SirEDCaLot

SirEDCaLot , 9 days ago

I agree. Even at $120 each. 120 times tens of millions is serious fucking cash.
We need to have a couple of big companies go bankrupt over this shit. Then maybe they will start taking it seriously. Perhaps at that point maintaining personal data on people will be seen as a liability rather than an asset. And that's what we really need.

SirEDCaLot , 8 days ago

Yup. We need more of the corporate death penalty. And when corporations are so big that 'killing' them would harm the economy, I argue we're back to too big to fail. Maybe the answer is giant fines, and if the company can't pay, wipe out the largest shareholders and then resell the stock over time.
Make people's personal information a giant hot potato that nobody wants to be holding.

SirEDCaLot , 8 days ago

Disagree. Breaking the corporate veil would have a whole lot of unintended consequences and would basically kill investment as a concept. I agree we need to do more about corporations that violate the law with impunity and get wrist slaps. I don't think that's it.

SirEDCaLot , 8 days ago

Because it would greatly increase the cost and risk of investment. Think not just for billionaires, but for anybody.
Imagine somebody buys a couple tens of thousands of dollars of a stock as part of their retirement, that company does something bad, and now not only do they lose their investment but they lose the rest of their retirement also.

I am all for wiping out shareholders, especially big ones, when a company does something super stupid. There should be an incentive for shareholders to hold companies they invest in accountable.

But suggesting that company owners become personally liable for the actions of those companies, especially when those equity owners have little or no control over the decisions of the company, that is a recipe for disaster.

SirEDCaLot , 8 days ago

Oh I'm sure there would be insurance for that, but it would be expensive. It would dramatically reduce the amount of overall investment in the nation. That is a very bad thing, it would slow down the rate of our economy and innovation.
Don't get me wrong, the current setup where companies treat your data like an asset and then lose it and nothing happens is broken. There need to be stiff penalties for it. Corporate death penalty even, especially with an ending of all too big to fail. I'm talking penalties scary to the point that whatever profit could be made from your personal information isn't worth the risk of having it, companies are scared to collect info.
This would especially be true if there is negligence involved, like when companies put their databases on open S3 buckets. Companies should be scared shitless of that.
But destroying our system of investment is not the answer.

SirEDCaLot , 7 days ago

If a company ruins people's lives, I'm okay with them disappearing and all their investors losing their shirts.

I agree that a company that can't afford to pay for the damage it is causing is doing more harm than help and should go away.

What I think we can both absolutely agree on, is that the current system where companies forcibly collect all kinds of information on people, don't take security seriously, get breached, and the only punishment that happens is a few million dollars fine they can just write a check for and everyone affected gets a year of credit monitoring, is a broken system.
In many of these breaches, they happen because the data was stored so poorly one could make a serious argument for gross negligence.
When a company does this and the punishment is a wrist slap, I have a problem with that. It becomes a cost of doing business, not something company management is actually afraid of.

Also, as somebody who actually works in IT, I can tell you cyber insurance is a thing. For small businesses it covers this sort of breach. When you sign up for it they send you a whole questionnaire that asks about your security practices. It's all boilerplate bullshit. Real cybersecurity involves an insane amount of complexity and required understanding at every level, and the insurance questionnaire is like do you use multi-factor authentication for your email y/n?. If you check no you get a higher insurance premium.

Perhaps a solution would be a mandatory payment of $250 per person made directly to that person if their information is breached. And if the company fails to report it within 60 days, it triples. If the company intentionally conceals it, it quadruples. And should the company go bankrupt and liquidate, these payments to users will be considered the primary creditor and take priority over all others.
So no more of this '$10 discount on your next purchase and a year of credit monitoring' class action settlements, put some real fucking teeth in a law. People would get some real compensation. And personal information would no longer be seen as a $20/person asset but rather as a potentially destroy the company liability.

SirEDCaLot , 14 days ago

Oh the plane will be fine.
Being a whistleblower is very stressful though. I would not be at all surprised if many if not all of them find it just too hard to go on and end up committing suicide by shooting themselves twice in the back of the head before jumping off a building.

SirEDCaLot , 18 days ago

Just disable TPM in your BIOS if you have that option. Win 11 needs modern TPM so it won't upgrade you if you don't have one.

SirEDCaLot , 17 days ago

Yeah people who really wanted 11 back in the beginning found an easy process to bypass the check during the install. 11 works fine without it.

SirEDCaLot , 22 days ago

This is 100% correct.
Look at the average rate of crashes per mile driven with autopilot versus a human. If the autopilot number is lower, they're doing it right and should be rewarded and NHTSA should leave them be. If the autopilot number is higher, then yes by all means bring in the regulation or whatever.

SirEDCaLot , 19 days ago

It is not my place or yours or the governments to tell people how to spend their money or not.
It IS our place to ensure that companies aren't producing products that kill people.

Thus money doesn't matter here. What matters is whether or not FSD is more dangerous than a human. If it is, it should be prohibited or only used under very monitored conditions. If it is equal or better than a human, IE same or fewer accident / fatalities per mile driven, then Tesla should be allowed to sell it, even if it is imperfect.

In the US we have a free market. Nobody is obligated to pay for FSD or use it. People can vote with their wallet whether they think it's worth the money or not, THAT is what determines if Tesla makes more money or not. It's up to each individual customer to decide if it's worth it. That's their choice not mine or yours.

As I see it, in a free market what Tesla has to prove is that their system doesn't make things worse. If they can, if they can prove they're not making roads more dangerous IE no need to ban it, then it's a matter between them and their customer.

SirEDCaLot , 19 days ago

One company says they can build FSD with 15 sensors and sensor fusion. Another company says they can build FSD with just cameras. As I see it, the development path doesn't matter, it's the end result that matters.

SirEDCaLot , 24 days ago

This is obviously a negotiation tactic.

If ByteDance doesn't want to sell their stupid algorithm, they could simply rip it out of TikTok, replace it with a random number generator or any other off-the-shelf recommendation engine, and proceed with the sale.

Find their lowest paid summer intern from the university computer science department, tell him to write some sort of recommendation algorithm and he has two weeks to do it, then whatever he comes up with make it live and that's all the new owner gets.

SirEDCaLot , 23 days ago

Obv without the algorithm TikTok loses some value. However it loses less value than if they just pull the plug.

SirEDCaLot , 1 month ago

Opt out entirely. Get an electric car. Your gas pump is your garage and you start every day with a full tank.

SirEDCaLot , 1 month ago

Wtf 80 grand I dont have that either.

Model 3 and Y are like $35-50k or go used for less.

SirEDCaLot , 1 month ago

Exactly. This thing itself is saying most people live outside of reasonable range of an office. And it says nothing about any sort of accommodation for those people or ability to continue remote work.
This is a 'relocate or quit' notice.
For those who were hired as remote workers, I hope they are smart enough to just say no to both options, force the company to lay them off and pay unemployment and severance.

SirEDCaLot , 3 months ago

IMHO, the problem with Google isn't SEO. It's Google.
When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible.
Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the 'engagement algorithm' Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn't search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I'm trying to find and that's exactly what I typed in.
Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it's still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn't include what I searched for.

It's actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase.
That was the moment Google decided that search wasn't their most important product. And it's been slow downhill ever since.

SirEDCaLot , 3 months ago

IMHO, the problem with Google isn't SEO. It's Google.
When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible.
Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the 'engagement algorithm' Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn't search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I'm trying to find and that's exactly what I typed in.
Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it's still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn't include what I searched for.

It's actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase.
That was the moment Google decided that search wasn't their most important product. And it's been slow downhill ever since.

SirEDCaLot , 3 months ago

Lol
Don't know anybody that does that, not since they closed in 2019 :P
Amusingly, double quotes are still the standard 'must include' operator on Google search.

Google has also completely blown a very good opportunity to make a ubiquitous chat system. Several iterations of Google talk and Google meet and the like, only one of which federated outside of Google, none of which are compatible with each other, all of which seem to get remade or rebranded every few years.

Competitor to Facebook would have been a great idea. I had actually planned to join Google+.
But shortly after it launched they started pushing it so fucking hard, like almost sneakly signing up people for it and making it damn near required to do anything, that made me say hell no. I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone in that regard.

I don't know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn't seem like they have much of any real mission these days. Haven't really since 'don't be evil' stopped being part of their mission statement.

SirEDCaLot , 3 months ago

Stupid short sighted crap too. Complaining about excessive compensation and too much stock given away... That's the people who build the best generation of money making products there. If they have no skin in the game and aren't being compensated well, they aren't going to attract and keep the best talent.
The best talent is going to go to companies like Tesla and OpenAI and various startups where those people have a chance to become millionaires on stock options.

It's one thing to pull the Netflix strategy, keep only the very best of the best people, pay them a lot, and get rid of everybody else.
But treating labor overall like a cost and not an investment is not a good long-term strategy.

SirEDCaLot , 3 months ago

Generally agree.

But it depends on what your product line is. Does Google want to be Microsoft (new flavor of the same old crap, cloud centric, no special talent needed just competent coders and project leadership) or do they want to be OpenAI (push the envelope of what's possible and commercialize it)?

If the goal is to be Microsoft, this investor's comments are accurate. Fewer staff, less compensation, just get a few well paid product managers with a vision and a buggy whip to drive the coders to build it. Higher margins will mean more profits.

If the goal is to be OpenAI, this investor is dead wrong.

Netflix hasn’t even been following the Netflix strategy.

I was talking about their employees, not their content. Their content strategy is brain dead. They cancel so much stuff that it's not even worth getting into a Netflix show because it'll probably be cancelled after one season.
It might work, in the short term. But without quality content people will give up on Netflix and they will be the 'budget option'.

HBO is doing the same thing- I really think their management must be on drugs or brain damaged or something. HBO was THE most recognizable brand name for QUALITY content in the entire industry, and they killed it in favor of 'max' which is generic and means nothing and blends in with everyone else's 'plus'. And lopping off their own content is equally stupid.

Just like Boeing putting the useless McDonnell Douglas bean counters in charge of the company post merge, WB put the people who ran Discovery into the ground in charge. Sad to watch.