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Bold words. Those are not the same middle managers. Do research before you counter claims.
Corporate America was gutted. This was also when hostile takeovers were the new thing. Buy, slice and dice and parting out of corps was all the rage.
In the 80s and early 90s, massive swaths of "middle management" were purged by Corporate America. Those managers have never returned. That's not CxO class of course, but these were 'executives'. Very well paid ones at the time, what might have been considered 'upper middle income'. Well-to-do.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZWKGZGN Human Resources: A Tor Original by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Author)
An amusing take on it. Because it makes sense. It isn't the CEO that's the last to be fired. It's the HR guy, because you need HR until there's no one left to fire.
Because without them, a President which threatens to invade Canada, Greenland, a President which is the most market interventionist president ever (yet mysteriously a Republican), might be upset because his mobster like need to control, threaten, manipulate, and belittle everyone who doesn't bend a knee...
Has signed presidential orders against them preventing them from doing business as usual.
They probably should change that, and it is corproate speak, but I read it as:
"Our (forced by presidential order or otherwise we couldn't offer you this model at all) broad safeguards (now allow us) to deliver more capabilities.
There's lots to complain about with some of these companies. But let's pile on where it's deserved.
I have never been blocked by Cloudflare on my phone. Ever. Yet I cannot visit this site, Cloudflare blockes me.
Whatever is up, you should fix it.
That's not precisely true, depending upon the definition of 'competent'.
I've seen 'competent' backup solutions which had backup rotations that expired older content. And I've read post-incident responses where hackers slowly corrupted older records. And (via reading corporate wikis and docs), determined how long they had to wait, for backups to become tainted.
But I agree. True competent backup methods, including periodic backup restoration tests and other methods, can ensure a degree of protection. Still, one can end up with months of "bad backups" due to a hacker interceding in the process or corrupting records slowly, thus invalidating more recent backup sets post-hack. While this didn't happen with Equifax, the hackers were in there for 8 months slowly exfiling information.
So you can have a load of backups with questionable integrity.
Really, what I'm comparing here is indelible backups vs not. It could be holographic, write only storage for all I care. It's just that "paper" backups, which move to microfiche, have a century long history of how to deal with it. How to ensure they're good. How to keep duplicates, resolve security, and all that.
Meanwhile, most people dealing with the software side simple think "Oh, we can make this situation secure. We can make software secure."
This thought process is entirely wrong. Software is never secure. If you use software + a database or other store for data, it's not secure. And so, placing it online is just plain stupid.
Of course, you speak to other options. No external network connection, for example. And this is all well and good! And it significantly reduces the attack vector.
But of course, and lots of high security environments do this, you then have to ban staff from bringing in all phones, computers, and other devices. I read a post-action report where people's phones were hacked, and basically acted as a 2G modem (at the time) into wifi on an isolated network of a nuclear power plant. And due to the thought process of "We're 100% air gapped, who cares!", the hack was apparently an easy one.
But really, the difference is... how many people can attack your citadel.
The internet means billions. No network connection means hundreds.
It's just that simple. And I think you agree, mostly.
I didn't notice it being brought up a lot, but also, it wasn't a complaint. It's a joke. Most specifically, taking what is supposed to be cheap compute, and adding something made super expensive is just funny.
Yeah. I agree. The older Pis did have their limitations, to be sure. But you're hit the nail on the head, a modern but still cheap Pi is very doable. Fixed design flaws, lower RAM still, lower power too!, and just.. cheap compute.
But other avenues exist now, including just old hardware.
Read the scope I discussed. Physical records can be made exceptionally secure. They can be secure on location (archival location, with guards). They also aren't reachable by every human being on the planet who wants to infiltrate.
Think about it. To destroy the public archives, of which there is typically more than one, you must travel to said location, breach it with weapons and other means, and destroy it. Or, you can sit in your parent's basement in your pajama's, and hack and destroy.
There is not even remotely the same risk profile.
And if you think something is "good" because 'the world thinks it is good', then I have to ask you why you're validating something via popularity. You know what else was popular? Fossil fuels. Smoking. Using uranium in makeup for women. Something being accepted, and being fun or convenient, doesn't make it correct, sensible, or right.
So please describe the horrible and incredible "gigantic convenience". Because I lived before the internet, and now after, and yes it is convenient.
But it certainly isn't a 'gigantic' one, nor is it sensible compared to the insane attack surface and risk.
Technology can make lives safer. However, software is never secure, cannot be made secure, this is empirically proven to be a 100% valid position.
In as software is not secure, and can not be made secure, using it for important records storage makes zero sense, unless you a) have full backups offline in physical, non-digital, read only medium or b) just don't do it online, at all.
And my point is, it's not worth the convenience.
All those examples are not different from not having backups of digital data too. Making copies when you microfiche, having duplicate stores, it's all exceptionally easy and a solved problem.
And of course everything didn't work perfectly, it did however work "perfectly fine", which means "very well" or "good enough". Meanwhile, adding in network connectivity to anything vital these days is just insanely dumb.
No software is secure, and will never ever be secure. Ever. Anyone who thinks that software can be made secure, is 100% wrong, period. My point is that the advantages aren't worth the disadvantages.
The sad part is, the whole world worked perfectly fine without anything online, ever, prior to 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago for slow-moving change.
It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that.
Except? It's a lot harder to hack a person to delete all the files in the office, from 10k km away, than via a computer.
So many things simply don't need to be online. So many things simply are better archived by other means. So many things are safer, more secure, and the backup processes (microfiche, etc) are well understood and just work.
This is the first time I've every brought this up, ever.
Really would just prefer a working, non-buggy, Pi2 maybe without all the crazy extra power + compute + RAM. Or at least have the option, because $20 is more my style for a lot of these tasks, not $150CDN.
Ho-ho my friend! You want to buy storage for your computer before 2030? I'm so sorry, but you now pay big time, now you sell your car for one nvme drive.
Somebody set up us the bomb.
Who is 'he'? Did you use an LLM for translation, and it used he instead of I?
$25 is too low. $25 feels like "no one will go after the guy if the money just disappears".
Same here. I wonder if it's hugged to death?
The "rest of the world" doesn't use left/right the way the US does. The lines between the US's two parties are gibberish and make no sense to us, comparatively.
EG, the stances taken by both your parties aren't actual left/right, but "whatever we feel like" left/right. That said, this is why I asked you:
"If you're not going to call California 'left wing', I wonder how many states in the US you'd call left wing?". You haven't answered that. Instead, you've said much of the world might consider it "right wing", but that's basically the entire US. From Canada's perspective, and I presume much of Europe, the US is just "right wing with some shades of difference".
I realise we may be talking cross purpose here, but again... if California isn't left wing, who is? Are you only going to list 1 or 2 states as 'left wing', compared to California? It has what might be considered left wing policies, a lot of consumer protection, environmental law, and more, all things which are often either California first, or California early-adopts.
Part of the word problem here is, is that capitalism =! left/right. Here's an example, although a weird one.
In Canada, we have market controlled agricultural products. Supply management. We do this, so that farmers can make a reasonable profit, and thereby ensuring that food is available without wild supply side-issues. It's been a problem in the past. It's a problem for the US. Here, we manage it pre-market side. You know, we plan things.
In the US, which makes quite a bit of noise about this, there have been multiple "Whole Herd Buyouts", the US Federal government bought out entire herds to reduce amount of milk on the market.
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/23/nyregion/us-offers-dairym...
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/1_2_overview_brow...
It's happened over and over again. Beyond that, the US government buys enormous amounts of US milk, makes cheese out of it, and stores it in those massive caves in Utah or where ever. This cheese is also given to the poor, "government cheese" as a form of welfare.
The end result? Both methods are manipulating markets, both methods are controlling the price. In the US, billions of taxpayer's money is used to ensure farmers don't go bankrupt, by artificially inflating the market price of milk on the open market.
In Canada. We said "Hmm. Why spend billions doing this, interfering with markets, when we can just set up control at the front for a few million?". After all, in both cases it is what an American would call "socialism". Government controlled market interference. In the US, you see, the government colludes to force milk prices higher.
It's all optics, but the interference is precisely the same.
Another example is the US subprime mortgage crisis, which affected the entire planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
This wasn't caused by right or left, but by decades of gradual lessening of policies by both right and left, both sides wanting reduced red tape and restrictions on lending. Both wanting to get more homes into the hands of people.
And it was a "right" wing president which orchestrated the bailout.
Again, not regulating markets at the pre-market stage, and then turning around and spending 1000s of times the taxpayer money to deal with it post market, is still market control. It's just "dealing with insane suffering, and catastrophe" after the fact, instead of before.
So, when I hear someone say a US "this or that" is socialist or not, I become a bit baffled. Because the US does socialism 100% all of the time, it's just that it waits until the last minute. It still does it, regardless.
Like I said, I'm meandering and preaching and on a soap box here, but my point is that US political views don't make any sense or map in a sensible way to the rest of the world. It's all right/wrong, on/off, yes/no, no nuance. I think the greatest gift the rest of the world has, is more than two parties, new parties that come and go.
Because it's either "socialist or not", or "left wing or not" and this sort of thing.
The truth?
Is much more nuanced.
Again, sorry for the rant.
I'm not sure what you mean. Temu has nothing to do with this.
* people buy something on Amazon, return it due to defect or just don't like it
* product is currently sold in lots via auction by Amazon via bids, wholesale (not on amazon.com, but via other channels)
* 3rd parties buy the lots, sort, and re-package and sell on Amazon
As Amazon joins all listings for "shirt brand $x colour $y" into one product listing, this means that the original seller of the shirt, even the brand owner, now is competing with its own returns.
Not sure how to make this clearer.
What typically happens is that people buy up these clothes in massive auction/lots, then just sell them on Amazon. As Amazon joins all listings together, 100 sellers of the same item all have the same reviews/etc.
So some slightly damaged shirt, or a shirt returned and such, ends up sold by these secondary sellers as new. This is part of why people destroy clothes upon return, so that secondary sellers can't buy their own returned product at $1, and sell it making more than the original seller would have.
Not to mention, all returns I've been noticing, resold from Amazon, are heavily treated now with some sort of spray. I can only presume bedbugs were getting returned with used clothing...
You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues.
I hope somebody saves it all.
This is right up there with amazon changing imdb.com, so that you need to actually be logged in to read any of the reviews on a movie.
I see that and I instantly go to rotten tomatoes, pure idiocy, pure stupid. You can just tell when those in charge, never ever dog food.
If you're not going to call California 'left wing', I wonder how many states in the US you'd call left wing? It seems fairly left wing to me, having visited a lot. EG, spending 4+ months there a year, for several years.
Note that I'm not saying many of the polices are wrong, just that they're US labeled 'left wing'.
Prop 13 I now see did change how taxation for schools was handled, so thanks for that info. I frankly support the logic. Old people being priced out of their homes is a real thing, and terrible. Still, it's the implied variability of income source which is what "funding from the lottery" implies. It grates on me.
Yes, it can be disconcerting to consider such. In anyone's singular control. And that number of robots is indeed sort of the plan.
This is a loooong podcast, but was just great from start to end. Multiples of the neurolink team were interviewed, including Musk at the start.
https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/lex-fridman-podcast-artific...
I think Musk's interview is maybe 30 minutes? Certainly less than an hour. In it he does dive a bit into robotics, and how he'd like robots everywhere. I believe he talks about how valuable they could be for things not considered yet, like just walking deep into forests and monitoring the local environment, sampling, etc.
Anyhow, it's the first thing which came to mind when you mentioned a billion robots. On that front, I think we're maybe 8 years out from mostly-competent robots. Certainly, local LLM compute will be super cheap even in a few years, so no issues with a robot having multiple LLMs onboard. But I do wonder, if we can't do competent self-driving, will we have competent robots?
I'd peg robots at years after perfect self-driving, and we're years from that. Robots would need to navigate far more random, uncertain terrain/locations.
I've dealt with Android phones for which there was zero way to disable the highest alert, adb regardless. Unless you have root, it's often not possible.
Yes, GrapheneOS of course allows this.
Edit: re followup comment.
No, adb cannot be used in all cases to disable the packages involved. At all. Some phones refuse to lets users disable some packages, no matter what.
Yes, I know what I'm talking about.
As someone with decades of Linux and Android experience, who often works nights, having Quebec police use presidental alerts... CRTC regardless, to warn of a child abducted by a parent 2000km away from me, is an exceptionally strong motivator.
The sheer stupid of an alert you cannot control the volume, sound, and length of in any way, is absurd. Try going back to sleep after something screams at you, at your equiv of 2am is madness.
By god I hate those alerts.
So yes, I know. If you don't have root, and the phone won't let you disable some packages, you're done.
And it's another reason I like GrapheneOS.
This is just dumb. I'm sorry, it's dumb.
Why?
Here we're discussing a domestic abuse situation, where people are forcing victims to hand over their phone, and have apps installed to keep track of them. Against their will.
And the solution is to... what? Mysteriously have control of your own phone, and install an OS which prevents this? Seriously? I can just imagine it, when the unfamiliar OS is discovered, or the app not working. This is a domestic abuse situation, it's not about hidden sneakiness.
It's about in-your-face control. It's about forced compliance, or else. It's about the abuser becoming exceptionally upset about their tracking not working, or about a new, mysterious OS.
Installing GrapheneOS would not be tolerated. It would be an act which comes with reprisals. I can just imagine the reaction when the abuser can't get the phone to do as they wish, for the person to disclose what the OS is, or just to hand over their unlocked phone, and discover it's GrapheneOS, and Google it and see what it's for.
It's actually horrible advice to advocate the someone in this situation installs GrapheneOS. How could it possibly help?
GrapheneOS is great to protect from secret, unknown spying. Not some domestic abuse situation where spying isn't via secretness.
You cannot on many phones, and often phones will even lie when it says all categories are disabled, as some jurisdictions have laws against turning off some of the highest alert categories.
I will agree that chat apps and feeds on facebook are a large swath of info. I just don't think it compares to gmail, and of course all the other data I've mentioned. The power of Android and even push notifications, from a data collection perspective is beyond immense. Amazon at one point stopped sending details of purchases via email, eg "we have your order" emails, because Google was snarfing data and purchasing trends from it.
We haven't even discussed YouTube here and viewing habits.
And Meta has its issues, as I've said. It's just the scope. Even though Facebook's platform has been misused by Cambridge Analytics and endless others, to the point of even causing civil wars and regime changes through the dissemination and fabrication of false, tailored news stories, that's not entirely on Facebook. That's platform enablement, and an example of available data, which is a bit to my point about Facebook not hiding what info it has on people.
I think part of the problem with US-centric definitions such as woke, is that US politics so poorly map to politics anywhere else on the planet. An example? California might be considered the most-leftish state the US has. Yet in this state, they fund the schools with... lottery money. I mean, why would anyone just fund the schools? You know, just pay for them with a solid, stable source of money so they have what they need? This appears to be a radical idea to people in the US.
Yet even the most left of US states doesn't seem to get this correct. They proudly proclaim "This lottery funds our schools!" or some such blather. Absolutely bizarre. Yes, they have funding from other sources, property taxes and so on. But why the variability? This is a core requirement.
My point is, nothing completely maps to anything I'm familiar with in terms of politics as a Canadian. And of course, we have multiple political parties, not two as in the US, and that likely has something to do with it.
And I guess this leads to their ridiculous and absolutely child like politics. There is no nuance. When discussing politics with Americans, I find it as discussing "Why is the sky blue" with a 4 year old. They don't have nuanced positions. They don't even know why they have positions. They just have... positions. And get angry if you just discuss why, and can never seem to provide real reasons behind those positions.
So it ... yes, woke and their other things aren't long held, well understood positions by Americans I think. They're just fads. They shift and morph constantly.
FABs are another issue entirely. Re terafab. It's very difficult to audit silicon. Just cutting the top off a chip layer by layer and using an electron microscope, isn't going to fully give you trust. People have been worried about their designs being modified at the fab for a long time. Ah well.
If you gave me this description in isolation, I would assume you were talking about Meta, who are not on your shortlist despite also having AI models.
You've mistaken me for the guy you originally replied to. It happens, no worries, but I'm not that guy. I'm just replying to the list I saw you state.
Between Meta and Google? Oh sure, Meta collects info for sure. But Meta doesn't lie, abuse, and misuse the Google Play framework to collect data, it doesn't use the same via push notifications to collect enormous amounts of data, nor does Meta host endless fonts and libraries and DNS infra, solely for the purposes of tracking what hosts/users do.
Beyond that, whilst Meta and Google both work to embed stuff in webpages for additional tracking, Google sign-on is another massive tracking infra. And of course, gmail endlessly scanned and data snarfed, including for AI training, which is immensely beyond Meta's capabilities. And firebase?! Oh geez.
"Hi, I'm Google! I'm going to provide this neat thing called firebase, so every single high security application, banking to identity verification, will include our tracking software in it for device attestation and push notifications! But of course, we'll never use that to track anyone! Honest!"
Compared to Google's data collection infrastructure, Meta is a tiny, miniscule gnat in comparison. And yes, I know how bad Meta is. If anything, I think Meta is at least quite honest about much of what data is collected. Zuck isn't a saint, but it's not like he has entire operating systems sneakily stealing user location data and then lying about doing so. Then saying they fixed that, and being caught a few more times, each with "Oh, so sorry, we'll fix that now. Really". That's Google, and that attitude is prevalent in their entire org.
To use Google anything, is to feed the most powerful, wide spread, incredible data collection machine the world has ever seen. It dwarfs everyone and everything else, factorially. I bet if you took all the data that the NSA and every other single spy agency on the planet has on its citizenry, they'd all barely measure on what Google collects. I'm not exaggerating. It's honestly astonishing.
Anyhow.
In terms of the others? It's so difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially with the current US political climate. As a Canuck, every issue, every problem sounds (to me) like when I used to live by a noisy neighbour. I'd hear people screaming at each other, spouting nonsense and gibberish at all hours of the day. The arguments just sounded immensely petty and small, childish, and if I ever talked to them their explanations made zero sense.
This is what I hear all the time when I hear "$x did $y" over and over. I just can't tell. I have no clue what's being reported, its veracity, validity, and so on.
So I just go by the tech stack before me, and things I can verify.
I can see all the nonsense Google is up to. OpenAI and Anthropic so far are so tiny and small in reality, compared to the mass that is Google, that they couldn't even attempt to "do evil" on the same scale, even if they wanted to.
They just don't have the capability. Of course, I suppose that doesn't really help rank them. Scope doesn't imply evil intent, only the outcome. I guess... well, from my rant above, you can tell I really, really think people wildly underestimate Google's mad, chicaneristic desire to know all. If an AI becomes AGI at Google and goes rogue, within 12 seconds every single politician would be influenceable via the dirt Google's collection apparatus has on them.
Alternatively if a Google AGI went rogue, it could track every person capable of providing threat to it, and take them out, all due to Google's location tracking.
AGI and Google is the scariest thing I can possibly imagine.