Posts by GoneFission 82 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2022
>Johnston told us he is “pretty infuriated” with Broadcom for making changes that brought no obvious benefit
The obvious benefit is bending customers over the table and making some of the investors and shareholders slightly more pleased. I don't know how people still haven't realized that they as the customer are no longer the main concern for virtually _any_ company, let alone someone in such a prime "butcher the pig" position as VMware.
"Oops we lost all your confidential data (hee hee), here's some free credit monitoring from our partner vendor! Just enter all your personal details on their website and - oops ooh nooo now that credit monitoring agency got compromised TOO, here's a few more months with a different agency! Their security game is on point! Go ahead and enter all your details again and - oops, oh man you won't believe what just happened, -"
>with commitments made to move O'Brien and his family to Dubai if he cooperated, and to cover legal costs.
That's a real "trust me bro" coming from the totally-up-and-up company that encouraged you to perform corporate espionage for a piddling profit and saddled you with all the risk. Once you get to Dubai we'll just need to hold onto your family's passports for safekeeping indefinitely, our "agent" needs it to uhh... fill out some forms...
What's a mild annoyance to you is completely unknown to many others. It's dragnet fishing of "AI adopter" consumers and their data by making it an opt-out by default. I'd be willing to bet a ton of iOS users right alongside the Windows crowd don't even know there's a way to disable that functionality and will blindly consent to it ingesting all of their on-screen activity in return for a barely-functional "assistant".
But to be awarded those you have to firmly be on the current administration's shortlist for consideration. I have no doubt Accenture can scrounge up a Washington-adjacent Christian nationalist from the Seven Mountain Mandate / Ziklag cult to shake hands with just the right people though, so investors need not worry.
Make sure to keep your personal information safe on the internet! Only enter it on trusted websites, use long and secure unique passwords and enable 2FA whenever possible. This will ensure that only these companies and service providers can exclusively profit from selling and monetizing your personal data, until they've wrung all they can from it and decide to chuck the whole mess onto an unencrypted database or S3 bucket so the cybercrime crowd, or anyone else really, can have a go as well.
Remember, security is your responsibility!
Refusal to facilitate spacetime alterations in order to ensure attendance and mission success will result in disciplinary action. High performers willing to show consistent engagement for 48 hours or more during a single 24-hour workday may be considered for 15 minutes unpaid leave from the Hellscape Time Loop
"As AI diffuses across countless sectors, societies can raise living standards and individuals can improve their well-being however they see fit"
Sorry, best we can do is force more people into unemployment, have C-levels and shareholders pocket the short-term difference and let organizations drown in poorly guardrailed slop with indefinitely deferred responsibility.
>"They were maybe a little under-invested in and there were pretty high failure rates," John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, told The Register
Clearly the answer here is to lay more people off so you can redirect more investment into GenAI. Keep gambling on the virtual golden goose that needs no unions or benefits until your org has been reduced to a husked shell, crowned by a boardroom full of suits feeding wads of cash into a slot in the wall labeled "AI workforce revolution".
Which is awesome considering the not insignificant role the company played in rendering the modern internet almost entirely unusable, and increasingly unsustainable due to AI slop seeping into every crevice. But what are you going to do when you have a 60%+ market share, a captive audience in Edu via Chromebooks and a business incentive to maximize monetization of every single user interaction, their data profile and comprehensive behavior record?
It'd be naive to pretend it's not in the company's financial best interest to grind users into paste.
On one hand, we have the currently implausible but potentially real concern of AGI's genuine development and improper handling resulting in a threat to human existence on a fundamental level. On the other hand, we have it potentially generating profits for investors and shareholders in the brief moment of time between emergence and the end.
Add it to the pile of "sacrifices they're willing to make" along with climate change, poverty and infectious diseases.
And the "assistant" has the great side effect that it can embed itself into every aspect of your digital and physical life to pipe information back to the collection entity of choice. We noticed you had 15 minutes of downtime based on location and activity data. Your employer has been notified and the time logged for review, since you could have used this opportunity to answer AI-generated emails in your inbox instead. Sign up for our CorpAI Assistant Pro Plus feature today to allow offloading of some of the more time-consuming tasks to our AI Agents!
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This feels like a larger-scale repeat of the early Bitcoin boom years, where manufacturers were falling over themselves to produce datacenters and warehouses full of ASICs that are now completely unusable electronic waste.
At least the GPU shovel salesmen for this gold rush fad are making out like bandits. It's still mind blowing to me that any sincere C-leve genuinely expects a ROI on actually _using_ AI, rather than just selling the faff associated with it.
Microsoft's ideal scenario is one where you don't have a _choice_ on what to use. If they could, they would absolutely DRM-lock every Windows PC to not only firehose a live feed of all your activity back to their data collection pit (thanks Recall), but to also keep you from switching to anything else more respectful of your time and activity because it just won't run on the platform.
Thankfully we're not there yet, but the days of computer-based jobs now requiring "a subscription to Copilot and a Windows 12-locked PC" are just a few industry mergers and investment slides away
Gotta love the inexorable march of downward spiral. Redirecting people to tools or services that they didn't explicitly choose, making the "opt-out" button merely hide data collection from the user and conducting it anyway behind the scenes. Adding "AI" to every digital interaction to capture & monetize it under the pretense of some half-baked functionality. "Decline" is now "Remind me later", everything is a subscription with ads on top, and both marketing and developers are in an arms race of ever-louder jangling of keys to compete for users' screen time and attention.
Time to chuck it all in the bin and go back to usenet.
It's really the only way for them to muscle into Chrome's omnipresent user share, tracking and data collection. And that's what consumer AI is all about - not providing value, not offering a useful service, but harvesting & monetizing every previously difficult-to-access aspect of your digital and physical life.
And people will willingly surrender everything they hold dear to it for the sake of ignorance or convenience, preferably both if you're running a company that profits from all of this.
>“The fight over net neutrality has never really been about net neutrality," he said in 2020. "That is the sheep's clothing. It has always been about rate regulation – a surefire way to kill innovation and scare off investment.”
Might as well get rid of consumer protections, worker's rights along with vacations and paid sick leave while we're at it, those are awful and scary for innovators and investors as well.
Oh no, someone might be able to access all of this user data without first paying the company for it. Good thing the consequence for hemorrhaging people's data is a fine and a sternly worded letter, that will surely disincentivize careless practices such as this from causing real economic damage.
"We spent millions on this AI garbage and laid off most of our human agent operators, but the magical immediate return on investment just hasn't materialized yet, so let's cut out the middleman and charge the customer directly for the privilege of using our AI garbage"
From a corporate perspective, it makes perfect sense to blame "lazy labor" for your project and financial shortcomings. It's clearly not an issue of incompetent management, understaffing, unreasonable expectations or competitors with an unrelated edge; those can't be re-packaged as failures of personal responsibility that the employees themselves have to address through discipline, introspection and a 30% off coupon for time management & productivity courses they can take in their spare time.
Because your employer cares about you, and you should care about yourself as much as they do. That the aforementioned coupon is only valid to a service provider your employer has an under-the-table business relationship with is unrelated, this is about what _you_ can bring to the table, and what _you_ can do to be a better person for the company. Maybe see your kids a bit less often. Maybe work a few extra hours every weekend. It's really you that is holding us back from success, and that's not very fair, is it?
I'm sure some grossly overpaid "consultants" are already frantically trying to spin this as an argument against remote work. There are PowerPoint charts being drafted labeled "500% faster return-to-productivity after global Crowdstrike outage for in-person staff due to valuable centralized office attendance!" with stock image photos of men in suits sitting in a boardroom.
In reality it's lines of idle in-office workers crowding the IT department in a disordered line, each asking "is it fixed yet? Can we go home until it is?"
It would've been hilarious if that red team compromised their systems, only to find out that another actually malicious actor had already set up shop
>"After gaining access, the team promptly informed the organization's trusted agents of the unpatched device, but the organization took over two weeks to apply the available patch," CISA's report reads. "Additionally, the organization did not perform a thorough investigation of the affected servers, which would have turned up IOCs and should have led to a full incident response.
It's 2024 and basic online infrastructure security, let alone incident response really is still just a complete theater and clown show. But let's keep spending more on C-levels and after-the-fact contractors, then post our infosec roles at $15/hour so we can blame them when the paper mache tower we run our business on crumbles.
>He also fixed the cleaner's problem, by giving them their own power socket in the secure area, and some education.
How was the cleaner supposed to responsibly do their job in the secure area if there were no power outlets for them to use within its bounds before this? That seems like less of an "education" moment for the "silly janitor" and more like a design and planning failure on part of the organization.
Take your pick between the blatantly exploitative sociopath party and the other party that makes its living off of decrying the sociopaths on ethical grounds, while at the same time falling in line with most of their profitable ambitions and policies anyway. They both know your outrage will be brief, easily distracted and if necessary, limited to the amount of time you want to be jailed and / or beaten by a militarized police force.
It's both reassuring that companies slavering after delicious head count reductions as a reward for buying into the gold rush didn't see a return on investment, and depressing that it won't stop them from doing it again 6 months from now when the next greased-up AI trend salesperson jellies their way into the C-suite offices & boardrooms.
I don't think user utility is the end goal with this; if anything the "search your past" functionality is the closest thing to a semi-useful purpose for the end user they could come with on short notice. It seems purpose-built for maximum user behavioral tracking, and to monitor employees in a corporate environment so you can both build "productivity assessment" tools on top of it, and map out their daily tasks and workflows for future automation through AI.
None of it is good.
This entire premise is a barely veiled disclosure that they'll be charging an expert's salary for subscription access to these resources. That's why they want you to think of it as a "worker", not a SaaS expenditure.
Imagine charging 40k a year for Creative Cloud. Ludicrous, right? What about 40k per year for access to an "AI graphic designer" instead? Hey I know the visual design department is overworked and behind schedule, meet your new co-worker that we got for a steal...
In the same way that deleting a Google Photos or Apple iCloud image gets rid of it entirely. If it's perfectly legal to simply hide the data or feature from any non-EU user when they hit "delete" or "disable", why wouldn't you take advantage of that? They even explicitly opted in by "carefully reading & signing" the ToS / T&C.
The Recall feature's contents may not be accessible by outside sources (and only to anyone with physical system access, since that never happens unauthorized), but it's guaranteed that they're harvesting the metadata from its generation process. That would be an absurd amount of potentially revenue-generating user and behavioral data left on the table.
That might solve the issue on an individual scale, but Chrome has rigorously infested both the corporate and K-12 education market share to an absolutely absurd extent, and in both of those environments you often don't _get_ a choice on what client to use.
Chrome is sitting at ~65% of the total browser user base in most statistics, with Firefox making up a measly 3%. If they can forcefully drag even a fraction of them back into an ad-infested tracking-burgeoned internet, why wouldn't they? What is the captive audience going to do, stop working / attending digital learning platforms in protest?
It's bizarre that the original commenter assumed people just casually work around sources of radiation in a semiconductor fab, like it's a steel mill in the 1800s and that the only reasonable measure separating workers from a grisly injury or death is their own prudence. Occasionally someone just loses a limb, but that's the price of progress baby!
It is improving things, just for the owners of the company and their bottom line, not for their workers. All those specialized roles and support staff you talked about now no longer have to be paid, and you get to do all the work yourself with your hasn't-been-raised-in-5-years unpaid overtime salary.
The current business drive behind AI is motivated by the same concept. Make fewer people do exponentially more work as long as it results in cost savings. It doesn't even matter if the product quality or workplace motivation declines in the long run as long as the short term line goes up, and if it fails catastrophically there's always another company waiting to be ruined elsewhere.
From a corporate PR and profit perspective, it's honestly a great usage case for AI-driven campaigns to drown out naysayers and skeptics with mass pro-corporate messaging across all news outlets and social media. Real easy way to make it sound like everyone is in Microsoft's camp, and frame the "privacy" crowd as the small-minded tiny minority.
The LLM / AI "service" really just seems to be the palatable sugar they cover up the exponentially more invasive removal of digital privacy with, to a scale that far outstrips the already constant location / activity tracking of smartphones.
People's behavioral data generates a bizarre amount of revenue beyond just "serving ads", and hooking a digital assistant into everyone's lives that is perpetually monitoring and receiving voice or text prompts about situations, challenges or preferences, all centralized under a single provider, is the ultimate vehicle into this data set.
Can't easily lock people into expensive leasing contracts for $1000+ devices if their hardware lasts longer than the contract term. I never really understood people's willingness to drop a grand on a smartphone when $300 devices exist that are repairable, perform just as well and have marginally fewer camera lenses, especially given most people's regular app usage (Google apps, Facebook, Amazon and a handful of games)
>when will the unwashed riot over their dismal lives?
They already are in a lot of cases of the US, hence the militarized police force and private security contractors to keep the labor-churning grist mills safe. We are already way beyond the point where UBI makes serious ethical and moral sense to implement; they've shown repeatedly they don't care if or to what degree their former consumer base or current labor force suffers as long as the cash keeps rolling in from somewhere.
>Lack of career advancement, lack of workplace flexibility, and lack of support being three of the most common motivations for moving on. Plenty also complained about not being paid enough, being worked too hard, or even their workplaces being unsafe.
The solution to this is obviously to increase the labor pool through channeling middle schoolers into the career path, rather than making the roles safer, more attractive or paying reasonable wages
If the demand for infinite exponential profit is anything to go by, those "low cost of construction & labor" areas are probably going to end up with regular extended grid outages due to over-allocation. The only thing still allowed to run will be "critical infrastructure", which now conveniently includes those datacenters despite them majorly exacerbating the load on an already taxed grid.
At least for one beautiful moment, lots of revenue was generated for shareholders.
>(...) the former NSA worker took his laptop to Union Station in Denver and sent the documents to the FBI agent over the internet
"Hey let's convene at this heavily monitored public transit location where there's cameras everywhere to do crimes!"
- "That sounds great and not unreasonable in the least"
"And despite you sending me these stolen documents electronically, which doesn't necessitate us meeting in person at all, bring your laptop along too"
- "Got it"
There's lots of space in the file explorer, the user's desktop and the task bar to add additional advertising venues! You could combine it with the requirement to type in an affirmative message on the login screen outlining your favorite brands. I think Microsoft is leaving money on the table here and has plenty of room for further innovation
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