The Sonnet 5 comment is spot on. Even Anthropic's own graph initially showed lower performance at higher costs. Only thing I notice about Sonnet 5 is that it does appear to hand off tasks to agents more frequently similar to Fable, but of course nowhere near the quality of Fable. My guess is that Opus 5 will do similar but just isn't ready yet.
I do use Claude Cowork and hence the VM is important, but I also leave the desktop app running all the time since I have many scheduled tasks at different times. The thing is that the VM could shutdown after being idle for some amount of time and then fire back up when you are ready to use it.
The VM itself is for Claude Cowork which does all work within the VM sandbox. That doesn't help answer why they spin it up immediately and don't have a way to disable it though. Just the "why it exists" question.
So, one of the things I have personally seen is where these companies have in-house counsel and then CC that person on emails that could be problematic if they were ever required to be produced in discovery. Then if something does happen, it is easy to claim privilege on these emails and hide what are essentially non-legal related emails from lawsuits. There is flimsy cover of keeping counsel informed so they can provide legal guidance if needed, but that essentially undermines the legal process during a lawsuit as the very emails verifying a plaintiff's claim may be in these privileged emails, or maybe not, but without seeing them only the company and their legal teams knows.
Yes, this is unethical and also can lead to things like we see in this case where the judge will pierce privilege because it was being abused. But......unless you can prove that is what is going on in the emails, judges are very reticent to pierce privilege.
What if some people's hunger is louder than others? What if your expended willpower to not overeat is a lot less than what is required by others?
I ask these as that is what the GLP-1's are showing. They change the hunger feeling and it might just be that you and others got lucky with a lower hunger feeling than others. There is no objective measure of food noise, but I think we all need to be open to the possibility that the food noise is different for different people and its not all willpower or laziness.
The thing that he doesn't mention is that as soon as they do something legislatively and announce routes there, etc.....well Google just won't crawl those sites. It turns into a game of whether you would like 0 traffic from Google, or allow them to use your content both for search results and AI summaries.
Google is the bringer of traffic and if you want it, then you play by their rules. I don't like that the web is in that position, but here we are.
That is for this instance where they were caught and it took a huge amount of resources, willpower, and luck for that to be followed through on to get to the fine.
Basically in this case it was breakeven minus lawyer fees if they get caught which only happens X% of the time.
That is why there are usually punitive premiums so that the business calculus never makes sense as the cost of doing it x risk of being caught is always a negative compared to potential profit.
TLDR: Fine should be 2-10x times benefit gained or higher to prevent even thinking about trying to get away with it.
Fining is because you can't put a corporation in jail. It is basically an alternative meant to speak the language of profit/loss that corporations live and die by.
So in this case if you don't make it so that the bad behavior is "unprofitable", then there is really no incentive to change as profitable business practices will not be discontinued and fines just become part of the operating costs.
Agreed, this is all a form of weaponized AI being used by the private sector to influence, optimize, and profit. Using AI for these purposes is perfectly fine. But there needs to be a realization of the impact so that guidelines, checks, and balances can be put in place. There can be unintended consequences of these things that the AI doesn't care about since its playing for high-score in the game of attention, views, and profit.