But on the other hand, all the reasons that people hate corporate OSes apply much more to Microsoft than Apple. Microsoft is the company that puts ads in their OS and is built entirely out of proprietary tech, and has been more vocal about shoehorning AI into everything.

LOL at Windows being marked as less corporate than MacOS. They should absolutely be at least tied.

Companies who’s founders still own a majority have limits to how much they will tarnish their creation. Each founder is different, but on the whole, they usually are more constrained than a CEO brought in by non-founders.

Well that can go either way. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, wasted billions on his cockamamie Metaverse idea, and even named the company after it.

Heck, ever read your employment contract

Can’t, as I am fully self-employed, much to my dismay when it comes time to file taxes in the US.

Mine basically says they reserve the right to change the rules unilaterally such that I am in breach of contract. And thats standard apparently (I asked a lawyer). That shouldn’t even be a legal contract.

Ideally that wouldn’t hold up in court, although of course the burden is on you to prove it if it goes that far, yay.

And last, most of them do pay tribute to trump if he takes notice of them. Others just try to stay out of his sight. But how many immediately cancelled all dei training and such as soon as he took office. Without even specifically being asked.

Oh yes, I know. We must remember everyone who did that, they should not be allowed to live it down, ever.

Don’t I feel like a fool for trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Please consider: it at executive’s job is only to make money, then why would any executive do anything but chase the single most source of maximum profit, which right now is obviously scamming people and courting Trump’s favor to get out of consequences? Who would care about building anything real? How could they? Just chase hollow bets and game the system as far as you can?

You can complain about capitalism, and indeed there are many problems with it, but I think you should realize that today’s hyper rapacious version of it is not historical, it’s a fairly recent interpretation of the law. A company is more, MUST be more than a single minded profit making engine. If it always had been, our civilization would have collapsed long before now.

“Ever heard of skills,” wow thanks for beginning with a dismissive statement that implies all of this you’re saying is not only true but obvious. This is not the way to respond to people with strong objections.

Your response is really unimpressive. My point is that LLM training, as it now stands, doesn’t seem like it can possibly adapt to an internet that isn’t full of free information ripe for the taking. If people come to rely on LLMs, how will they get the information to keep up with further advancements in, well, anything?

Because it’s nice, and if you ate it first you wouldn’t want to have as much of the healthy stuff that came before. Not everything has to have an objective purpose. Nice things are nice.

Assuming that’s true, and that’s a BIG assumption… What makes you think that would matter? AI has no interiority; it isn’t a thinking blob, it’s a text generator. Think of it as a fancy Markov chain.

Even if it were true, where in the chain do new principles, new techniques, new concepts enter into it? All these forms of generative AI can do is regurgitate what’s been fed into it. The worst thing you can train an AI from is AI-generated output.

It varies.

I often give the example of HP Lovecraft. I’m a big fan of his stories and the Cthulhu Mythos. But it remains that he was a huge racist. How do I reconcile the two?

First, an author’s works are separate from the author themselves. Second, in Lovecraft’s case, he was a product of his time and upbringing. And third, and importantly in his case: he’s dead. He has no ability to change beyond his passing in the 1930s. People can and do change all the time. If Lovecraft were around today he might have become to most left-leaning person in the world, but he never had that chance. There were indications, late in life, that he might well have changed.

But, he didn’t. It remains that he was a racist in life, that will never change, and because of it there will always be people uncomfortable with his work. That is understandable, and I won’t try to convince anyone that they should ignore it.

Yes, the age of all programming is over, because no new libraries or languages will ever be invented and LLMs will this always know everything there is to know about coding based on what’s already been written which will never go obsolete.

Honestly, mocking these things is SO EASY.

It’s because those shareholders are captive to that same narrative. These practices do carry a real cost, but executives have made themselves blind to it. There are people who’s job it is to judge the value of customer satisfaction and loyalty and to measure it against the cost of providing good service, and they think the former is less valuable than the latter. My premise is these people are not doing their job well.

This view of the purpose of a company, to ruthlessly extract every cent of value from a company or else face the wrath of shareholders, it’s a fairly recent view. Shareholders selling doesn’t cause a company to go out of business, failing at that business does. Stock price falling is a different issue, it matters because company success has come to mean the success of its shares more than the amount of customer goodwill. But that matters.

I sense though that we really aren’t on different sides. I wouldn’t say you’re absolutely wrong, nor that I’m absolutely right. We both have profound dissatisfaction with this world that all these rapacious companies have build around us. The next generation of business people, if we’re privileged to even have one, will have to figure out some things for themselves all over again.

But, that’s not alternate history, it’s speculative fiction.

Companies very well can change. Nothing forces them to enshittify their customer service for what amounts to virtual pennies per user. It’s entirely a case of narrative capture among business people, the conventional wisdom that they have to do this stupid thing. That’s it.

If you can’t log into Windows you can’t change its OneDrive settings! What’s more, the user had no idea what was causing the problem, be it OneDrive or something else, until he did that troubleshooting! And, just setting up a new phone shouldn’t make your computer unbootable for any reason! Geez, way to victim-blame there.

I’d say part of it is likely raw userbase size. Like how even the most positive, well-meaning fandoms turn toxic at the edges when they get large enough.

Especially now that Digg’s died once again.

(Earthbound battle music begins)

It can change, but it’ll require a large number of people seeing it as a problem worth addressing. Companies currently don’t value customer experience very well and haven’t for a long time, witness how phone customer service has become loaded with automated services standing between users and a small phone support staff. But if that were change, if stockholders were to come to see how much users hate that, and more importantly if users were to base their habits on that decision, it might cause things to improve. Money people, despite their near-legendary density, tend to be very nervous about trends. It might be possible to spook them.

Well, I think it could happen. I’ve been wrong before.

I dunno? It sounds very plausible, exactly the kind of thing that Windows would do. I posted about it to Metafilter some time back and no one there seemed to think it couldn’t happen.