The wording is weird enough that I have to agree. This is the first time I've ever heard spyware segmented using "mercenary" as a qualifier, which is just insanely suspicious.

> US consumer protection laws

Bahahaha. Good one! Let's be real, consumer protection laws might as well not exist for Americans.

Before the "well akshually"s - Do they exist? Yes. Are they enforced? Barely, if at all. Do you have any hope of recourse if they're ignored? Nope! Are they being ripped to shreds by the current government in real time right this very minute? You betcha.

Amusing you picked that quote to quote because your job description is a dead ringer for Amazon work culture.

I suspect it's a dead ringer for Corporate America at any large American company.

Mostly yes, I was just pointing out the irony of quoting Bezos as if Amazon isn't exactly the same problem (if not one of the worst of them all).

Whenever I see a comment that says "if you don't do the thing in the most efficient way possible, someone else will steal your lunch", I think that people vastly overestimate the likelihood that this will actually happen.

It's similar to "open source is the most secure because it has the most eyeballs on it", but in reality security bugs will exist for years with no one noticing because people vastly overestimate how any developers will actually spend their time analyzing any given open source software.

Sure, bugs are more likely to be caught in open source and it's more likely someone will take your market share with a more efficient and competitively priced product, but you're overblowing the likelihood of both by a large margin.

> "if you don't do the thing in the most efficient way possible, someone else will steal your lunch"

Well you’re leaving behind both a serious pain point for your users AND you’re leaving in the open a clearly more compute- and money-efficient way to achieve the objective on the table.

It’s literally giving your eventual competitors (because there will be competitors, eventually) a competitive advantage.

Then sure, the market is very wide but… just look at stackoverflow vs chatgpt. As soon as a better alternative came on the market, stackoverflow died to irrelevance within months.

Except if you happen to travel for more than 45 days, in which case Google Fi will promptly tell you to get fucked and cut off your service without warning, advanced notice, or spelling out anywhere when you sign up. Not my idea of a carrier I can trust. I deleted my account and service with them to move to a carrier that I can trust and actually respects me as a customer.

tbf, that was because a lot of people abused it by being permanently outside of the US and relying exclusively on the roaming for all their data. I know because I was one of those people for 6 years.

Gee, thanks.

We've exceeded that by months on multiple occasions and fully expected them to cut us off after reading similar dire warnings but they never have.

That said, we keep data usage rather low because we're on the metered plan.

I don't know what the difference is, but the first time I exceeded that they chopped me off immediately.

What service do you use now?

I've switched to US Mobile. I haven't used it on an extended basis internationally yet, but I am about to travel internationally, so will find out soon. That said, the reviews are pretty good by people that use it internationally for an extended period of time.

They're a small shop compared to the big laptop makers and their focus is on user-repairability. Between those two you are naturally going to have a slightly higher price point than simply buying a laptop from one of the usual companies. I wouldn't call it junk or gimmickery. It has a purpose and a niche. It might not be your niche, but it is for some people.

I think people do - it's one of the main ways you can reliably spot AI-generated content. M-dashes are so fat they stick out like a sore thumb.

Absolutely not. Why would I ever want to hire a recruiter for anything? When every recruiter thinks it's perfectly okay to ghost candidates and post fake job ads, especially "big tech" recruiters, that's not the stellar reputational background you seem to think it is.

The article title isn't wrong unless you assume that the title implies the employees did in fact contact authorities, but if they did it would read "Open AI raised", not "Open AI employees raised". We all know how much company leadership listens to its employees, of course.