Do people honestly believe their current employers aren’t monitoring them right now?
Every employment contract I’ve signed has included language that makes it clear that whatever I do on corporate time, on the corporate net, on corporate devices, is corporate property. This is why I never mix corp and personal data on my phone or join my phone to their WiFi.
Is it just the AI training angle that makes this newsworthy?
The world of contracts is really interesting. Imagine a country Byteland that has a problem with alcoholism. Lots of people get too drunk and bother others. The parliament gathers and decides to issue a new law. First they try "it is illegal to bother other citizens in public" but the problem is, how do you legally define "to bother other citizens"? Then someone has a bright idea - make a law "it is illegal to be drunk in public". The idea is, only those who are annoying fucks will ever be checked, for obvious practical reasons. Everyone happy, the law passes. Citizens enjoy their beer, but they know that it they drink too much and start causing problems, they'll be arrested. One day a Sillycoin Valley startup comes up with great technology - a device that can pinpoint who exactly is drunk within two kilometers of range. Now suddenly lots of citizens who had just one beer and are minding their own business start getting fines.
The point I'm making is, there is a difference between what contract explicitly says, and what is implicitly understood due to practical limitations of the real world we live in. When the real world changes so does the effective implementation of contracts, even though the contracts themselves don't change. The problem is, by the time the world has changed against your favor, you might not have the power to demand an adjustment to the already signed contract.
That’s hardly a relevant scenario for any office worker who is issued a laptop, phone, desk and badge.
The equipment is worth thousands of dollars and the company has a fiduciary responsibility to track their assets. Of course they are going to install spyware on their equipment and make it crystal clear that the employee has no expectation of privacy while using it.
I assumed this happens on any employer machine anyway. If not specific mouse movement and keystrokes then file access and connected devices. I honestly don't understand the outrage.
> which is not practical due to how many essential things run on e.g. whatsapp
Where do you live that WhatsApp is essential?
I deleted my account when Facebook bought it and I don’t feel like anything of value was lost. Between messages/sms, signal, telegram, discord, I have no shortage of places to chat.
WhatsApp only has value because of the network effect. Quit the platform and make your contacts find you elsewhere. Every platform dies eventually. The users just need to leave.
I don’t really care about the shadow profile. Meta is hardly the first to build a database of non customers, and it’s not the only such database I’m in. I avoid all Meta services and will never see an ad from them.
In Brazil, for example, without WhatsApp you are an outcast of modern society there, businesses communicate with customers on WhatsApp, whole families and friend groups only use WhatsApp.
> WhatsApp only has value because of the network effect. Quit the platform and make your contacts find you elsewhere. Every platform dies eventually. The users just need to leave.
The network effect is exactly what makes it really hard for any single user to decide "I'm leaving" and tell every single person they need to be in touch to contact on another platform they don't use. What you are suggesting is simply impossible on an individual level, the only way it happens is if the platform has major issues that bleed users because it isn't working or the platform is made inaccessible by the government. Even a better competitor appearing will have a very hard time to crack the market share of a established network exactly due to network effects.
I’m sorry but that’s just dumb. An LLM is a tool. Your brain is not a substitute for an LLM in the same way your fingers are not a substitute for a wrench.
The year is 2026 and if you are using your brain on chore work like one-off scripts, refactoring, boilerplate test code, then you are wasting time and money and I don’t want to work with you.
Local models are fine for this and can do it in a fraction of the time your brain will take to even get bootstrapped
The year is 2026 the average RAM for the most common type of developer’s (web) machine is 16GB. 8 will be the lower end. Tell me which model can one run on this machine locally?
I’m having a hard time coming up with a better way. Simply banning all manufacturing and import is not going to work when it’s heavily addictive. In the case of alcohol, quitting cold can kill you.
Banning it today and expecting people to cope, or attempt to fund recovery efforts for a whole nation would completely misunderstand the addicts mind. If you don’t want to quit, you never will.
Instead we have a total ban that is timeboxed to allow the addicts the rest of their lives to quit one way or another.
Your points are why Apple isn’t entering that market.
Mounts, cases, smart locks, thermostats, bulbs…where is the “iPhone moment” for this sector? It’s all small beans now. Why would Apple want to compete here?
Personally I think any big moves in this area would be predicated on a next-level Siri companion. Stop futzing around with scenes, buttons, switches and pairing devices and just tell your house how it should work.
I often think the problem is Apple thinks too big.
They are so big that for a product to move the needle it needs to be huge. Even the "failed" VisionPro was probably $2B of revenue. The "Home, Wearables and accessories" line is $40B of revenue.
Is Apple willing to trade-off some of the steady reliability of their earnings stream for product lines that may be real contributors 5-10+ years out is the question? I think under Cook the answer to that was no.
I think staying on this path will eventually lead diminishing returns and endanger them long term.
Siri first needs to fulfill the promise from the Apple Intelligence keynote. In this context, the small beans are things like setting timers and playing music reliably. AI was pitched as a true assistant who understood your whole digital life.
Nobody is going to hand control of their home to a system that was the dumbest smart assistant 14 years ago and is still behind everyone else.
It’s amazing to me that Apple announced vaporware that they didn’t know how to build yet. Nobody did, but Apple usually bides their time making it work before the reveal.
My experience with tape is very out of date but I doubt much has changed due to the nature of tape
Tape software sucks. Tape restores are cumbersome. A SMB can literally but a multi TB HDD and just drag and drop, and but the drive in a safe.
A SMB will need to hire someone who wants to deal with this niche tape storage, and why would they bother if they can use a NAS for that and a dozen other things at the same time
Tapes can have a shelf life of 30 years. If you need archival storage then tape is a great solution. For everybody else it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
reply