It's doing something that wasn't worth the squeeze for a human. Seems like a perfect use case for AI. Sure, I can do X or I can do Y but if it takes me a few weeks but AI can hash it out in hours, it now makes it worth it.
I think it is legitimate to argue that the process here does not fit the usual definition of "brute forcing". Traditionally, brute forcing would refer to something like a dictionary attack, where an algorithm tries to match all possible combinations of words to eg. find a password. Here, the approach was more common sense based, using historical records and possible error sources to narrow down the possibility space enormously in advance, try out a much more limited set of options within that space until you got a result that made sense, and finally validate those results using historical records. It's the exact same kind of "brute forcing" a human expert would do.
If the final set of possibilities is astronomically smaller than a naive one, calling the whole process a "brute force exercise" draws attention to an astronomically insignificant part.
So OpenAI is partnering with Latham Watkins, Freshfields is partnering with Anthropic and Kleiner Perkins is building their own. It'll be interesting to see which wins out here, I don't see how those partnerships can end well for the law firms unless they're making an assumption they'll be sucked dry of USP but the revenue split from the AI labs will make up for it. Why would I pay a premium for Latham Watkins when every other firm can get their expertise and experience in a subscription, and add their own on top?
They'll be operating under a ZDR. Labs will still get some data but I wouldn't go as far as sucked dry of USP. Firms are very aware of the value of their USP.
The work of Dieter Rams, the primary influence for Ive's work at Apple that's set the aesthetic direction for hardware for the last ~20 years to critical acclaim and is a showcase of manufacturing prowess? That Dieter Rams? This is an absurd and ahistorical understanding of modernism.
Apple hardware is glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepipeds very similar to the glass-surfaced featureless rectangular parallelepiped skyscrapers that this article is decrying. The main difference is that Apple hardware has rounded corners as a necessary concession to practicality.
But that’s not a byproduct of trying to ‘use cheaper resources’, it’s borne of trying to create products that are shaped exclusively by how to best solve a problem and treat materials honestly, as opposed to ornamentation and material imitation.
That wasn't my point, or the point of GP. It's that modernism has become acceptable. So much so that everything from our buildings to our cars to our phones have the same style.
Given OpenAI's well documented history of unethical behaviour it seems adorably naive to think they actually do that in general, or that they wouldn't pull this particular data separately to generate these proofs.
Unethical doesn't mean irrational. They'd be risking massive lawsuits and a total loss of trust if they got caught lying about this. Doesn't seem worth it.
By "loss of trust", I meant that this is something they would risk losing a lot of users over, which isn't the case with the other lawsuits. There is a massive distinction between fighting third parties in a legal grey area and committing blatant fraud against your own users. Even if you have no regards for ethics, intentionally shipping a noop "do not train" toggle offers negligible upside for a massive downside.
I answered your initial question in good faith, but it's increasingly clear each time you shift the goalposts that you're more interested in JAQ than discussing.
As before, despite your prevarication, I've provided examples of
- Massive lawsuits
- Risks to consumer trust
That's what was asked for; your assertion that it will totally all be fine doesn't invalidate that.
I know you are excited to quibble endlessly over this, but it's transparently disingenuous each time you jump to a new point and pretend it was there originally.
Consider: if your point was defensible, you would have been able to make it honestly.
Those examples aren't really comparable in scale, especially regarding risk to consumer trust. How many users did they actually lose from wrongful death lawsuits? I guess very few.
Shipping an intentionally fake privacy toggle is fundamentally different. That is deliberate, active deception targeted at the entire user base. The resulting fallout would be far more damaging to them than settling an isolated lawsuit. That could even potentially cross the threshold into criminal fraud. I'm genuinely incredulous you believe they'd take so much risk for so little reward.
We do tend to impose them on individual drivers who make egregious and consequential failures, that’s the point. If every car running the same software is functionally the same ‘driver’ this class of failure absolutely should trigger a moratorium.
>We do tend to impose them on individual drivers who make egregious and consequential failures, that’s the point.
Do we? It's a common saying that if you want to kill someone with no penalties, have them run over with a car.
Then there are examples like these all over the place. Not to mention distracted driving and DUIs don't even get your license suspended in many or most jurisdictions.
>The Audi, which Jones had bought one month before the crash, was the third car he had totaled in a crash within 11 months. Speed was a factor in all three collisions, but police did not cite Jones in the first two crashes, prosecutors said.
Also see the 80-year-old woman in SF who killed an entire family at a bus stop, while speeding, while going the wrong way on a one way street, and was sentenced to probation and community service and banned from driving for three years.
This is a lot of words to describe rent seeking.
Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to buy stock in the monopolists, their ability to extract these rents from an ever-growing proportion of the economy is only getting stronger.
Yes. I paused reading at some point just to marvel at the clarity of writing. It seems absurd to complain about length, it isn't long. Maybe we have different ideas what good writing is, but I'd say this is in the top percent.
AI can mirror this style of writing, but it can't mirror the clarity of thought behind it.
I don't think parent commenter is complaining about the length. "a lot of words to describe..." is a rhetorical device. Their comment is basically saying "you wrote this whole article complaining about Amazon, but what they're doing is common and systemic."
Now show Seth’s audience (which has been accumulated for a long time) your explanation and theirs. I’d wager most people would be scratching their heads and rereading yours, while they’d breeze through Seth’s. In other words, your take may be shorter, but it’s not clearer or necessarily faster to read when aiming for comprehension. Seth doesn’t write for people who visit HN everyday.
There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all. The people who made their names beginning twenty years ago by marketing these expressions are losers who have simply been proven wrong. It is monotonous middle brow repetition See eg the left wing expose of the above mentioned brain death in Maher Aquanno https://archive.ph/YJaZr better in their academic papers like Monopoly or Competition? Unraveling the Amazon Paradox https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/04866134261415639
where do you live? Most places I've lived if you walk into a private residence where you don't know anyone but the door is open that is unlawful entry or trespassing. Same if someone forgets to lock the door of their business when they close at 9 p.m and you go in at midnight.
> Perhaps in theory but I wouldn't bet my freedom on it. "But officer, I only walked into that woman's house as an act in itself"
Or life. Where I live it is legal to shoot a person who is an active and immediate threat to your property, self, or other persons. Any person walking through the front yard in the daytime while you are inside, not an active threat. An unknown person entering your dwelling through an unlocked open door is an active threat. In the above case of a woman's house she would probably be praised as a hero, or at least a role model, for shooting the intruder.
I suspect a lot of these aesthetic baselines aren’t some kind of organic emergence from the model and more a layer of human curated fine tuning, prompting and harness adjustments to produce a positively received aesthetic in lieu of user guidance.
A lot of companies are still using Cursor but I don't know of anyone moving to it, and I do know of many moving from it to Codex or Claude, feels like a legacy product at this point alongside windsurf & the replit/lovable/bolt cluster.
I imagine the Venn Diagram of Rivian buyers and Apple users is basically a circle (or one small circle inside a much larger one), this seems like a wildly obtuse position for them to take.
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