People in the west indeed have access to cheaper and more superior necessities than ever before. However, they are not content to work for these things at just any job, they want more meaningful work now as well. The trick is continuing to invest in the same forces that brought us lower prices and superior products and better technology in the first place to provide more options for meaningful work as well.

For at least several years now enterprise "note taking" apps have been skirting ethical and legal grey areas. Sales people use them to record other zoom/google-meet participants without having to ask the other participants' permission because the recording app is outside zoom, explicitly because they know it would raise questions and freak them out. Many states make it clear this is illegal and all these apps simply say "it is the ethical and legal responsibility of the recording party to inform other participants as required" etc... In other words the companies selling this software are absolutely aware this is being done and are turning a blind eye intentionally. Now Amazon is going to make the same thing available to consumers, taking it from enterprise to the consumer space. However, the two are subtly different: nobody wants to be recorded, but at least in enterprise settings we have our "shields up", but consumer/personal settings are when we are most vulnerable, so this level of violation is way above what had been foisted on us in the enterprise space. It is much worse than Meta's glasses.

Since you asked in good faith (sort of) the honest answer is Trump enforces the law, uses our trade and military leverage to get better deals for the US, does everything he can to bolster election anonymity and security, and has worked harder than any president in my lifetime to cut government size, power, influence, and spending, so that more money can be invested in enterprise, which lowers prices and brings prosperity for all. I love Democrats, because they love democracy. Most of my friends are Democrats (I'm in tech). I do not think ill of them, and believe they want to fundamentally prevent large corporations from creating Noam Chomsky style manufactured consent, and abuse our freedoms in other ways. Their concerns are legitimate, but ultimately it can go too far the other way as well when power is overly centralized in the government as well. Our job as voting citizens is to keep power from consolidating so much that power can't swing back the other way in the next election, that's basically job number one. I only have policy disagreements with Democrats, I don't question their good faith or patriotism. At least, that's just me.

If we thought social media companies were messing with us, now imagine being shamed or shunned by a pouty AI. Wouldn't this be much more mind warping for children, and insidious, than social media ever was? This is like the 10x version of what TikTok has been doing to us. If Anthropic wanted to, they could easily and very surreptitiously train us to become further dependent on them, and if they were to follow purely a profit motive, they would absolutely do so for "user retention" (which they are already obsessing over as the only metric that matters at least within Microsoft AI). Eventually little twitches, unsurenesses, and confusions would have us rushing to correct ourselves, and ask forgiveness, especially if the AI can hold our own work and deadlines over our heads as leverage. It goes from being a tool to being a master.

SIGINT! SIGINT!

Gearing up to be AI-first is a real engineering shift. With AI-first development you have to lean extra extra hard on integration, end-to-end, and fuzz tests, i.e., "behavioral" tests. Very similar to how reinforcement learning needs to bang around in a simulator before it can figure out what to do, AI-first software projects need to invest heavily in "simulator" tests (NOT unit tests) that the AI can "bang around" on (and have to pass) before you let it merge/release. This is a big shift for engineering teams that are used to thinking mathematically/axiomatically/constructively: the code is correct because it was correct before my change, and I keep it correct each time I make a change. With AI you have dozens of people who can change 100s, 1000s, or more lines of code in a commit (and that's actually the goal) so changes easily violate that base case. The massive increase in testing reliance brings with it massive increases in VM pool infra, build infra, CI, test suite configurability, etc..., etc... So AI-first coding is a huge engineering shift going from carefully controlled code with lighter testing, to generating probabilistically controlled code with huge suites of tests, along multiple dimensions, that can run very fast, concurrently. It's also a big culture shift. It takes time so it makes sense that mature firms running large projects are trying to get it in place before their competitors do.

Investors hear this "who can access this data, what vendors can disclose, improper searches, and records being kept after data expires" ...and think these are all solvable problems, and by putting money into it now when everyone thinks it will get mob-with-pitchforked out of existence, they can buy low, and get in on the ground floor. So Flock will always have plenty of money. I think the privacy loving public will be dismayed to find that Flock is not going anywhere, and in fact will continue to grow. Also, controversially, I think the highest concentration of Flock cameras will be in urban areas with people living at the lowest socioeconomic levels. That is why it is usually the counties and townships that are less urban that we keep hearing about when Flock cameras are pulled out. However, this is just the first wave of early adopters that didn't know better, now realizing the privacy/security tradeoff is not in their favor. The cameras will settle in and find more permanent homes in higher density areas where the tradeoff is more favorable for stopping actual crimes.

"Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death." ...well then how can there be enough room to get down to business and create more offspring? I think peer reviewers should have rejected the paper back then based strictly on its own model and premise.

I know this is the internet, but the parent's statement does not deserve such an insult. Asking why a company would claim to have issues finding employees while they are simultaneously laying off employees, which is contradictory, is a reasonable question. Holding companies accountable, that use programs like this seemingly for their own benefit at the expense of Americans in the labor pool, benefits everyone.

CAF is an interesting group, and reading about its early cases grants interesting perspective. One of CAF's early cases was for a student whose "fuck you" response was maliciously broadcast throughout Ohio's campus newsgroups, culminating in the student's dismissal from the university for obscene language. This is what cancel culture looked like in 1991. The dismissed student's tagline he uses in usenet/e-mails was "I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it." So while the crime worthy of cancellation (in 1991 it was obscene language) has changed over the years, the underlying principals proponents of free speech believe in are still the same.

This is the ultimate bike shed issue, i.e., what color should the bike shed at the nuclear power plant be painted? Once again proven by the endless equivocation of upsides and downsides.

...you can rarely traverse to a global maxima, without first navigating some local minimas along the way.

If you asked your close friend advice on how to shoot up a Sheriff's office, and also where to acquire guns, etc..., and that person reported you to police, they would be doing the community a service, and while theoretically betraying your trust in this instance, in reality, they would be doing you a service with respect to your long term happiness as well.

The office of Truth is one that is too powerful to ever allow exist. Regardless of your politics today, everyone will soon regret empowering, or further empowering if that's your take, an office that can regulate what we say to each other online. There would be no way to control it, and the interests of those that are entrusted with it would soon be corrupted from "filter out the garbage" to "stay in power at all costs".

Windows' real only advantage over macOS and Linux is its gaming audience. Xbox is a huge part of making sure it's expanding that audience aggressively, since many gamers only play set-top rigs, and not desk-top rigs. If MS starts bleeding gamers, even on the set-top side, it means they're losing their foothold in defining the primary gaming platform, which is a huge part of their moat around Windows users. AI is adding generic uncertainty to the future of every vertical, so without loss of generality, it makes the most sense for MS to hold onto Xbox. That could change if AI can generate new games with a snap of the fingers in two years, but until that becomes clear, MS will not release its death grip on Xbox.