the_snooze

As long as the smart TV still trusts eMudhra, then yeah. You'll want to super careful and prevent the TV from pulling updates that could revoke that trust.

What AI boosters don't realize is that we're not in the optimistic days of the 1990s anymore. We've seen that the prevailing tech business model is to offer convenience as a lure to lock in dependent users and extract value from them.

Unless these AI assistants are running on self-managed platforms independent of their developers, all I see is immense counterparty risk.

Proper engineering requires observing and working with real-world constraints. Ignoring constraints is a form of magical thinking.

One real-world constraint is that end-users won't always do what you intend for them to with the thing you engineered.

>Decapitating the regime and degrading their military capabilities was the primary objective.

Those are tactical objectives, not strategic aims. The US is very good at winning tactically, but losing strategically. This is yet another example.

Bringing on new fabs takes many years and billions of dollars. You're exposing yourself to a lot of risk if you build now and find that the gold rush is over by the time your new capacity is online.

That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.

We're going back to the mainframe model. Client-side general-purpose computing is an impediment to recurring subscription revenue and vendor lock-in.

>Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users.

They lost the plot long ago. They're firmly in extraction mode now: how much value can they get from end-users?

I'm of the same mind. Money is simply a means to an end. The workplace is just somewhere to exchange your time and skills for money, which you use to pursue priorities outside of that.

No job will ever tell you you've done enough and so you should do something else. If you don't make that call yourself, whose life are you actually living?

You don't. You accept that social bandwidth is a real-world constraint that you work with, not magic away. That's real engineering.

This is why I asked:

>And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around?

A bottom-up approach has a far better chance of finding those particularly good use cases, and if you lean on the people how found those fits, they're more persuasive than top-down edicts. They actually know what they're talking about. If the point is to leverage AI for better work outcomes, someone with your experience is far more valuable than "here's a dashboard, make the number go up," which seems to be what's going on at Amazon.

My questions for that approach are: Why treat AI as a special technology that needs enterprise-scale exploration to come up with a useful application? And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around?

The top-down approach to encouraging (mandating?) AI usage strikes me as infantilizing to the workers, who are perfectly capable of choosing which tools they use and when.

>I do agree that it is still a tool to keep in touch with some people, yes, but… Are there no alternatives that require a lower price to pay?

The sustainable alternative I've arrived at is private group chats with notifications disabled. Engagement is entirely on my own terms (i.e., I have to manually open the thing to see any updates), and there's no formalized moderation or amplification because it's human-scale enough to let shared social norms govern it.

These benefits make sense up-front, but we have 15+ years of direct experience with "democratizing" technology that ultimately end up ensnaring people. Unless you get these benefits from a local model, you're establishing a deep dependency on an AI service provider whose interests may not necessarily align with yours.

Too much of modern consumer-facing software think they're the ends, not the means.