This has been my line of thinking as well. I have developed a sort of paranoia when I'm working using AI on my projects. Who's to say Claude or OpenAI isn't using the final conclusion of all my ideas, trial and error, and adding it to their database of insights to be offered to the next subscriber for a price?
They have demonstrated both the intelligence at scale and the lack of morals for this to not be a problem at all.
Earlier in late 90s "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." sounded cool. Now it has taken a sinister turn.
From being able to quickly find information and gain knowledge for the people, it is becoming - using information to manipulate and control the people.
In the short run it’s fantastic if it means that folks will feed in enough inputs from a wide array of software that can eventually replicate software with smaller teams than historically.
Why? Competition. In the long run imagination will win out.
No firm has the divine right to exist - it must earn its existence.
What OAI and Anthropic have shown is they can accumulate all the information in the world - they still lack imagination re. Product development though.
Nation’s will have to step in and protect firms though as OAI and Anthropic acquire strong competitive advantages.
I mean I see this as very likely. When the world runs on digital infrastructure then having a nearly infinite collection of hackers that will work for you 24/7 without question makes you very powerful indeed.
I really don't think people realize how our lax position on security is coming to bite us in the ass.
load some games you think you'll enjoy. carry it around in your pocket. pull it out when bored. don't put a case on it, let it gather scratches and dirt.
I can lose 10 mins to a sudoku game or chase a highscore in some arcade-ish game without coming away with an impending sense of doom (which tends to happen with doomscrolling).
I'd compare it more with the iphone of micro handhelds than a LV bag. Tried Ambernic first, it was annoying and it randomly stopped working anyway. Steam deck and such are too much, they're for gamers and I'm no gamer. I just need a toy, and playdate happens to be the iphone of this weird niche I seem to enjoy.
Also, the devex is good, and I can build tools and apps in a weekend if I have to, and enjoy the experience.
fwiw yeah it's expensive and i much rather enjoy simple classics than most of the art projects pretending to be games in the catalog.
I used to have long conversations with frontend developers that "no, when I log on I don't want to be forced through a look-at-the-new-feature-we-made" sequences. And then they went ahead and did it anyway. And usually whatever flag they tried to set to make sure you only saw it once would malfunction, so next time you'd get to click through it all over again.
(If you want to tell users about new features, show a unread flag on a notification icon and make it a one-click affair to make it go away. Don't get in users' face with stuff they don't want)
"Damn, I'm being asked to put a cookie into this site that will maybe result in some guy seeing an ad about a toothpaste he might buy at some point in the future.
I'm going to risk months of unemployment and explain to my family why this is more important than eating when I get home. The internet is serious business, they'll understand."
-- the hypothetical webdev in that scenario, I guess?
If you can get replaced over something so minor, it means there's dozens of capable bootlickers lined up and ready to do it as soon as you're gone, so yes, there is a webdev problem.
You can try to put the blame on the grunts, like trying to focus on the engineers in the VW Dieselgate, etc, but that is very weak leverage. You have to intervene at the root cause of the incentive. But of course the higher you go, the more there is a blur between legislators and business owners and they won't be harsh to themselves.
You don't really need a web dev to add a cookie banner these days, but you probably still want one to build the actual site (unless it's simple enough to be fully site-as-a-service, in which case there is really no webdev at all).
Be it the EU for regulating disclosure and consent requirements, users for being "lazy" and usually just accepting all, or the webdev for not staking their livelihood on denying the banner - I'm sure they'll all get blamed before someone sees the ones actually demanding it be done can be the problem.
I remember Flowise app being well-intended but bad. I evaluated the self-hosted version to be used as a component in an internal tool so non-technical people can tweak their prompt chains without writing code. As far as I remember:
1. it became increasingly slow as I added flows (felt like a O(n^2) ish bottleneck)
2. There were many bugs and bad UX
3. the flow variable system was underbaked and underdocumented
4. feature gaps
I decided I was probably not the target audience for their app and moved on.
Would I sell you something if there was a 1 in 100 chance that I have to steal it back from you sometime in the future? Nope.
Would I at least refund you for stealing back that thing you cherish and have possibly watched with your family and kids many times? Absolutely. Wouldn't be able to sleep otherwise.
But I guess that's the morality speaking, and we must kill it violently for marginal profits.
there are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous. the changes don't affect the final aggregates significantly, just enough to avoid saying much *about any individual person*.
know how you can buy "anonymized" data from data brokers and drill down until it's not anonymous anymore and in many cases point to the exact person? differential privacy would prevent that kind of thing.
If someone actually wanted to achieve political objectives by tampering with census data, there are better means than tampering with homogeneous statistical fuzzing.
Any (sealed) container designed to hold hot things should have a pressure release system.
It can be seals that buckle before the lid. It can be a tiny hole with a soft rubber stopper. It can be one of many things that cost a couple of cents extra and a bit more engineering and testing effort.
The cheapest disposable coffee cups I've used have a tiny hole for the express purpose of not pressurizing and spilling hot liquid everywhere.
There's a lot of conversation in the comments about "was there was an expectation that the pressure release valve would be there" There absolutely is a safety expectation that a sealed container of hot food is designed with a pressure release system.
BTW the fermented food thing is a misdirection. The pressure release system should have released pressure way before it even reached ballistic territory.
My steam cleaner recently was recalled and sent me a new cap with a built-in pressure-locking valve. People were opening it too early and getting burns. Heat and pressure can be very dangerous.
They have demonstrated both the intelligence at scale and the lack of morals for this to not be a problem at all.
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