This drove me crazy at previous companies where our build system dependencies were specified with wildcards so they would just auto pull in the latest version whenever you built the project. Not only are there security issues with that, as seen here, but it destroys your ability to have deterministic builds; every time you build the project it might be building against a different set of dependencies. You lose the ability to even compare builds against each other, because even though the builds are for the same exact project code, the dependency binaries might be different, and so the two builds could run differently.
The AI fever feels a lot to me like all the other fevers, most recently in particular around Bitcoin and how its proponents claimed all sorts of things: it was going to be worth millions, and all stores would switch to bitcoin and the population would conduct business with bitcoin, it would take over the finance world and replace fiat currency, etc. etc. etc.
We had a few years of that insanity where if you somehow dared to commit blasphemy and say something otherwise, even something mundane like "yeah the tech is cool and has some cool/good uses, but I don't see any of your bitcoin singularity actually happening" you'd get downvoted to oblivion no matter where you were. Now all those downvoters, years later, when their singularity never happened have somehow become quiet and disappeared and we don't hear from them anymore.
It feels exactly the same with "AI" for me. Especially reading some of the comments in here ... jeez .. yeah it's a cool tech and has lots of cool/good uses, but do I think it's going to fall into somehow inventing strong AI, a concept which we don't even have a definition for, and start taking all our thinking jobs and go into AI singularity state? No, no I do not.
I wonder if in a few years all the people writing in here about how they fear they're about to lose their job and how AI is going to take over, will also fall silent and disappear when it doesn't happen, same as the bitcoiners did. They'll just move onto the next thing I guess.
I'd rather the product not exist in the first place if their business model is unsustainable and requires them to eventually enshitify after they've lured people into using it.
This addresses the crux of the issue as I see it. We will never have nice things if this cycle is allowed to repeat endlessly. I hope that people will eventually wisen up to these tactics but realistically I think regulation would be required if we wanted to stop it. I see parallels to classic price dumping but I don't know how applicable those laws are in the digital world.
You can find basically exact duplicate of stories like this from multiple years ago. Similar type of claim in the headline, similar type of article that praises some particular company that plans to deploy driverless trucks soon. The company gets some press attention, makes some money from investors, then cashes out, then in a couple more years the company no longer exists and you see another clone of this story about company Y that plans to deploy driverless trucks soon. Repeat ad nasueum. Honestly comes across as a straight up grift. I wonder if the author or publication has any stake in these companies.
The original author likely works for one of these companies, with the listed author trading a little credibility to save a lot of effort an extremely common thing in journalism these days.
If you look around you can often find waves of this kind of article pushed by various PR firms. The sudden influx of articles trying to get people back into the office post COVID being a recent example when an industry realized it was at a major crisis point.
Thing is, when a technology is actually almost here, people stop talking about it. Those on the cusp of making it happen don't want anyone else to know as they don't want to attract competition that might beat them to the punch.
If you're reading articles about how some new tech is "almost here", you can be sure it's not. When radios start to go silent, that is when you might want to take notice.
I don't think you read the same article that I did, because you are impugning Trisha Thadani and/or the Washington Post for grift and conflict of interest with zero evidence. The tone of the article does not at all strike me as praising Aurora Innovation, Kodiak Robotics, or Daimler Trucks. The subtitle warns that they are "speeding ahead of federal regulations," and if you look at her history she has written several articles focusing on the risks of testing autonomous vehicles on public roads.
I find it so insane that people think the major VPN providers aren't all completely compromised one way or the other. As if you're really going to be able to just pass your traffic through such a business and they're going to actually keep no logs, and not have secret deals made with intelligence agencies, and aren't unknowingly completely insided/compromised by intelligence agencies. As if you can just push your traffic through a major VPN and intelligence agencies would just go "well shucks, oh man, they sure got us, we'll never know who it was, foiled again".
> I find it so insane that people think the major VPN providers aren't all completely compromised one way or the other.
For 99.9% of people a VPN is just something they use to access something in another country or because some YouTube ad scared them into believing you need a VPN as soon as you step into a coffee shop.
The threat model of most people does not include state actors or intelligence actors and they just don’t care.
I've seen a lot of discussion on the topic but have yet to see someone just specify which versions of xz are likely affected so that I can verify whether I'm running them or not ..
You believe that no other factor explains the difference better? The reason is "incompetent police"? Why did the US not have the same problem in the past? You would explain it as somehow, across the entire country, all police, at all levels, just become incompetent sometime in the last generation? Why don't you list some of the other countries that you believe have things figured out, and we can see what they have in common, other than "competent police"?
> somehow, across the entire country, all police, at all levels, just become incompetent sometime in the last generation
It isn’t as far-fetched as you make it sound. If the incentives stop rewarding competence, then people focus on other stuff instead.
This seems inline with the general decay we’ve seen across the Western world where actually doing work and doing it well has a lower ROI than engaging in shenanigans to artificially boost one’s earnings such as office politics, fraud, etc. A certain airplane maker recently got to see the end result for example.
The cops were even worse before. The crime wave of the 80s and 90s was way worse than what we have now and that was just the continuation . We’ve always had this problem.
The most relevant point to the headline is the claim that large grocers unfairly raised prices more than they had to.
Well, if you pull up the report, it says "This study did not test whether the specific companies that received 6(b) Orders increased their prices by more or less than their input cost increases". So .. they don't actually have any data that says this, from the grocers they studied.
What they're instead going on, from the report, is looking at grocer's profit numbers (which they never provide a source for): "Specifically, food and beverage retailer revenues increased to
more than 6 percent over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak, in 2015, of 5.6 percent".
So .. before the pandemic they had peaks of up to 5.6% over cost, and the year after the pandemic they were at ~6% over cost (also, what does "more than" mean? Why not just write the number? They had no problem writing 5.6%, why not write 6.1% or 6.7% or whatever the number is?).
Ok? So basically the same with some minor, less than half a percent variation? Where less than half a percent of difference could be explained by a multitude of factors? Seems like the year of covid and year after covid had virtually no impact. The (slightly) more interesting figure is that in 2023 (why was no 2022 data point included, did it not fit the narrative?) the rate was ~7% over cost. But multiple years on from covid I'm not sure what the connection to covid is at that point.
Also .. isn't it extremely basics economics that when supply drops but demand stays the same or rises, this should result in higher prices? That's exactly the scenario we had in covid. If prices only rose less than half a percent more than pre-covid profit peaks, doesn't that say something extremely positive about the grocers? If they really wanted to "take advantage" of the consumer they could have raised prices to make demand drop to match the supply, for example instead of selling out of toilet paper, selling them at $100 a roll, $200 a roll. That's not remotely what happened.
It reads as highly politicized. I am not one for Biden or Trump, so I am sharing a neutral perspective here.
But as they say, where there’s a spark there’s usually a fire. Cutting through the cruft - the main issue seems to be that some grocers may have cashed in on their monopoly, by forcing suppliers to give them preferential treatment or face some penalty.
I think that’s a pretty standard business practice. While I like my groceries to be cheaper, I think that any retrospective government interference in free economics is unwarranted.
I get it - it’s a hard balance to strike between supporting individuals wanting to be treated fair and businesses trying to make money under uncertainty.
I also don’t like that CEOs earn 100-200x an average employees salary. But objectively, simply flexing your business muscles and getting a better deal is not illegal.
By that logic - it was illegal for US to scoop up vaccine capacity of Pfizer at the height of the pandemic.
But it’s not - because universally, we accept the difference in fighting for survival and intentionally starving your competition.
This was one of those times. Each business was out for its survival. When supply is low, we cannot expect companies to support egalitarian values. The concept of fairness is a human creation (or, more widely, of sentient intelligent beings). In times of survival, there is no fairness in nature or civilization.
So, the suppliers were thinking about their survival (choosing to keep their relationship with the big guys), just as the businesses were thinking about theirs.
However, like I pointed out, there is a more profound argument to be made - in the pursuit for higher bonuses/payout, the company executives (possibly with the full cooperation of the board) were overzealous in increasing profitability in the name of survival. This included doing mass layoffs, hogging inventory, hiking rates sharply by 20% (over a 3 year period, the inflation was between 4% and 8% - which is equivalent to ~13% when combined, so there’s an unexplained difference of maybe 6-7% or so).
It doesn’t make sense to hinge the entire argument on how unfair this was to the little guy.
Exactly, the problem here is the consolidation of the industry so there are only a few large corporations and large bars of entry for new players. It's not a free competitive market anymore. It's also food, a necessity, and not a luxury people could choose not to buy anymore.
>So basically the same with some minor, less than half a percent variation?
half a percent in profits can mean millions of dollars, I wouldn't easily discount that, especially if my job is precisely to look into bad price control.
> The (slightly) more interesting figure is that in 2023 (why was no 2022 data point included, did it not fit the narrative?) the rate was ~7% over cost.
probably because it did fall and did in fact raise higher in 2023, which is adding more smoke to a potential fire. I remember a lot of grocers price hikes starting in early 2023.
>But multiple years on from covid I'm not sure what the connection to covid is at that point.
that, " Large Grocers Took Advantage of Pandemic Supply Chain Disruptions"? You say yourself how falling supply works. Well, if supply came back by 2023 and prices kept rising, there's the reason FTC initiated this investigation. Anecdotally, prices did not in fact fall back down in the past 15 months.
>If they really wanted to "take advantage" of the consumer they could have raised prices to make demand drop to match the supply, for example instead of selling out of toilet paper, selling them at $100 a roll, $200 a roll. That's not remotely what happened.
That'd be both a PR and legal disasters. They are looser than other countries. but the US still does have regulations on price fluctuations, if only so companies can be somewhat evil instead of mustache twirling evil. Individuals can scalp on eBay, but WalMart/Vonz/etc. cannot.
> half a percent in profits can mean millions of dollars
You took the right framing and inverted it into the wrong framing. It may be millions of dollars, but it's only half a percent relative to total profits. Variance is relative (see, e.g., the normal distribution).
Eh, lies, damn lies, and statistics. You saying it's the "right" or "wrong" framing is implying any of us had applied statistic rigor to centuries of grocer data, accounting for inflation and other economic factors.
You even say it yourself, variance it relative. We don't know the normal distribution. I'm just explaining the POV that can prompt an investigation. A difference of millions of dollars is a lot to pocket for a business selling a necessary good. It's worth looking into.
> half a percent in profits can mean millions of dollars, I wouldn't easily discount that, especially if my job is precisely to look into bad price control.
I took a statistics class over 30 years ago and can recall very little of it but even I remember that this could easily fall within the margin of error.
One could also reasonably correlate the higher profits with people eating in more (since restaurants were mostly closed) but that doesn't set off the dog whistles.
And, you know, inflation...prices will never fall back down to pre-pandemic levels.
>I took a statistics class over 30 years ago and can recall very little of it but even I remember that this could easily fall within the margin of error.
it could. It could not. I imagine the data is out there to determine it, but not enough of it is in the article nor any of its links to form an analysis.
But this admitedly isn't a statistics 101 problem , between taking into account inflation, local and record fluctuations, expected pandemic impacts, the PPP/interest rates and more affecting the result, etc.
>One could also reasonably correlate the higher profits with people eating in more (since restaurants were mostly closed) but that doesn't set off the dog whistles.
It'd be pretty easy to support/weaken that evidence if we just look at food delivery services. less people eating in doesn't mean less people ordered out.
I don't know why you're being so cynical about the government doing its job for once and investigating potential greed. Worse case, nothing happens and life moves on, best case we get better grocery prices in the future. I don't see the downside as a consumer.
Man the propaganda flies so fast, I don't know how we're going to survive the internet. Maybe instead of just shoveling the propaganda forward you could back up your wild claim with data? What are the odds of dying by flying in the current line of Boeing planes vs the odds in Airbus? Hint: It's lottery ticket odds both ways, it's the same order of magnitude both ways.
One airline has a fleet of 737 MAX planes, the other a fleet of Airbus 320s.
Are the insurance premiums the same? I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if that’s the case today after all the design and construction problems on the Boeings.
The recent Boeing situation is that there's literally lottery ticket odds of dying in a Boeing plane and it's still, by far, the safest form of travel. What point are you trying to make?
