Unfortunately many states (north eastern states that spread salt on their roads I’m looking at you) have rolled back their safety inspections - but this is the perfect application of a reasonable state-sanctioned activity. Tax tires, inspect vehicles, write fixit tickets, and let insurance handle the rest of the edge cases where deadbeats caused harm with their slick-tired jalopies.
I mean…I guess. But this is ridiculous - how many layers does our technology need to bash through to update two records on remote systems? I get that value is being added at some point - but just charge some micropayment for transactions. This is just too much.
I guess Meta still needs some people to run the core business (ads/social media rageslop) but your point about 2021 staffing levels would suggest they haven't been able to innovate or bring anything new to market in the past 5 years. Llama has certainly been impressive but doesn't really add more money to the pile or more eyeballs to the ad inventory.
It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.
I disagree. While their core products have stayed similar, they keep getting better at ads after Apple's privacy changes in 2021 hurt their efficiency. And Instagram has changed quite a bit, with reels growing to half of total IG usage. (Of course these are dystopian products but I'm just trying to be objective here).
To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.
Not only are businesses already doing that - they're not even cleaning up their source material so LLMs are generating garbage outputs from the old inconsistent trash that haunts Confluence, Google Drive, and all of the other dumping grounds for enterprise ephemera. Oftentimes "AI transformation" is just a slightly better search engine that regurgitates your old strategy (that didn't work the first time) and wraps it up in new sycophantic language that C-levels use to bulldoze the budgets and timelines of actual skilled front line employees.
I do believe that LLMs and AI provide actual value, but the "workspace" is usually the passive aggressive CYA battleground for employees to appear productive in-spite of leadership's blind-spots, ossified business practices, and "aligned" decision-making that doesn't actually fix a broken org. Maybe this release will be the one that finally challenges nepo-hires, not-invented here, and all of the other corpo crap that defines "enterprise" business.
Cleaning up source material is not easy work in companies that have massive piles of it and don't exactly know which parts of it are wrong. Quite often these documents are poorly versioned and do work for something but not exactly what you're looking for.
With this said, you can use your incorrect AI answers to find and then purge or repair this old and/or poorly written documentation and improve the output.
I agree - and I've noticed that these AI transformations tend to lay bare the many issues, inconsistencies, and other problems with workspace functions and data. Unfortunately the people that are usually in charge of these projects do not have the seniority or sway to actually change the broken processes or aren't on the right team to remove cruft. Usually you have to wait until a salesperson misquotes something from an AI summary before these issues get unblocked because they actually affected revenue.
I guess OpenAI couldn't train AdManagerGPT to ignore the client (except when it's time to renew), suggest more ad spend, and turn off any of the features that let you control your budget.
For internal stuff you’re absolutely correct - but using “main stream” design language (the current trend of rounded 3 column AI layouts, corporate Memphis, skeuomorphism, stock photos of help desk workers, wordart, etc) that isn’t unique makes your brand forgettable. Sure it was mind blowing when it first came out but it quickly loses its uniqueness and starts becoming a sign of crapiness/scaminess/enshitificarion.
Your users will never make it to your no-nonsense backend if your marketing is completely cookie cutter.
Let’s just stretch copyright to cover movement/location as a protected creative expression. It’s somewhat ridiculous but we’ve already established case law and technology for handling/mishandling protected assets.
Cory Doctorow argued against using copyright law as a substitute for privacy law or labor law [1], and I argue the same for location privacy. Copyright law already gets abused enough in contexts that indisputably involve copying of creative work. I do not want to stretch copyright law into location/movement privacy, where nonconsensual recording of location/movement does not necessarily copy something created by the person whose location was tracked. At least in the US, copyright comes into existence when creative expression is recorded in a tangible medium (such as your device's RAM, because outside of my beloved meme world you cannot download more RAM), and the copyright belongs to whoever did the recording. If an app on your phone records your location, was it you who recorded it? Was it the phone maker who recorded it? Was it the app maker who recorded it? Keep in mind, maybe you didn't install the app, or maybe you weren't aware that the app would track your location when you first installed it.
Then they add a clause to the ToS with "you grant us and our affiliates a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to your location..."
(IANAL - in the US) I think it's worth clarifying that the third-party doctrine is probably what applies here. You used someone else's computer (Google search and the recorded search history, Claude and the conversation history, or cell phone providers and the tower ping records) and you had no expectation of privacy or any sort of confidentiality (e.g. lawyer/spouse/protected medical info).
I understand that other countries handle this differently and might have more privacy restrictions, but this seems to come down to a judge asking a neutral third-party to testify to what they know about a subject and them responding with search history/chat logs/location pings. I guess if you want to do crimes then you need to stop intentionally revealing incriminating evidence to unbound third-parties.
IANAL either, but I don't think it's even that complex. You can have all kinds of legally-compelled data requests come up in a subpoena or in discovery. Even if the models were completely self-hosted on the owner's own computer, the opposing side could ask the court to make you hand over those logs, in the same way they could ask for a copy of your journal. While the 5th amendment right to not incriminate yourself still holds, I think a self-owned AI would be just as subject to a subpoena as your diary or calendar or whatever else. And in no case could I imagine it would get the extra protections of attorney-client privilege.
Domestic students sometimes get a local/in-state discount so they actually cost more since they aren't paying as much tuition upfront. GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. This was already an issue before Trump II but has been exacerbated by ICE's gestapo tactics along with all of the other roadblocks that Trump and team are trying to insert via executive order, strategic defunding, and all the other mob/shakedown behavior.
>GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here.
I'm not sure this is such a big issue. If the research environment is poor in their home country, the VC environment is probably even worse. Also consider every foreign professor teaching in the US right now is essentially a modern Operation Paperclip victory against their homeland. And there are a lot of them. Plus the student is still contributing to American research efforts as a grad student here. It isn't all unilateral effort unilateral benefit. They are advancing their PIs grant effort. They are probably teaching and mentoring.
Even without internet, many of the scientists of Eastern European extraction were able to share secrets to the Soviets. I don't believe any Operation Paperclip scientists were directly implicated as atomic spies (and there may be some reasons the US wouldn't want to bring attention to that), but plenty of other operations occurred, and plenty of other scientists did in fact share secrets with the Soviets.
Now, with the Internet and strong crypto, it's trivial for Chinese professors to send IP back to collaborators in China. That is the basis of the 1000 Talents Plan (1), one of 200 Chinese "talent recruitment" plans.
This is not at all hypothetical. I used to swim with Kang Zhang, who has done amazing work to cure chlamydial blindness, but also took that IP from the US to China (2). Another ophthalmologist would drive all the way from UCLA (the north end of LA) to San Diego to swim with us. I asked him why. He said it was to keep an eye on Kang: he had more macaques in China to run experiments on than anyone in the US could possibly access.
