jj4211

An example I can think of is IBM.

In 2010, the CEO proclaimed an earnings target for 2015 based on nothing at all. There was no plan or reasonable expectation, just a flashy number. Investors ate it up and stock went up. No shortage of white men eager to be at the helm of a company that seemed to be on top of the world.

He promptly left the company and handed it over to a woman. As one could predict, a hollow wish about earnings without an actual plan failed to actually deliver. To a lot of folks who understood the nuance, they called it from the moment he said it.

However, the news coverage was basically that she failed to execute on his "plan".

Now she wasn't amazing leadership or anything, but neither was he. However he got to be celebrated as a strong leader mostly on the back of hollow promises and she got to be blamed for the fact it was hollow.

I suppose I can't prove that it was because she was a woman that she got to be the fall person, but I am at least sure they could have found a willing white dude to be the fall guy at least.

It means that if you are so obsessed with protecting a user from making an informed decision about their own security, then you could gracefully degrade in your 'horribly insecure context' instead of just bombing out completely.

You cannot start a car with a suction cup.

I can't start my car with my car's app either.

If you really want to be picky about it, block out the unlock feature and any potential 'phone as key' functionality. Leave starting the air conditioning and information.

I get the touchscreen thing, though I really don't mind a touchscreen so long as I have real hard controls for volume and heating/cooling. GPS without touchscreen is painful.

But the backup cameras, absolutely those need to be a thing. They have saved lives. People have arguably never been driving 'just fine', just getting closer to just fine. Backup cameras reduced child death from being backed over by 80%.

The apps that didn't work well were not due to lack of lock-in.

The apps didn't work well due to lack of maturity in the platform. This app is not failing because the OS is somehow '2013-like', it is failing because Android app developers are going all-in on lock-in.

Not alone.

I once dared to run Ford's app on a rooted device. They permabanned my account including a hundred dollars worth of included charging over it without so much as a warning.

Car vendors are absolute dicks about their apps.

Note it is very nice for me to be able to start the air conditioning in my electric car when it's 38C out before I leave my desk.

Other things are mildly convenient, like checking progress of charging, locking/unlocking doors remotely. It happens to be convenient to check problems, but that's only because the in-car system isn't very good, and I would happily take the in-car system being better.

No, the lock in is not needed for seamless behavior. The lock-in is to secure various revenue opportunities.

For example, if I connect a displayport cable to a displayport connection, poof, display happens. There's no 'tinkering', there's no "trying to match vendors", it just works.

Similarly, here folks sorted out the protocols in use, and none of the 'seamless' users were impacted. VW went out of their way to break them not to ensure a seamless experience, but because they wanted to paywall capability in a reliable way.

One could easily imagine schemes that didn't require the lock-in, but would not assure an enduring revenue opportunity.

Fun fact, recently had an argument with someone defending the favorable tax situation for the ultra wealthy.

Their argument was that billionaires did not have as much "real money" as middle class people so of course the middle class people should pay more in taxes...

Relevant to nothing, but just thinking of favorable billionaire treatment right now triggers that thought..

Indeed, the courts have shockingly given a pass to torrenting down unauthorized copies to the LLM companies, versus how they destroyed some lives of private individuals for similar behavior...

While I agree with you, the issue is that this question is almost more religious than technical. Folks can rearrange the goal posts, and claim stuff like humans only respond to stimulus just stimulus is non stop and response is unbounded. They can claim things like the rolling cotext window is the conciousness.

I've learned to roughly steer clear because the "LLMs are conscious folks" are impossible to discuss with and it's just kind of miserable and scary trying to engoge.

The people are of course still there, but they are largely relegated to engaging like people did with television. There's some human content and a whole lot of generated content and a key thing about "internet" was that it was a big bidirectional thing where people put content out as much as they took it in.

People have been significantly pushed toward passive engagement with a corporate curated internet instead of active engagement. That is the crux of this concept.