The attention economy is a resource extraction industry. It'll claw out any bit of attention it can get and sell it, even if that attention would be needed elsewhere.
Not sure if "optimistic" is the right word - you could still do a lot with tiny memory or CPU footprint, but that's difficult to do if a large part of tech have adopted to either not care about the waste ("space is cheap"/ "the RAM would just sit there unused if I didn't use it") or lately even based technologies on the paradigm of using as much of it as possible. That was the explicit idea of bitcoin, but even AI development goes by the logic of "what would happen if we just made the model twice as large?"
The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.
> I think the similar thing happened due to factory manufacturing automation. What used to be a varied skillful craft in a shop became standing in a single place of an assembly line doing the exact same thing whole day.
I had to think of the factory scenes in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The author's feeling is basically the main idea of the sketches, i.e. humans having to follow the pace of the machines instead of the other way around.
Reverse centaurs are nothing new. Ask any worker movement from the last centuries.
Yes, from a programmer's perspective, this is insane. But the team may have been made up of people without coding experience who maybe didn't even know what a script was. I imagine there are a lot of people right now who "know AI" and not much else, for whom this would be a genuinely new insight...
Note that even before AI, there were a lot of manual data munging jobs that could famously be replaced by "a very small shell script".
I worry, this might become worse if we see the emergence of "100% nontechnical tech startups" where no one in the entire org knows how to code - because why would you, we have AI for that...
German here. The law as written actually permits most of the speech: As long as you avoid a number of banned phrases and don't voice explicit support for groups classified as terrorist organizations, your speech is protected - in theory.
In practice, wondrous things may start to happen already long before you reach that threshold, such as police forgetting their own laws, your venue, backup venue and second backup venue suddenly all deciding they cannot host you, politicians trying to fire you - or you suddenly realizing that you're unable to access any kind of bank account or credit card because the EU put you on a sanctions list (behind closed doors, without telling you, with no option to appeal).
But none of that has to do with overregulation - on the contrary, those measures are often in violation of the law and courts have frequently decided in favor of pro-palestinian activists and axed them.
For that kind of announcement, I found it surprisingly open and detailed (at least if everything in there is true).
Still, some points are telling.
> Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses.
So the layoffs are not because they're operating at a loss and had to cut costs urgently. The margins are there, they aren't even thin, they're just not thick enough...
> In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me. These two studios have increasingly become platforms and are our largest by monthly active players. They bring critical geographic, demographic, and differentiation to XBOX.
Was a bit surprised that Minecraft got such a special status, but not at all surprised by King. All the studios getting nerfed, except the engagement maximizing mobile games...
What I find almost as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice.
We were all shocked by Polymarket, but meanwhile others just saw it as yet another emerging market - and now CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
But that's OP's point. If the server is pwned, the hackers can simply change the front-end of the app and have it send the confidential data to wherever after it was decrypted on the client.
I feel the legal part is on point. It's also increasingly used by governments to have their cake and eat it too: "We'll completely lock down your devices and run all kinds of analysis on your data, but don't worry, it's all done on-device and all communication is encrypted, so our promise to protect your privacy is kept!"
> Using e2e from a US-based entity means you are prone to spying from the US government, but at least you know you're reasonably secure against the IRGC, the Chinese intelligence service, the FSB, and so on.
You don't need E2E for that, using https/TLS for transport and servers hosted in the US would be enough.
> By definition you can't protect yourself from the entity that provides you the software you use, because you have now way to guarantee that they aren't going to backdoor you.
That's not completely true. If I can control when (and if!) the software updates and if there is some kind of vetting process to verify that the version I'm currently running does not contain a backdoor, I can treat it like a third party with respect to the server.
I agree with you though that most current software that are made to auto-update at any time without any oversight do not fall under this umbrella. Web apps definitely don't fall under it.