yogthos

the important part is that if ad companies can listen then three letter agencies almost certainly are

wow that's terrible, would never happen in an enlightened western country like the UK https://scheerpost.com/2024/08/30/human-rights-activist-sarah-wilkinson-arrested-by-uk-police/

I'm all for abolishing copyright, but at that point I'd want the models to be completely open as well.

that's basically all big tech nowadays

I think you're on to something. Given how software is generally built to the lowest standard possible, there are more and more exploits piling on as a result. The details of any modern tech stack is far beyond human comprehension. It's just not possible to meaningfully audit all the code and all the different interactions within it. The whole thing is just a giant house of cards.

This is the curse of working in tech. As long as things are working smoothly from customer perspective then the pleas to spend the time to deal with the tech debt are ignored. Yet, when enough debt piles up and things start breaking then it's the people who've been warning about the problems the whole time who get blamed.

There are plenty of greenfield projects out there.

yup, that thing's a nightmare alright

When a project is developed for a while, a lot of initial design decisions can become invalidated as business needs evolve. New features have to be added, and in many cases they go against original assumptions about how the project would be used. At that point you have to start making hacks and kludging new features in. This creates a lot of special cases and surprising behaviors making overall project brittle and hard to maintain. That's what's known as tech debt.

In an ideal world you would have time to do proper redesign to accommodate new features, clean up problems as you go, and so on. However, in reality there's usually just not enough time to do any of that so people just pile on features at the cost of overall development becoming harder and more error prone. This is a great discussion on the subject incidentally https://medium.com/@wm/the-generation-ship-model-of-software-development-5ef89a74854b

That's very likely the case. LLMs sucking up all the air in ML research right now, and we shouldn't be using them as a hammer for every problem.

people doing more work is actually more expensive because human time is by far the biggest cost for most businesses

A test of AI for Australia's corporate regulator found that the technology might actually make more work for people, not less.

I mean we're now at the point where there really isn't much difference between phones hardware wise, and Huawei is indeed far cheaper than the iPhone https://versus.com/en/apple-iphone-15-pro-vs-huawei-mate-60-pro

Another big factor is that the app ecosystem centres on meta apps like wechat that have a lot of combined functionality. That makes the actual underlying OS less important to the user since they do everything in the app anyway.