I think that ship has sailed. The entire world runs on SaaS tools which cannot / do not run locally. For mission critical ops, it can make sense to pay the enormous premium for local tools, but when one runs the risk/impact calculation, it rarely makes sense. Especially when there are four 9s attached to most of these online services.
> The entire world runs on SaaS tools which cannot / do not run locally.
Some of us have made different choices and therefore have different exposure to these kinds of failures. Yes, sometimes those choices mean higher costs or fewer features, but a lower probability of getting kneecapped by others' problems is a pretty good feature.
That ship is still very much available for boarding, but if your not already on it, it will take a bit of effort to get onboard.
Many of us refused to go along with the subscription model, and so are not affected. I've used primarily LibreOffice for ~two decades, and even more emphatically when Excel became primarily Subscription. Stuck with Gimp even after buying Photoshop for the Pantone support, but killed PS when it went online model. Was very interested in Fusion 360, but stuck with RhinoCAD when Fusion was online-only. I refuse to use online accounting/payroll "solutions".
I use Claude $20/mth a good amount, and am hesitant to use Chinese technology, but the last day makes it look a lot more sensible to setup local AIs, even at the cost of higher initial cost, lower capability, more system management effort, and potential compromise.
It's just one small shop, but many others could make similar decisions, instead of going with what's "just easier today".
If you use open router you can choose whatever you want whenever you want. Before I switched to mostly local I discovered like a lot of people how 99% of the time using the us labs is a complete waste of money.
Here is the world's tiniest violin playing just for Apple. Their anti-competitive policies on app distribution mean people literally cannot distribute their apps without their acceptance. EVEN TO THEIR OWN FUCKING PHONE (unless you're willing to re-sign your application EVERY FUCKING WEEK). This "problem" is going to become exponentially "worse." I'm using quotes because cheap and ubiquitous software is not a problem. It's amazing, and Apple preventing people from freely exchanging software is an affront to the entire space.
> Why couldn’t they run it on their iPhone if the app is for themselves? You can install it directly from xcode, the problem is when you want to release it to others.
Assuming you're referring to free, non-developer accounts, having to re-sign one's app is a really annoying inconvenience which should not exist.
I grow really tired of these excuses for the multi-trillion dollar company doing its best to make it difficult for users. "Just do this really annoying thing. What's the problem?"
Asking people to guess beforehand how much intelligence they require for a task will hopefully be a relic soon. We’re lacking useful routing techniques which accurately pick the right model for the job. Or a high intelligence model which completes simple tasks fast and cheap. Or something else.
Maybe I’m spoiled but I found it repulsively dumb. Some of the highest rates of hallucinations since GPT-3. Incredibly lazy. Heavily biased to parametric knowledge and speed over accuracy. I would rather have no AI at all than use that.
Jensen isn't stepping down for the affair. He's stepping down because the affair was with a Chinese spy, and his words and actions appear to have facilitated circumvention of exports bans to China, and he concealed it.
Shareholders don't care that he's having sex outside his marriage.
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." - IBM slide deck, 1979
Scratch the "management" and replace it with "critical" and we probably have a near universal statement (maybe also add that no sole person should make such decisions).
1. Boss orders dev to use Claude for everything. Claims proudly "we're AI-native", "we're using an AI factory". Disincentivizes any kind of human review.
2. Dev eventually gives in.
3. Claude makes mistakes.
4. Dev gets blamed, because they're the "human [fuse] in the loop".
> It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option.
They’re not saying they can’t do it. They’re explaining they don’t want to do it. I have a CS degree and I also hate booking flights. It’s a mess of dark patterns, up-sell, time limits, and details intended to trip up customers. For example, you might not realise there’s an unusually small carry-on limitation until you’re so far into the process that you think “fuck it I guess I’ll have to pay that extra charge.” God help you if you want to compare the exact arrangement between airlines because they do their best to differentiate the service so you can’t compare apples with apples. That’s an intentional product design choice.
I’ve no doubt your mother can book flights. I doubt she’s consistently booking the best value flights.
I think the problem is that all the "CS degrees" on this board have an inflated sense of the difficulty of tasks and an inflated sense of their ability to find the "best value" programmatically because it seems they're completed ignorant of economics.
"Best value" is not a strictly numerical metric. For many people, "best value" means some combination of best time of day and best seats. For others, its fewest connections. For most, it's cheapest seats regardless of the above.
Your agentic ticket buyer will not be able to handle the moderately advanced case of "best time of day" + "best seats" + "fewest connections" any better than a human because those are all basic filters on every ticket booking website.
But you do you! Recreate the filter that's already there because you don't want to spend even a second outside of your comfort zone and do something even slightly unfamiliar, and then wonder why it is that everyone outside of your industry doesn't just think you've lost touch but actively hate you!
I agree with the principle but where I think price discrimination goes too far is, for example, Uber charging people more by age or statistically imputed income. Or PlayStation charging more for a game by the time of day.
Notice the difference. One is charging people more because they're actually costing you something by imposing an inconvenience, the other is charging people more because you've X-rayed their wallet and set the price to be the amount that cleans them out.
Notice also the thing the customers should be doing in response to the second one: Sharing the prices they're shown for everything with the other customers so they can arbitrage by having the person offered the lowest price be the one to order it.
> Notice also the thing the customers should be doing in response to the second one: Sharing the prices they're shown for everything with the other customers so they can arbitrage by having the person offered the lowest price be the one to order it.
Ah, but this is worst in industries where resale is not possible. For example, flights, digital games, and rideshare. Of course one has the option to just not fly, buy games, or use Uber, but this limits a lot of convenience and function in a modern society. This is why I think targeted regulation is not such a bad thing - provided, as you explain, that the reason for the price discrimination is not because the customer actually costs the business more.
> Ah, but this is worst in industries where resale is not possible. For example, flights, digital games, and rideshare.
Resale is only not possible in those industries because the companies are getting away with forcing it to be. That's the actual problem. You shouldn't need the airline's permission to resell your non-refundable plane ticket. You shouldn't have to use Uber's app to summon an Uber, so that Bob can use a different app to automatically summon one for Alice when Uber is trying to show Alice a higher price, and then Alice and Bob each get half the difference between the prices they're being shown.
So is the idea that laws should allow price gouging only for certain reasons that they must be able to justify?
That would get gamed immediately and we'd be in the same spot. Allow price differences for problem customers that require more attention and airlines will say that why they change prices basedcon certain factors.
> That would get gamed immediately and we'd be in the same spot.
That's what happens anyway. Instead of showing you a different price for the same product, they show the person they want to charge more a subtly different product that costs more etc. There are way too many ways to do things like that for a general prohibition on "price discrimination" to actually work.
What you need instead is a way to apply competitive pressure against companies who try to do that. When they show you a higher price, something outside of their control should be automatically checking for you to see if anyone else has a lower price for something equivalent, so that doing that causes them to lose business.
I'd be supportive of a consumer-side tool that lets buyers see what prices others have been shown for the same product.
That falls squarely within the realm of where I think these problems should be solved, the consumer. We need people informed so they can patronize who they agree with and avoid companies they disagree with. What we don't need is regulation trying to enforce this, regulators always get bought, regulations get nerfed ahead of time or gamed after the fact, etc.
The main issue here is that you need the consumer-side tool to not be blocked by the companies. You especially need them not to be able to have the entity providing it sued or prosecuted, which might require changes to some laws.
Yeah I'd be very curious what laws might exist that would make such a tool illegal. It'd be hard to create, but I'm not sure how a company would claim its illegal for a tool to share the price shown for a given product and user.
The idea is that if you have a handful of customers and you offer bespoke service to each you can have custom pricing. If you offer standardized service to many customers, you can't.
Airlines are already a good example of how that would be hard to regulate though. Their cost basis is pretty fluid, especially when we start wars that throw a wrench in the oil industry. Seats aren't uniform in value, some are more valued by customers than others and some come with perks like legroom or free drinks.
Trying to write regulation that is understandable, enforceable, and not leaky without focusing on any one industry is just really hard to do.
Its much easier for customers to simply stop paying if they lose faith in a company or find that all companies offering said service or seem to collude or use the same dirty tricks. We don't have to fly, for example, effectively all of human history survived without it.
It's not practical to have customers coordinating purchases in that manner. What should happen is the customers report to a regulatory agency "this seller is engaging in illegal price discrimination" and that agency brings the hammer down.
> It's not practical to have customers coordinating purchases in that manner.
Why not? It's software. Instead of searching Amazon for a product, you use a third party service that searches Amazon (and every other seller) for you, using the account of some other user(s) who are being shown lower prices. Then the order gets placed as them but shipped to you and the difference in price gets shared between the two users and the third party service.
The thing stopping it is if the companies are allowed to block it from happening, and that's the thing they shouldn't be allowed to do.
In general a company shouldn't be allowed to control the interface through which the customer orders their product or service. Providing one is fine; prohibiting the customer from using a different one is not.
> What should happen is the customers report to a regulatory agency "this seller is engaging in illegal price discrimination" and that agency brings the hammer down.
The problem there is that "price discrimination" is extremely hard to define, much less identify.
Suppose you go to the site and it shows you a price of $7 but your cousin visits five minutes later or earlier and it shows them a price of $5. Is that price discrimination, or is it because you have a different address and there is some legitimate reason it costs more when you're in the other location? Or is it because the price just changed for everyone, but they're willing to honor the lower price for a period of time for a user who was already shown it? Or because one of you is looking at model number 123A and the other at 123B, which are visually identical but have some trivial difference that cause them to have a different price?
You don't have to deal with that entire quagmire if you just have your cousin place the order at the lower price, and companies shouldn't be able to stop you from automating that or having someone automate it for you.
I still think the solution to most of those difficulties is to tilt the rules based on size. If joeschmoe.com wants to sell paper clips at different prices to different visitors, fine. If Amazon wants to do it, not fine. Just set broad guidelines and say "if any large company comes anywhere near these limits, they will be destroyed".
I’m not sure if you haven’t followed this story or if you’re constructing some kind of specious argument that the only evidence you’ll accept is a personally signed letter from Xi Jinping. I’ll assume the former.
* US intelligence agencies reportedly monitored Alice Huang for over a year and concluded she was passing information directly to Beijing.
* A memo overseen by Marco Rubio reportedly concluded that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited her to gather intelligence on Jensen Huang and potentially influence Nvidia's chip exports.
* The FBI reportedly warned US lawmakers nearly a year ago that she might be supplying information to China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
In the spy world, this is about as close to irrefutable evidence as it gets. We know that any strategically important or large company in China requires Party members in positions of authority inside the company. The CCP exerts direct power over these companies in a multitude of ways. Megaspeed is a clear example of the kind of company they oversee. To assume anything other than Megaspeed being in clear cooperation with the CCP would be a rejection of everything we know about how companies operate in China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
I would not be surprised if Alice Huang and others were coordinating chip purchases through financing backed by the China government. But that's not spying. Thats just business.
I think you have a very strange definition of spying if you preclude the Chinese government using an operative to sexually compromise the world's most influential tech leader running the world's most influential tech business into breaking US laws to materially benefit China to an almost unprecedented degree.
I think you've made up your mind on this matter and you're not going to let reality get in the way.
This is not a courtroom. Jensen has been very open that he wants to be able to sell his chips to China. As of today it comes out that he has had other affairs.
Jenson may have knowing broken the law. Perhaps the law will have its way with him.
My point is simply what I said at the beginning of this thread: "In effort for us to see clear eyed."
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