The level of delusion and entitlement coming from people getting paid $160k (plus golden Cadillac benefits, fully covered) to work from home doing approximately 15 hours of real work a week is staggering.
I suppose its just proof of the hedonic treadmill at work.
Don't feel to bad, Spotify deleted all my saved content too, which I learned while on a trip out in the woods. My card didn't decline or expire, Spotifiy either updated and/or glitched and dumped everything along with any memory of what was downloaded.
In my youth I found RMS to be excessively dogmatic, inflexible, and obsessed with ideological purity even in situations where it didn't appear to be relevant or matter.
I now see that he was probably right about everything, and every year, users lose more and more ground in the war.
RMS has some issues, but ultimately even deeply flawed people can still have great ideas. He's a good example of why a good message shouldn't be ignored because of the messenger. No one is right 100% of the time about everything, but he was absolutely right about the importance of freedom and technology. He's got some great views on copyright too.
I'm not sure it's the same at all. With most Saas, there's no upfront cost, there is nothing you "buy" that you can reasonably consider to be "yours" and use in isolation. Say, a managed database, you pay per resource unit whatever it is, time, space, whatever. If you use a managed service you pay per user or whatever.
Eh... I think SaaS is just a more polished version of basically the same idea.
There absolutely is an upfront cost - a company has paid to create the software that enables that SaaS.
They are simply hiding that from view of the customer, and only offering a rental option.
You used to be able to actually buy stand-alone software, which you installed, and managed on hardware you'd bought, and which upgraded only when you decided to buy again.
But... it turns out it's less profitable to sell standalone software - so the vast majority of vendors are just quietly dropping that option and moving to subscription only licenses: SaaS.
Basically
> there is nothing you "buy" that you can reasonably consider to be "yours" and use in isolation.
Is entirely intentional, and exactly what the printer manufacturer wishes they could do - except they have the pesky problem of having to provide hardware that actually prints at some point. But it's DEFINITELY not the only way to sell software.
All these examples are missing the nefarious bait-and-switchy property to them like the printer example does. When you start using a managed SQL DB from GCP for instance there is no expectation whatsoever that you can use that offline. But you can still spin up a PostgreSQL and use that offline, no problem. No one can turn that off. Sure there are things like licensing but those have existed forever.
> You used to be able to actually buy stand-alone software, which you installed, and managed on hardware you'd bought, and which upgraded only when you decided to buy again.
That's not what Saas is usually considered though, at least in my experience. A note taking app needing a subscription to work isn't what I imagine this thread means when we talk about SaaS.
When they try to make their lives easier at the gross expense of their customers?
It's like those terrible runaway train memes where one track has 100 people and the other track has 1 rich man. Guess which side they always choose to run over?
I am referring to the desire. I presume almost everyone would like to be paid a salary, regardless of working or not working, just like "businesspeople" want subscription revenues.
Everyone has the desire for fist-sized rubies and emeralds too, but having a desire for something doesn't make it reasonable. Exploiting customers so that 'businesspeople' can get what they want isn't justified by "But everyone wants things"
Sure, we should expect them to be greedy, but when they get too greedy we should hold them accountable. It's too late for me though, I stopped buying HP printers ages ago and while all inkjet printers are scams, and I would advise anyone to avoid them in general, HP currently tops the list of printer companies I'd recommend people avoid.
Coming from a "I deal in hardware and professional services around implementing that hardware" background SaaS always struck me a bit different than this kind of thing. SaaS is basically a rental whereas you've bought these things and then need to still pay rent to use them anyways.
I think about this often. I feel justified by working on a product that is strictly B2B, enterprise software. No predatory practices towards end users. Is that any better or am I deluding myself?
>> I think about this often. I feel justified by working on a product that is strictly B2B, enterprise software. No predatory practices towards end users. Is that any better or am I deluding myself?
I think the question is whether you're providing an actual service that has value, or just charging rent for the software and calling it SaaS. Software has a marginal cost of ZERO, so SaaS is often simple rent-seeking. A company might actually use the money to develop a better version of the software, but that's actually optional on their part.
Part of me thinks one of the big reasons Google has held back so much is because of ethical concerns and/or just general fear of not having complete knowledge of how AI (incomplete to boot) will impact the world. We know that Google has some extremely powerful AI, but they never let it out of the lab. Just the most heavily neutered and clamped versions to help accentuate their existing products.
Now it seems that Open.AI/Microsoft are ready to jump in, caution to the wind. As you would expect the chance for a competitive advantage will always overwhelm external concerns.
We'll see what Google does. They might say "fuck it" and finally give us a chance to play with whatever their top tier AI is. Or maybe they'll discredit it and try and compete with their current (ad optimized) search product. We'll see, but I am definitely curious to see how Google responds to all this.
It's because Google has this exact same problem with their AI models. Also they would probably have to double their compute capacity if a billion of their customers started using it. (My made up numbers). It uses hundreds of GB of GPU RAM during the inference. I am guessing they don't have enough GPUs to do that and still have a Google Cloud.
It's different from OpenAI because of the existing user base is like a billion users or something.
There are a lot of people who just want privacy wherever they can get it. It's not necessarily something nefarious, but the result of the question "Does this person need to know who I am? No. Therefore there is nothing to gain and only something to lose by telling them."
I cancelled prime a few year ago and haven't looked back. Amazon has basically turned into a flea market chock full of counterfeit goods, goods of questionable origin, and a relentless "review optimization" schemes under the hood.
Recently my mother threw out a bunch of Christmas decorations because "they gave up the ghost". What had actually happened is she got counterfeit energizer batteries from amazon (which had 5-star reviews ofc). This story is not that big of a deal, but perfectly emblematic of the mess that is Amazon's store and hardly the only bad experience I have had with the junk they sell there.
Also this has been going on for years now and amazon has done _nothing_ to address it. I suppose it's because people keep voting with their dollars for them to do nothing. Maybe now they'll start to think about it.
Amazon’s fees are so high, and sellers pay it a massive amount of money on every return (something Amazon encourages by encouraging people to buy products they don’t need), which means that legitimate businesses find it extremely hard to survive.
It’s no wonder Amazon is filled with illegitimate businesses because they are the only ones that can survive Amazon’s punitive terms of operation.
There are certain categories you can basically guarantee to get fakes.
Brand name batteries is one of them, I guess that's one more thing pushing people towards "Amazon Basics", it's the only one that's not going to be counterfeit.
These models are infant technology. They are the chess playing computers of 1960.
It's completely missing the forest for the trees to call it out as useless. It's not meant to be useful right now, it's exploratory tech meant to feel out the space. Wait till it gets developed to hold it to some standard.
I should note though that progress has been far faster than computer chess. We went from "An AI wont beat a Go champion for at least 30 years" to "AI beats Go champion" in two years.
Is there really something of value to be had by fighting a war against the coming tide of AI that can spit out whatever you ask for?
To me it looks like old world professors calling the council because the abacus is under threat by the calculator, and we need to ensure the students are absolutely not using the calculator for their abacus studies. This all being despite the fact that society at large is moving as fast as it can to leave the abacus for calculators.
I can't help that but feel that people have lost the forest for the trees. So transfixed on the small steps that they have completely lost track of why we take all those small steps, and the utility that they ultimately provide.
If you want to study whatever subject and become an expert, history or chemical engineering, cool, go ahead. I'm still gonna chose my AI consultant over you in 5-10 years.
> I'm still gonna chose my AI consultant over you in 5-10 years.
AI will never replace experts.
Someone still has to curate the firehose of information returned. What's the point then?
AI can only interpolate a response from internet sources, and claims of plagiarism are already coming hard. The internet was never a good source of expertise.
If an AI can be trained on the internet, it can be trained on a textbook or lecture notes. I think it’s shortsighted to insist that AI won’t replace experts based on the training sets that AIs are currently being trained on.
Who writes the books and lectures? This is literally chicken and egg. Can't have eggs without chickens. Can't have chickens without eggs. This is not an oversimplification.
AI can detect pancreatic cancer better than the best radiologists. The belief that machine learning cannot surpass human intelligence is contrary to the evidence.
That’s what Wall street said about expert traders. And then replaced them all with bots and gave the capital to the bots to be traded.
I remember when Garry Kasparov insisted that centaurs -- computer+human — do better than just a computer or just a human. He held out longer than most in this belief. But seriously… can you name a field where computers and bots can NEVER beat humans?
Any topic where being an expert is not mere memorization or imitation without comprehension, and discovering new facts is not just relentlessly churning through a rule set and producing what was already self-evident.
I don't disagree whether computers are good at computation. That's what they're for. I disagree that AI can replace experts because expertise is a moving target.
Where AI approximates a response given at some point in time or within a range of time written by a crowd of people who are not necessarily experts, experts must inevitably contradict themselves on something and update their theories. AI as currently implemented will always lag behind human experts.
In other words, do you seriously believe that an AI trained on scientific publications from the middle ages would eventually rediscover what we know now and beyond? I think it would be stuck forever hallucinating recipes to turn lead into gold.
What does 'never' mean here. Do you literally mean that it can't happen even if human society progresses for another millenia? Or just that it won't happen in your career. The latter is somewhat plausible to me, but the former is only happening if there is a civilization ending catastrophe.
Experts used to evaluate your credit application. Experts would adjust depth of field in portrait photography, and bracketed exposure in HDR photography. Experts would beat you at chess.
AI now does the majority of instances of these things and many more. Not every instance, so you can say that experts have not been completely replaced, but they have been substantially replaced.
As for ‘can only interpolate a response from internet sources’, first, there’s no requirement that training data comes from the internet, and second, if the AI has learned the correct function, ‘interpolation’ is not a criticism.
For this to remain true for the indefinite future we must assume that strong AI is strictly impossible. Our scientific knowledge today does not suggest that this is the case.
It is valuable for SPAM filters, and other fraudulent activity. If you get an e-mail from someone you know and it says "I need itunes gift cards right away!" most people know that is a scam. But if you get an e-mail that appears to be following up on a previous conversation, you are much more likely to click on a link in that e-mail.
I doubt spammers will be the only ones leveraging AI generated text. I'm sure legit marketing people and even administrators and support staff will benefit from using AI written responses. So you're going to filter out valuable emails as well.
Typically, outside experts are useful for out of distribution inference about a particular situation. Fine-tuned generative AI is self evidently not good at generalizing outside the scope of its training data, and becoming reliant on it for this task is foolish.
Signed, AI researcher.
I mean, is the very situation you stated not a situation you are trying to solve? Would you stumble upon such a solution and bury it because AI isn't supposed to be more informed than experts?
I suppose its just proof of the hedonic treadmill at work.