msy

Given Titan was an entirely preventable disaster borne of arrogance and stupidity it seems an apt analogy for the frontier labs 'sandboxing' efforts so far.

If they genuinely believe these models are going to obliterate the human race their utterly cavalier attitudes is be grounds for immediate government shutdown/takeover and arrest of everyone involved. If this was nuclear or biological research work none of this would be tolerated.

Data visualisation can never be neutral for the same reason photography can never be neutral - you cannot do it without making endless decisions about framing even if you try and capture your subject ‘neutrally’. What you include, what you don’t, whether your axies focus on the charge range or full numeric ranges and so on. See Susan Sontag’s On Phototography for a deeply considered read on this.

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.