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The total failure of PurpleBricks attempt to disrupt estate agents in the UK is a good example of this. Turns out people had no idea of the shit-shovelling, chivvying and smoothing-over agents do to help sales actually close.

Sounds like some PM is jealous of Whoop and trying to launder the cost and boost adoption of their unwanted AI feature/subscription behind a heavily used existing feature.

Look at spaces where ripoffs/copying are already rampant like mobile games. The result is a slop avalanche, rending the whole space commercially unviable for anything other than the most bottom-of-the-barrel dark-pattern shitware laden with scam ads and spyware because users don't care and won't pay.

That may well be the future for most commercial software (and software engineers) as margins collapse and AI tokenomics moves more power from labor to capital.

Which is why you aren't the audience of people that pay for Photoshop.

The tone is angry but understandably so. The labour, creativity and innovation of millions is being stolen and then belittled by grifters shilling slop. Art, design, math, music, software, there's nothing they won't claim they can now copyright-launder and somehow magically render obsolete. But look at any of it and it's never more than the simulacrum of real work. It always looks like the real thing, particularly to the untrained eye but it's always a tissue-paper of stolen work and half-assed, half-working, sloppy output. The prompters are lazy and so are the models.

These are powerful, interesting tools but the money, the hype and the grift is just intollerable, a pox on it all. If you're a professional you cannot ignore or avoid it, but you can push towards a future where the commodification of it - open models, open weights, open hardware - turns it into a low-margin overlay on real intellectual work and the hype/grift machine can move on to whatever intellectually bankrupt boondoggle they find next.

The curve go vertical for what, precisely? For all the chest-puffing and ominous and cryptic comments from 'insiders' about these incredible capabilities every time they put something public it turns out to be a pale shadow of what was trumpeted. These are powerful useful tools but the quasi-cultish behaviour around them is getting old.

This is the difference between accessible and efficient. Bloomberg, and aircraft controls are expert interfaces, they have steep learning curves and in the latter require case extensive education to use (Bloomberg also does a ton of work on user training). Which is absolutely fine when efficiency trumps everything else and it's a system people use all day every day.

Most interfaces we use on a day to day basis are the opposite, they're designed to be accessible (in the sense that you can use it if you are unfamiliar, not disability) for someone unfamiliar, untrained, and uninterested in learning, which also aligns a lot of the time with sales growth. Nobody is willing to do a 6 week course to use the new HR UI really, really efficiently. The unfortunate thing is some of these are enterprise UIs some of us do have to use all day every day and that's where the impedance mismatch gets painful.

Agree entirely but that's the point, if it's a margin knife-fight with marginal product differentiation/pricing power nobody is going to be making bank.

‘I found a new way of wasting people’s time with my slop’ god this is bleak.

Isn't this just a brute forcing exercise of a (in today's terms) very small key then?

So OpenAI is partnering with Latham Watkins, Freshfields is partnering with Anthropic and Kleiner Perkins is building their own. It'll be interesting to see which wins out here, I don't see how those partnerships can end well for the law firms unless they're making an assumption they'll be sucked dry of USP but the revenue split from the AI labs will make up for it. Why would I pay a premium for Latham Watkins when every other firm can get their expertise and experience in a subscription, and add their own on top?

But that’s not a byproduct of trying to ‘use cheaper resources’, it’s borne of trying to create products that are shaped exclusively by how to best solve a problem and treat materials honestly, as opposed to ornamentation and material imitation.

The work of Dieter Rams, the primary influence for Ive's work at Apple that's set the aesthetic direction for hardware for the last ~20 years to critical acclaim and is a showcase of manufacturing prowess? That Dieter Rams? This is an absurd and ahistorical understanding of modernism.

Given OpenAI's well documented history of unethical behaviour it seems adorably naive to think they actually do that in general, or that they wouldn't pull this particular data separately to generate these proofs.

We do tend to impose them on individual drivers who make egregious and consequential failures, that’s the point. If every car running the same software is functionally the same ‘driver’ this class of failure absolutely should trigger a moratorium.

This is a lot of words to describe rent seeking. Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to buy stock in the monopolists, their ability to extract these rents from an ever-growing proportion of the economy is only getting stronger.

If you leave your front door open I don’t think you’d classifying someone walking in and taking your laptop as ‘not stealing’.

I suspect a lot of these aesthetic baselines aren’t some kind of organic emergence from the model and more a layer of human curated fine tuning, prompting and harness adjustments to produce a positively received aesthetic in lieu of user guidance.

A lot of companies are still using Cursor but I don't know of anyone moving to it, and I do know of many moving from it to Codex or Claude, feels like a legacy product at this point alongside windsurf & the replit/lovable/bolt cluster.

I imagine the Venn Diagram of Rivian buyers and Apple users is basically a circle (or one small circle inside a much larger one), this seems like a wildly obtuse position for them to take.

I find myself in an odd predicament. For nearly all my life I would have seen all of this as an unconscionable anathema. But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls. Too many people are too gullible, too uncritical for it to survive without the state being able to curtail harmful speech at scale. Do I hate it? Absolutely. But I hate the alternative more. And I want the bounds of acceptable speech to be decided by my democratically elected government, not a bunch of American billionaires determined to burn society to the ground so they can pan the ashes for yet more gold.

Do they? There's been a lot of hot air, quite literally, but aside from some math conjectures actual evidence of meaningful progress on anything that actually helps humanity seems rather thin on the ground.

That's the difference between returning search results and interpreting the information and summarising them. If a newspaper says 'so-and-so has been arrested for theft' it's not the same as them summarising to 'so-and-so is a thief', the second is potentially libel. Why should Google be held to a different standard?

I wonder what the wet bulb temperature is, it feels like the day when we have our first true mass casualty event (as opposed to the longer, slower crisies caused by say european heatwaves in the last decade) caused by the climate crisis is getting close.

...except they can produce the same image without the fake SynthID.

We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time.

Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.

You don't have to trust the AI to do it with Rust, you just have to ensure certain conventions are followed and you can formally prove you're 'safe' from certain classes of issue, no AI magic dice-roll.

A lot of people are very excited by the idea that now language capabilities (and almost every other technical nuance) somehow don't matter but much like gravity they will continue to assert themselves whether you believe in them or not.

So far humans have proven unable to write large apps in C without those issues, given their work is the training basis for LLMs this creates two problems, one being that they don't 'know' what a safe app looks like either and any humans reviewing the outputted code will be unable to validate that either.

'rewrite in C, make sure there are no memory leaks'. You first.

Minivans cause minivans?

Or cars usually fit 2 child seats because that's the common number they get from customer research.