Dude, what? The fuckers set up an automated system that found people’s private email addresses and blasted them with unwanted emails. The outrage is exactly that they built a line-crossing machine. Your moralizing is incoherent.
The goals (initially "raise as much money for charity as you can", currently "Do random acts of kindness") don't seem ill-intentioned, particularly since it was somewhat successful at the first ($1481 for Helen Keller International and $503 for the Malaria Consortium). To my understanding it also didn't send more than one email per person.
I think "these emails are annoying, stop it sending them" is entirely fair, but a lot of the hate/anger, analogizing what they're doing to rape, etc. seems disproportionate.
Because the incidence and cost of mistaken under-consistency are both generally higher than those of mistaken over-consistency—especially at the scale where people would need to rely on managed off-the-shelf services like aurora instead of being able to build their own.
I would be hesitant to generalise that. There is an inherent tension with its impact on the larger availability of your system. We can't analyse the effect in isolation.
Most systems can tolerate downtime but not data incorrectness. Also, eventual consistency is a bit of a misnomer because it implies that the only cost you’re paying is staleness. In reality these systems are “never consistent” because you often give up guarantees like full serializability making you susceptible to outright data corruption.
Because intentionally fucking over their customers would be an impossible secret to keep, and when it inevitably leaks would trigger severe backlash, if not investigations for fraud. The game theoretic model you’re positing only really makes sense if there’s only one iteration of the game, which isn’t the case.
That is unfortunately not true. It's pretty easy to mess with your customers when your whole product is as opaque as LLMs. I mean they don't even understand how they work internally.
So much of the tech debt work scheduling feels like a coordination or cover problem. We’re overdue for a federal “Tech Debt Week” holiday once a year, and just save people all the hand-wringing of how when or how much. If big tech brands can keep affording to celebrate April fools jokes, they can afford to celebrate this.
