> we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now
Tell me you have zero clue what a monopoly is or what the law is, without telling me.
Monopoly law relies on broad categories, not narrow ones. You can’t call Microsoft a monopoly because they are the only company that makes Windows. You can’t call Amazon a monopoly because they are the only company that makes AmazonBasics. You can’t call Anthropic a monopoly because their product is 20% better for your use case, otherwise by definition no company has any incentive to do a good job at anything.
Somehow this was coming up a few years ago where people kept saying that Apple could face antitrust because they were the only company who made iOS and controlled the App Store. Given that android exists, and has roughly equal market share, that didn’t make much sense to me, but I kept seeing it being discussed.
> Tell me you have zero clue what a monopoly is or what the law is, without telling me.
Monopoly law is subject to reinterpretation over time and anybody who has studied the history of it knows this. The only people argue for "strict" interpretations of current monopoly law are those who currently benefit from the status quo.
> Monopoly law relies on broad categories, not narrow ones.
And this is currently a gigantic problem. Because of relying on broad categories to define "monopoly", every single supply chain has been allowed to collapse into a small handful of suppliers who have no downstream capacity thanks to Always Late Inventory(tm). This prevents businesses from mounting effective competition since their upstream suppliers have no ability to support such activities thanks to over-optimization.
To be effective on the modern incarnation of businesses, monopoly law needs to bust every single consolidated narrow vertical over and over and over until they have enough downstream capacity to support competition again.
Oh, give me a break. I know the law around this incredibly well. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the law is appropriate. The whole point of laws is that they should match intent – and as for '20%': "tell me you don't understand how a small quantitative gap can result in a step change in capability."
> Oh, give me a break. I know the law around this incredibly well.
Then don’t make BS up like implying Anthropic is a monopolist for the crime of competence.
> tell me you don't understand how a small quantitative gap can result in a step change in capability
The law does not give a darn about this. Being a good competitive option does not make you a league of your own. If I invent a new flavor of shake, the Emerald Slide, am I a monopolist in shakes because I’m the only one selling Emerald Slides? If you go and then start a local business reselling shakes and I’m your only supplier, am I a monopolist then? Absolutely not.
You do realize that I called out in my post they are absolutely not a monopoly by the law, right? I know all-too-well what the definition is.
We have a similar situation in mobile where Apple may not be considered a monopoly, but people have walked around for a decade with a supercomputer in their pocket that is wildly underused.
Things have gotten faster; things are different than they were decades ago when a lot of this was devised.
The reality of the matter is that some of us just want to see innovation actually happen apace, and not see 5, 10, or 30 years of slowdown while we litigate whether or not such a company is holding all the cards, while everyone is collectively waiting at the spigot for a company to get its shit together because we're not allowed to fix the situation.
For what it's worth, I'm hopeful that the other model providers will catch up and put us in a situation where this conversation is irrelevant.
What I'm afraid of is a situation where we see continued divergence, and we end up with another Apple situation.
> “we are self-preferencing, and the FTC should really take a look at us, even if we're technically not a monopoly right now”
That is not calling out that they are “absolutely not a monopoly by the law” in any way, shape, or form. You’re framing it as though they aren’t by a technicality, when they aren’t anywhere near discussion by even the most extreme of legal theories. You won’t find Lina Khan or Margarethe Vestager, both ousted for going too far, complaining about Anthropic.
> “We have a similar situation in mobile where Apple may not be considered a monopoly, but people have walked around for a decade with a supercomputer in their pocket that is wildly underused.”
In that we can’t run a Torrent client to download illegally redistributed media 99% of the time? Otherwise, in what way, are they underused? For the degrees of public addiction, a more underutilized phone would be a social benefit.
Let me back up what you're saying. They absolutely are not a monopoly today by any definition, by any stretch, in any conceivable way.
I'm looking forward. Things are moving very quickly. As I said above, I'm afraid of us diverging into another Apple situation in the future. If I suggest that they should be looked at and thought about, it's not for today, it's for tomorrow. If divergence continues. Because as with everything in AI, it might hit us a lot faster than people expect. Hell, given their approach to morality, I suspect that Anthropic folks have already thought deeply about these sorts of concerns. That's why it's actually a lot more in character for them to be doing this not due to self-preferencing, but due to unaffordability, which - if you look at my first post - is what I said seems to be happening.
Suffice to say that I have a graveyard of things that I think phones could have been, where unfortunately we've ended up with these - as you say - addicting consumerist messes.
Gonna stop here so I don't flood the thread. We're getting very off topic.
Open source developers are wildly idealistic. In the rest of the world, I have finally internalized...
1. Most people say they care about privacy... but won't spend even $1 for it. They care about their privacy about as much as an open source developer cares about user experience. Just extract the tarball, it's not that hard.
2. Most people don't care about technology and want it out of their lives. They don't want to know what sideloading is. They don't want to know how to discern safe from dangerous. And they aren't wrong. How many open source developers know how to drive manual? Car enthusiasts have just as much of a righteous claim to attention, after all. The model railroad enthusiasts are also upset by our community's lack of attention. Every enthusiast, in every field, hundreds of them, are upset by lack of mainstream attention, and this will never change.
3. Linux and open source software in general are not even close to being popular on the desktop. Gaming and web browsing is a tiny subset of what people buy PCs to do, and Linux isn't even close on the rest. Even the gaming success is so niche it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (Switch 2 outsold 3 years Steam Deck sales in the first 24 hours).
4. Some of this optimism was deluded from the start. Like when Stallman said we can defeat proprietary software with open source, then openly admitted he had no idea how any open source developers could afford rent. "If everyone works for free, while the big companies stop working, we could get ahead" is gobsmackingly naive and it's honestly astounding anyone fell for it.
> Most people say they care about privacy... but won't spend even $1 for it.
Maybe they are smarter than you and noticed that trust is being violated constantly so paying for it in no way means you will obtain it and is just a waste of money?
> Dr. Irene Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex for 30 years. Alex could identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers. He understood abstract concepts like "same" and "different." His vocabulary exceeded 100 words. When he died in 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were reportedly "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow." I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off.
The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.
Ah yeah that's exactly what it was but thought I'd try to add a bit more emotion to this point haha. Even if the parrot said this every night as a good night - its still very sweet that Alex said that every night :)
Then to put it bluntly; you lied to your audience.
> "I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off."
If your audience conceived it as possibly being a merely repeated phrase that the researcher probably said thousands of times, not something the parrot actually understood, then it is very easy to brush off as something we already knew parrots could do.
I'm not a professional photographer though. I'm also not a professional musician, either.
Yet, Darktable allows me to process my RAWs to a point which I like. Similarly, my audio equipment allows me to create some music which I like, too.
I didn't push Darktable to professional levels, but I believe it can match bigger tools for what I want to do with it. I don't do photo manipulation, for example. Just process RAWs. I expect the same from my audio equipment for my music endeavors.
That's the thing, not everyone is a professional photographer. Open source tools are fine for many of us. They are also great to get a taste of a field, to learn the basics, without a massive investment.
You don't have to be everything to everyone. You just have to satisfy a need.
I don’t personally care for her work, at least the more recent stuff. Her older performances were more interesting. But I’m not evaluating it morally, and I don’t really see how it being “demonic” is equivalent to it being dumb.
Your problem is that you see "demonic" as an aesthetic choice; but Marina and others like her completely believe what they are doing is real and has weight. The people accused of engaging in the occult are frequently offended by those who claim it is merely aesthetic.
A video of Abramovic preparing for one event shows her smearing pig blood on walls while writing cryptic instructions, including, “Mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk, drink on earthquake nights.”
In one photo, Abramovic holds a bloody, skinned goat head—a symbol associated with Baphomet, a pagan idol tied to Satanism. Another image depicts her standing behind a model posed as a “dead” body, naked with her internal organs spilling out. Abramovic’s hand gestures in these photos are said to align with occult practices.
If that's not demonic, Satanic, and occult, what would you ever call demonic, Satanic, and occult? Does every demonic person need to self-identify as such? Is this a game of "she's not because she says she's not"? Believe people when they tell you what they are.
The fact that there is no newer bug ticket for it in 12 years shows is this a purely academic feature nobody wanted.
And why should they? Most Blu-ray players support the old format (SRT); converting it to PGS gains almost none of the upsides of the newer format (screen placement).
We've already been through this when people a decade ago thought voice was the future of the computer.
When that completely didn't work, we thought that augmented reality was the future of the computer, which also didn't work out.
You need a screen to be able to verify what you're doing (try shopping on Amazon without a screen), which means you also need a UI around it, which then means voice (and by extension agents which also function by conversation) is slower and dumber than the UI, every time.
Meanwhile I have yet to see any brand excited to be integrated with ChatGPT and Claude. Unlike a consumer; being a purely "reasoning-based" agent, they're most likely to ignore everything aesthetic and pick the bottom of the barrel cheapest option for any category. How do you convince an AI to show your specific product to a customer? You don't.
They are not saying "we will remove the mandate to use a Microsoft Account." By itself, that shows their "care" is purely corporate, likely driven to calm down furious OEMs who will happily remind them Apple doesn't need an Apple Account to use a now-cheap Mac.
Also, because Nadella can't stand the word, I'll say it right here: Microslop is still making Winslop to help people make Officeslop to then upload to Slopdrive.
Good point, and that one has actually caused logistical headaches. If someone tries to set up a new out-of-box computer without an internet connect, well, you just cannot. Even the previously working bypass has been removed in a recent update.
And, yes, I am aware that Pro/Enterprise don't suffer from this, but a LOT of computers sold are Windows Home/OEM licenses. It impacts a ton of people.
They also aren't saying "we're going to prioritize performance and make sure that when we rewrite functionality, it performs just as well as what it's replacing". Color me skeptical that they actually care about quality.
I've seen this argument, but I strongly suspect that it's a cope argument. "We couldn't get in... because... we didn't care to! Even though we've hacked literally every other object on the planet just because."
The proof in the pudding of this will be when the Nintendo Switch 2 reaches 2035 with no cracks. That's my prophecy; that this time around the cat actually will catch the mouse. Between NVIDIA's heavily revised glitch-resistant RISC-V security architecture and Nintendo's impeccable microkernel, there's nowhere left to hide. DRM may turn out to have been a very slow long battle to "victory," not a "this will always be defeated."
I have my doubts. I suspect that Nvidia have made mistakes.
Anyway, situations like the one you describe are one to be solved by legislation requiring certain devices be sold as open devices that put power in the hands of the owner.
my nintendo switch is "rootable" by shorting two pins in the controller interface, with a previously set up SD card inserted with the homebrew bootloader.
My PS3 and PS4 were both jailbroken/rooted. I don't remember the ps3 routine, but the PS4 was loading the "system -> help" page while connected to a ESP32 wifi AP running a simple web server that replied to requests with the jailbreak for PS4.
I give it about a year, especially if nintendo has to change the specs or otherwise tampers with customer expectations. there's bound to be some way to reload firmware on a "dead" device without pulling chips, and that's all it takes.
The shorting two pins is a heavy oversimplification of what happened.
The two pins were installed by design from Nintendo to activate the Tegra RCM mode. RCM mode meanwhile has a USB buffer overflow which is the real bug.
In modern NVIDIA chips, this RCM mode no longer exists. The new recovery modes meanwhile are running across multiple physically separate CPUs verifying each other (glitch one, the other notices), all running formally verified firmware written in SPARK (the thing you use for nuclear reactors and avionics).
As for the OS itself, according to a maintainer who rewrote the kernel twice for open source, it has zero bugs. None. The microkernel is tiny, has no drivers, and almost no attack surface. This is born out by WebKit exploits being a dime a dozen on Switch, but all of them are useless.
> In modern NVIDIA chips, this RCM mode no longer exists. The new recovery modes meanwhile are running across multiple physically separate CPUs verifying each other (glitch one, the other notices), all running formally verified firmware written in SPARK (the thing you use for nuclear reactors and avionics).
I guess that, when you absolutely want zero surprises, Ada is the language of choice.
This is hyperbole. We have 1 switch that routinely "won't power on" without a ritual of button holding & timing. My original switch used to hard lock, but i stopped trying to play the sorts of games that were causing the OS to crash.
Both of these disprove the zero bugs claim, unless we move the goalposts.
That's obviously hardware failure, loose solder connections, or RAM failure, not bugs. For that matter, I was talking very specifically about kernel security bugs in context, not any bugs someone could experience.
That's like saying "I plugged in my phone's charging cable, and unplugged it, 20,000 times, and now it's sometimes showing the charging symbol inconsistently, obviously a software bug proving the charging circuit driver has a security flaw."
When you extrapolate out the political economy consequences of your hypothesis being correct the future looks very dark indeed. If you can make an unhackable game console it should be obvious to people on this site what sorts of dystopias you could also create.
unhackable brain-computer interface required for most daily activities (like phones are today) and with a killswitch "for the public safety" and 24/7 cloud monitoring. Obviously this is pretty out there science fiction today but will it remain so in a century? And if it doesn't, what kinds of political systems are likely to dominate? What will happen to those political systems that for one reason or another decline this capability? I leave these questions as an exercise for the reader.
Before we even get there, within 5-7 years new PCs will be Xbox-like, locked down devices. Only approved OS and apps may be installed, as it is a felony to run an OS that doesn't meet federal and state KYC ID requirements or even own a copy of one without a license, and no PC manufacturer wants the liability risk of being found complicit in the commission of such crimes. General purpose computing will be a thing of the past for the masses (who didn't really want it anyway). Server hardware will be exempt from these requirements, but to purchase it you need a D-U-N-S number and a statement of intended use in the purchase agreement.
Even if it were possible to find a vulnerability in the hardware, doing so without attracting the attention of law enforcement will be profoundly difficult, as Windows sends telemetry back to Microsoft about every instruction that runs on your hardware. Apple will claim to be more privacy-focused, at least for a year or two, but the M9 chip's NPU will just perform local inference on your activity and report you to Apple and the FBI if it detects attempts to break security.
Well, and these systems are also designed with ratchet-type measures in place from the get-go, where holes are plugged, fuses are burned, and newly released titles will only decrypt/run on the latest OS.
So even if Switch 2 doesn't make it all the way to 2035 with zero cracks, there's a strong likelihood that any exploits found will be short-lived.
Which incentivizes people to hold on to exploits for as long as possible, ideally past the console life cycle, just to make sure it can be used, which already is a thing
2035 for Switch 2 piracy to get started sounds nice, as someone invested in the platform.
Maybe we should think about this like the concept of public domain. Locked down for X years in order to protect the artist, then opened up for everyone to benefit society.
Tell me you have zero clue what a monopoly is or what the law is, without telling me.
Monopoly law relies on broad categories, not narrow ones. You can’t call Microsoft a monopoly because they are the only company that makes Windows. You can’t call Amazon a monopoly because they are the only company that makes AmazonBasics. You can’t call Anthropic a monopoly because their product is 20% better for your use case, otherwise by definition no company has any incentive to do a good job at anything.
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