So this isn't about the Chinese, or any other culture. It's just necessary for this to be onshored because it's critical.
> we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world
What does this look like, in practice? Once China and India and Vietnam "starve the professional capability to compete" (presumably in the manufacture of smart phones) from the US, what would actually change and why?
This would be a world where the top talent and training capability for that talent lives there. Our universities would have deteriorated, our professional class at this top level would have died off or relocated over there. Probably an example I can think of is the once great textile industry of Britain that is now in Asia.
I can only speak to corporate use, but the most common issues I saw were battery life, charging port issues, and speaker failures, in that order. I managed about 1200 for about 2 years and I'd get 1-3 of those issues a week. I'd say 25% of the time it required a replacement. Average age 2.5 years.
That’s repairable for cheaper that buying a new one, isn’t it? Perhaps the rationale is that it’s cheaper because the resell price offset the repair price?
Yeah you get a few bucks back from recyclers or your carrier but also having to inventory phones and track them is a pain in the ass and requires staff to manage. Much easier to just toss it and send em a new one next day.
VCs are middlemen. It's not their money. As long as they can find a narrative to raise money, make a commission and do damage control on their reputation after the fallout, then their side pieces will never want for nothing.
Yes. Before AI the source was a demonstration of your substance. Users would be encouraged to reach out to maintainers to pay for upgrades or custom tweaks or training. Or indirectly pay for advertising while reading docs. After AI those revenue streams have collapsed. Now you have to withdraw enough of the work to make it hard for an individual to recreate with an LLM. The open source needs to be restricted to a rich interaction layer. Cloudflare just announced they are using that model with their services which were already closed source but now they are exposing them through new APIs. So they can capitalize on existing services that were not ripe enough for SaaS before AI, that had to be handled by their in-house professionals services folks. With this move they are using AI to expand/automate their white glove professional services business to smaller customers.
Altman didn't create AI. That disruption is already coming no matter what. He's a fine enough steward of the tech. And what's this garbage about selling to the military? You pay taxes? You fund the military. Without security you can't protect your nation or your allies, and enemy nations would do as they please. Yet another citizen who benefits from a system while trying to attack it.
> That disruption is already coming no matter what.
[citation needed]. Depending on what you mean by "that disruption," I might even be willing to bet against it coming at all.
> He's a fine enough steward of the tech.
He's a manipulative con-man who is mediocre at everything except convincing investors to give him money. If the tech is truly as revolutionary as it's purported to be, he absolutely should not be a "steward of the tech."
> And what's this garbage about selling to the military? You pay taxes? You fund the military. Without security you can't protect your nation or your allies, and enemy nations would do as they please.
There is security, and there is bombing schools. Guess which one is Altman associating himself and the software he sells associating with?
I think there is a super-sophisticated industry where advertisers are gamed out of their advertising dollars, and we occasionally can see it leaking out. For example I was very recently relentlessly hammered by political advertising by some odious tech guy who wants to get nominated for some congressional seat in the Bay Area. This was hard programming, where they just threw out the guy's name before you could hit mute, figuring that ppl would do that as quick as they could because the guy's vibe was so unrelatable. I have to imagine that the seasoned ad folks saw this dude as a pay day that they'd milk for all he is worth with this utterly misery inducing campaign. It's almost 100% brainwashing, with the tiniest sprinkle of substance. It has to be an industry that's preying on the buyer as much as the consumer.
I also get bombarded by anti-Saikat ads, most from "Abundant Future", which appears to be a PAC funded by Garry Tan and the Ripple guy. the ads loudly proclaim that AOC tweeted once that one of Saikat's tweets is divisive, and that Saikat is a millionaire. This coming from two guys who control a huge pile of money in San Francisco.
This is what I call content based on 'garbage'. Because garbage is the random collection of peoples' stuff. You can try and make sense and commentary on a society through the garbage dump, but it's pretty superficial. It doesn't tell you a lot about any real person's motivations. So it's not a great basis for commenting on real people. OPs comments are on the collection of things that they happen to come across through news and social media. Sure it looks like a lot is happening, but look at any one person's or business's approach and it will make a lot more sense. Yes, I realize people are producing content that appeals to the 'garbage' mindset, but it's obviously theater. A system that writes 10,000 lines of code for you a week, is headline theater.
That's not how the legal framework in society works. Victims are compensated. The business pays. The precedent of wrongdoing is specifically established which means that further infringements can be quickly resolved.
The legal system does not seek to destroy the business, or individual criminal. Instead it wants them to be able to continue doing their other non-criminal stuff.
The legal system has two goals - to compensate individuals harmed and to discourage further violations of the law. This lawsuit seems to have fulfilled the first goal but fell flat on its face when it comes to punitive damages.
I think there's an axis of perceived wrongdoing here, and you and I fall on different points. Yours is more extreme, you say Meta was doing broad harm by exploring this activity, and want to see greater damages to scare other businesses off from the general territory of addictive interfaces. Mine is where we want businesses to continue to explore and develop 'sticky', compelling, user experiences but Meta went too deep in some specific ways.
EDIT: I see I'm mixing up the New Mexico case yesterday on sexploitation with the addiction case in Los Angeles I thought we were talking about here.
To start off with my personal beliefs... I agree - I see a much broader harm in how platforms try and make themselves addictive as I've worked on such systems in the past. I think the public and even most technical folks that aren't deep into engagement metrics underestimate how studied the field has been and how many iterations of approaches to daily engagement reminders, friction removal and FOMO have been worked through to get to the point we're at today. In my opinion, which absolutely isn't fact, this work is broadly unproductive at improving our daily lives - I can understand that there are some compelling counter arguments that these developments can be harnessed for good but I don't share them.
But, specific to this article and ignoring my personal beliefs - I still find this judgement to be severely lacking. I don't think this judgement is nearly noticeable enough to Meta to actually provide a significant impact on the way they do business outside of tidying up some specifically egregious corners and making sure they internally communicate moving forward in a way that appears to comply with the judgement. The judgement was enough when applied to this pool of users to make these specific users unprofitable in retrospect (e.g. Meta would have more money if it had refused to even do business with these users) but I'm also concerned that the pool of considered victims was so narrow that it excluded a significant number of similarly harmed victims and that the amortized damages end up being negligible.
I guess we have deep deep divisions on what everyone is doing in society, and what makes a 'good' society.
As I've aged, I've entered new-to-me territory where a good society needs to reflect the world as it is, so that its members have high survivability.
At the local family level for instance. When my kids were young. I had dreams of being super financially successful so that I could give them lots of nice things. I just don't want that for them anymore. Protection, and pandering, does not make a good lineage IMO. It's something of a leap I'm asking of you to connect this to my position here on Meta, but I've got other work to do, and I hope it's enough to convey my point.
> When my kids were young. I had dreams of being super financially successful so that I could give them lots of nice things. I just don't want that for them anymore.
That is a decision you had the freedom to make for yourself and your family. In this case, the millions of children didn’t get to make that choice and meta knowingly exploited that. I hope you see our point of view as to why meta doesn’t get the benefit of doubt here.
This was about Meta's platforms not doing enough to protect children from sexual material (and allegedly ignoring employee warnings and lying to the public about it), not intrinsically their addictive interface and compelling user experience. I suppose the actions necessary to protect children from exposure to sexual material/exploitation could limit their ability to make certain changes to their platform, eg tighter moderation would reduce the amount of content that could be uploaded, but they could also have just not allowed children on the platform (like how Facebook started) and then not worried about child exploration?
Meta knowingly hurt children for profit. It worked.
If we are in any way serious about technocratic solutions to social problems, this would be untenable, the company would be bankrupted, a new company would fill its place. No tears would be cried, nothing of value would be lost, half of hacker news would be chafing at the bit to build a better alternative for the newly opened market.
But that's not what happened. We allowed children to be knowingly hurt for profit.
Not hurting children is a pretty popular idea. So why don't you make that technical product for children based on this foundation, and blow Meta out of the water? I love your conviction. Good luck.
It's not sarcasm. I'm channeling you to a more productive focus for what I see as reaching beliefs/hopes. Try and make them happen instead of trying to convince other people they should happen. It will either temper/align them to the world as it is, or show the world what it can be.
Ok, well let's think about this with the same framework I'm trying to bring to the discussion above: system dynamics.
Your comment has the effect of being flippant, condescending, and seemingly callous to the subject matter. When called out, you have backed up to an alternative explanation which is, again, massively condescending (I don't need channeling mate, certainly not from you).
You have not engaged with the content in a good faith manner.
So, standing back and looking at your comment in terms of its effects rather than what it claims to be its effects (AND the effect that making those secondary claims have - doubling down on condescension), it looks more like you're trying to bully me into changing my behaviour and viewpoint without meaningfully engaging with the content.
Ironically, I'm feeling psychological reactance, so your comments polarized me against you (see the Backfire Effect) and deepened my convictions.
I won't engage with bullies any further but to call them out, I'm hesitant to bring the conversation down to this level and give you any kind of air to begin with, but I think it's important to analyze discourse as it happens.
It's very hard to think they wouldn't do something harmful to children again if the economic incentives aligned. For corporations it's just so easy to say sorry, and in the worst case they know an irrelevant fine will be placed in order not "to destroy the business".
Yeah compared to the case in LA today where one person was awarded 3M for getting addicted to instagram. The verdict here seems about 4 orders of magnitude too small.
Your opinion isn't particularly important in our legal system. Since your comment expresses a preconceived notion of the
accused's guilt. It would disqualify you from a jury, and undermine your legitimacy in a judicial, defensive and even prosecutorial function.
