torpak

The best solution to this problem is not to buy one in the first place.

Is there anyone who likes landlords? Why would they?

You only get to become CEO when you have friends in high places. Why would anyone risk the backlash for hurting you when silently letting you go with a golden handshake doesn’t cost their own money or at least a neglegible part of it.

I remember the 1984 incident. At the time I thought this is so ironic, it has to be satire. Now, just a few years later it doesn’t even register as odd anymore.

If I recall correctly there was a time, where they did a deal with Disney a few years back. Disney wanted to bring one or more of their classic animations back to the cinema and Amazon disabled playback of those movie(s) for that time even for people who had “bought” them.

When it comes to corporations, the problem is there are no good actors. They are required by law to do what ever maximizes shareholder value.

I wouldn’t do that if I hadn’t warned everyone who would and wouldn’t listen about this since the start of the business model. I’m just frustrated, that nobody listens until it’s to late.

Ad targeting should just be banned outright. It serves noone and creates huge pools of easy to abuse data.

The funny part is that contextual ads are at least as effective as targeted ads. So not only is facebook violating your privacy. They are ripping of their customers at the same time.

So you give them $14 and hope, they don’t sell your data? I never had a facebook/whatsapp account and never will and I know why.

The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised by this. If you buy a physical book from anywhere, you own it. If you “buy” the rigth to play a movie (or read a book) from amazon, you own nothing. Usually they don’t show that so clearly but that’s the reality.

When you make your business dependent on a single supplier, that’s a massive risk. I don’t quite understand why many Managers don’t grasp that concept. There are two solutions: build your own infrastructure or use something that’s either publicly available (like open source software) or easily replaceable (like a library with a common interface that many others also implement in a way that would also solve your usecase).

If you don’t do that, one day in the future your supplier will increase the cost until it’s just below the cost of switching. If the cost of switching is more than you can afford at that point, you are screwed.

Cloud computing anyone?

he reality is if you give it a simple prompt, it generates the blandest, most uninspired, badly paced textural garbage imaginable

Which is not too far from the typical sequel quality coming out of hollywood at the moment ;-)

That is definitely not inevitable. It could very well be that we reach a point of diminishing returns soon. I’m not convinced, that the simplistic construction of current generation machine learning can go much further than it already has without significant changes in strategy.

I would even go so far as to say: I want every household appliance as dumb as possible. Once things are smart enough, they are used to spy on you, or defraud you or both.

It’s worse. They use “machine learning”. So nobody can know the failure modes before they happen.

Climate change. I live in a city with decent bicycle infrastructure and good public transport. Yet most people still argue they need their damn car to get to work alone without luggage, less than 5 kilometers away.

You can have a bad government with any kind of economic system. As evidenced by the USA. They tend to commit most of their atrocities outside their own country but that doesn’t make them any better than china or russia.

No amount of ethics teaching will change the behaviour of a narcisistic psychopath like musk.

It is inevitable with scaling quickly. In the early days of the internet there were unwritten (and later written) rules how to behave. And people who didn’t accept those even after being educated were usually banned for a time.

This worked because the early internet users were mostly us nerds and we tend to be able to have civilized discussions.

Every time new users came, those were quickly educated and if they didn’t fit in they either left or built their own communities.

Of cause there were always trolls but they were few and quickly isolated.

The problem with people who couldn’t behave started when people came in more quickly than they could be educated. And those who knew the rules didn’t want to repeat the rules 20 times a day to some newcomers. So either a community stopped accepting new members or started accepting shitstorms.