Company that sells revolutionary AI innovations to investors promises revolutionary AI innovations

As someone who maintained apps on both Android and Fire OS, Fire OS was always a more tepid version of Android, it felt like they were struggling to keep up with Google, there just wasn't enough business incentive to invest in it. So it seems absurd to me that they would course-correct that by going all-in on a fork of Linux itself, with none of the abstractions and conveniences and third-party apps that Android brings. At least with Android they were getting what amounts to millions of dollars of free-as-in-beer ongoing development by Google doing the legwork of updating the trunk OS and drawing developers to the platform.

Now they get to be even more of an OS company... which has no upside I can see. They shouldn't want to be an OS company, after the flop that was the Fire Phone they already figured out that people like Amazon for their hardware because it's dirt-cheap, reliable and gets the job done. Why make things even harder on themselves?

The corollary to this is that you're usually plugging in a set-top box that is just as bad, if it's a Roku or Fire Stick or whatever.

I actually like the built-in LG UI/UX enough to use it, with all the advertising settings disabled that they'll let me access, and my firewall to hopefully block the rest, although in reality I'm sure they're still accruing a ton of data on me. This new AI thing is disconcerting, but hopefully just another switch I have to flip somewhere.

1 is the most easily disputable, at least in my field of game development.

Nobody is going to rewrite FMOD, unless you want your business to be writing FMOD. Same with dozens, nay hundreds of other pieces of essential, complicated pieces of technology. This ladders all the way up to entire game engines... I'd reckon about half of major studios today use their own internal engines, of which I'd further wager a majority of them wish they didn't, and are probably at least fantasizing about ways to ditch theirs. Do you want to be maintaining your own JSON library, or general-purpose allocator, or font renderer? Or do you want to be shipping games. (Speaking as someone who has had to build/maintain all of the former.)

If you want to be taken seriously in the quantum computing space, a good first step would be to put it in a separate org from your cloud software division.

I mean, I'm sure they're real experts in the field, but there's something terribly unserious about being an "Amazon Web Services material scientist"

I suspect this is a reaction to DeepSeek disrupting all of the existing AI business models.

I worked for Microsoft less than a year ago, in a department nowhere even remotely close to AI, and at that time our regular engineering surveys from leadership had additional questions whether we were finding ways to educate ourselves on AI and incorporate AI into our business. Entire orgs were basically being graded on their successful incorporation of AI. It was seen as that mission-critical to the company. To hear Satya say this in an interview, feels like it's gotta be a major strategic pivot.

> The system now handles complex tasks including booking concert tickets, making restaurant reservations via Yelp integration, and creating smart home routines autonomously

Who wants to do any of these things with a voice assistant?

* The handful of times I book tickets to something, I want the visual interface to understand my options and pick the best one, I don't want to trust some unreliable verbal narrative.
* I don't even remember the last time I made reservations at a restaurant... I suppose that's still a thing plenty of people do, but again, if you care enough to make a reservation, I wouldn't want to trust a verbal exchange with a machine to either get it right or give me the best option. Hell, I'd even want to see on a map to know that they got the right restaurant and not some other place with a similar-sounding name in Poughkeepsie.
* Creating smart home routines autonomously - is there an actual use case for this? It sounds like BS to begin with, but even if it isn't, creating smart home routines is something I'd expect to do once and then never again (maybe touch them every few years). Who needs or wants a voice assistant for that?

I've worked up, down and across organizations in my career, from mid-size to AAA studios. I've worked with PMs and artists and musicians and designers and directors and CVPs and the money people and the business people. I've been at the IC level, manager level, and director level myself. In my experience nobody, in any field, gets into games if they don't love working on games. And they don't stay if they don't want to be there. The technical and organizational complexity is an order of magnitude more challenging than nearly any other tech field, and you pay the "games tax" in both your salary and career advancement opportunities. It is a highly competitive industry that chews up and spits out people who don't want to be there, can't find the joy in their work, or just can't hack it.

Yes, the further up the management chain you get, there is inevitably an increasing requirement to be something of a sociopath to be successful, as is the case in all corporations. But even the sociopaths at the very top who would lay off half the company if it was the right thing to do for the stock price? I guarantee you that the person behind that loves working in games, loves the product, and in a twisted way thinks they're doing what's best for it (they just think "maximizing shareholder value" is what it takes to get art made).

Yes, people get checked out. Those people don't last. Some last longer than others. But mostly they self-select out into jobs where they can get a huge salary bump for doing half the work.

Yes, there are bad leaders in games. Boy howdy there are. But leaders without a shred of passion for what they're doing? I'll believe it when I see it.

What are you talking about? I've been in the games industry over 20 years, I've never known a single person who would willingly overcome all of the obstacles to getting into this profession if they weren't passionate about what they do.

Apple finally feels like it's caught up sufficiently to Google, or more likely just captured sufficient market share from their walled garden. Thus, as was foretold by the ancient scrolls, let the enshittification commence!

*gong sound*

Exactly this. If you're in a technology race with other companies to be the top dog in one of the only (perceived) new frontiers of business, it's way cheaper to ignore a few laws and pay some dinky fine than it is to lose the race and get left behind the competition.

Obligatory Futurama: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Yeah when you're the only alleged opposition to corporate takeover of the entire government it's kind of tone-deaf to play your cards on protecting their IP

does not ban any specific fees but requires clear disclosure before consumers enter payment information

To my knowledge, none of these sites add fees after you enter payment information. It's often a screen or two away from the listed price, sometimes nestled snugly in with the "checkout" button, but it's never, like, go to checkout and then inform you of the fees. To make an observable difference, this rule would have to apply to whenever the price is actually listed.

This is pretty exciting if true. I did some googling but it was hard to come up with anything that wasn't clearly biased towards advertising/hype. Would love to find something that spells out the realistic tradeoffs of the technology.