Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

[seobook]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

One of the big reasons Google keeps growing ad clicks a large degree year over year with aggregate click price falling significantly is YouTube ad views are counted as ad clicks & they keep dragging down the overall "click" price because they don't have the intent tied to them that a search for [new jersey auto insurance quotes for young drivers] does.

Until they can find a way to shift TV ad budgets across or can match TV-type CPMs at scale, they will struggle to get some of the best parts of premium TV content to share in a free(ish) ad-supported format.

And they don't want to seriously take on the hit-or-miss high cost production business model directly when they can get 45% of the ad revenues for hosting the videos without any production costs.

If they can't get the best premium content (outside of select niches like music) in order to keep people tuned in they'll need to keep pushing people down paths other people with similar view sets carry.

When people have a choice to select between neutral, something against their views, or something that confirms their views, they'll usually go for whatever confirms their views and identities.

But the craziest people end up getting the most weighting in the algorithm, because they'll be the ones spending hours and hours watching crazy stuff & leave the sort of click stream or watch stream that guides others who follow in their footsteps.

president Obama -> Obama bad for America -> xyz (corporate? ethnicity?) takeover conspiracy -> secret elite meetings -> Obama's wife is actually a man -> etc etc etc

Whenever someone self-selects out of the crazy, they stop contributing to the click paths & aggregate watch statistics on the topic.

They then either leave the site to go to other sites, take a break from the web, or search for some other siloed topic.

Within any sort of realm or topic, there is heavy incentive for the market edges to create slanted pieces. They'll get: more clicks, more view time, more ad revenues, more comments, likes, subscribers & recommendations, more offsite sharing, etc. So the producers also have a shared incentive to go right up to whatever limit there is. Filming suicided bodies? Why not.

So both the craziest content creators & craziest viewers will contribute to a large degree to shaping the landscape others see.

Every view on every topic is true. Someone else made a video confirming it in an absolutist fashion.

Other "high growth" social start ups also used sort of (not sure if this is the right word?) but catered to underserved markets to supercharge growth, hoping it would later lead into a more mainstream community where they could perhaps clean up some of the rough edges at some point.

Some of the sort of indy sites got their growth fuel from serving markets that were considered out of bounds by more mainstream publishers. Verizon took a writedown of about 50% of the combined purchase price of AOL & Yahoo yesterday. Years ago Yahoo bought Tumblr for over a quarter the amount Yahoo ultimately sold itself for. Tumblr had quite a bit of porn & semi-porn stuff on it, which was recently announced would be going away. Reddit had sub-sections for topics like jailbait, creepshots, beatingwomen, fatpeoplehate, sanctionedsuicides, etc etc etc

Tumblr is likely to eventually get shut down just like Geocities was. Verizon could sell it back to the original founder (in a parallel to how Del.icio.us was sold off to the YouTube founders, or how Flickr was sold off to Smugmug) but one issue with selling anything at a steep loss is if it makes a comeback later then that gets pointed to as proof of mismanagement.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

If you can see patterns in the data and know that if you change a variable here and there a different outcome is possible then of course politicians will go for it, this has been going on long before AI, its just that the way they did it by mining data from Facebook was out of hand, also this method is a little more precise.

I think it's even more than that. The question is whether it's politicians doing vs some private billionaire. We've seen how much they like to manipulate things. The search bar can be very, very dangerous. Youtube is actively radicalizing Americans. There can be no doubt about it. Last month I was proving this point, so I went on VPN, private browsing, with Tor, no login, and no cache, here are some top 4 results of searching simple things. The algorithm might maximize profit. But it's wildly irresponsible.

For example, search for "equality" just the word. You don't get any information about its meaning in mathematics or philosophy. Not even a cute comedy or kids show. Just nothing but bile and vitriol. Search for "democratic" and you get nothing about Ancient Athens, Plato, or Socrates. No videos of New England Town Meetings or Swiss Cantons. Not even state propaganda about the allies' victory in WWII. Just nothing again but bile and vitriol. Search for "hate speech" after watching some of that, and the results don't tell you what it is. There aren't examples of it. Just bile and vitriol again.












And that's only the half of it. Kids go here for information. They might type any of that in if they're learning about democracy in class or equality or whatever. But it gets much worse. What if they were learning about, say, Jewish Americans?





I mean, if I were trying to train a generation of fascists, I mean actually trying--going out of my way as a multi-year project with billions to invest--I might have come up with the youtube search bar. Now, maybe it's not hard-programmed in and the most extreme shit just gets more clicks or something. Fine. But it doesn't mean Alphabet's & Google aren't complicit here. The top results are overwhelmingly illiberal. Even the Google Video search bar is nowhere near as bad as the youtube one. Tinfoil or not, deliberate or not, the results are the same. Youtube is breeding blackshirts. Imagine a kid comes home from MLK day or in February for black history month and types African American into the damned thing:




There's quite obviously something very, very wrong here. And it's woven into the very fabric of youtube. Keep in mind, it's at least partially deliberate. They scrub the ISIS videos almost instantly. They are policing the thing. They just either designed an algorithm that pushes this whacky shit up to the top by chance and know it and aren't interested in fixing it. Or they're actively promoting it. Either way, they need to be taken to task and held to account. It's getting too important. How can you have reasoned debate in a democratic republic when the main sources of information are all rigidly controlled by an unaccountable private entity that's actively poisoning the information stream?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

I don't have a philosophy on this subject...In the end the hunt for General AI will teach us what it is to be human, intelligent and that there is no such thing as consciousness.

Sounds a bit like a philosophy to me!

, just interested in predicting and following where it might lead us, I would rather hear those with opposing predictions you learn more that way.
All the evidence I have seen says that this technology has hit the self reinforcement phase and will have a profound impact on humanity.

It's funny your logistic regression quote is what some mathematician's said about AI, and how it cheap trick they knew about a long time ago.

Fun fact the Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton is the great great grandson of George Boole. 1's and 0's have changed the planet and now his descendant is directly involved in doing it again.

Don't get me wrong. It's not a cheap trick. But it's not intelligent either. Regression analysis can be a powerful tool. And there's enough data to snack on now that predictions will improve over time with some tweaks. And there is value to getting beyond making everything a deductive logic problem (even if in the end you need to convert everything back into one). But there are just features of it that are baked in. The process can't invent new things. It can't make new categories. It can only use existing, often arbitrary, always manmade, categories and check how they're related to other things. I just don't think it's in any way related to intelligence or mammalian thought. Breaking out of the confines of tortuous logic will make a lot of problems easier. There will be a bit of inference, for a change. But it's not the nematode project or anything like that. If you're really trying to figure out how brains work, what they're calling AI today is a terrible way to do it. On the other hand, it's a good way to make predictions. And it will work scarily well in some areas and be laughably idiotic in others. Perfect memory. No dreams. Rigid existing constructed categories. No creativity. No cultural evolution.

Rigid definitions. A disruptor in 2000s was a space laser, in 2010s it's an entrepreneur. Or ask it a tough one. Are Brazilians Hispanic? Any categorization scheme with any sort of grey it's going to choke on or give a super-confident and bad answer to. And they all have shades of grey. I mean, they have the whole internet to chew on. They can vacuum up a lot of facts about people. They can correlate things. Better ways to search and retrieve data and predict what people want? Sure. But Artificial Intelligence is a marketing term. I mean, actual Robot brains? Given our primitive understanding of brain science, my guess is we'll probably all have flying cars first.

[Techdread]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

The rub here is it easier to predict market outcome or is it easier to manipulate people to engineer desired outcomes? "That's right, we deliberately manipulated the voting preferences of more than 2,000 real voters in the largest democratic election in the history of the world," he writes, "easily pushing the preferences of undecided voters by more than 12% in any direction we chose - double that amount in some demographic groups."

If you can see patterns in the data and know that if you change a variable here and there a different outcome is possible then of course politicians will go for it, this has been going on long before AI, its just that the way they did it by mining data from Facebook was out of hand, also this method is a little more precise.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

i briefly used a facebook account, maybe 7 or 8 years ago. i deleted all my information [or i thought i did- i'm now sure it still resides on some server of theirs] after it became clear that they were not at all respecting the privacy settings i had chosen. their cloying email notifications aimed to tempt me back into their system were kind of disgusting.

and it may be old fashioned, but i won't store personal data in the cloud. i won't use "iphoto" or google photo either. my work information, my financial information, whatever, is local, with local copies and backups. my paranoia matches yours, dc.

the only exception is evernote, but it's filled with nothing important, just stuff i've gathered from the internet: recipes; articles on neuroscience and meditation; travel-related information; audio equipment; music history; estate planning, whatever.

otoh, i use gmail and amazon. as long as the use is commercial, serving me ads which i never see because my ad blockers are pretty effective [ublock origin and script blockers] i don't care much.

my major concern is the gov't eventually using it for social and political control, like the chinese are doing with their new social credit system. we've created a panopticon, a turn-key tyranny. so far no one's turned the key here, as far as i can tell, but the machinery is there.

You are in the minority. edit: This is not a judgement, it's a statement of fact.

[Techdread]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

FWIW, electric generation is getting more distributed and less centralized this lass decade, not less. And in much of the US, the local municipality is or owns the electric company. Distributed generation is huge and actually really growing thanks to the lower cost of solar and micro CHP, etc.

Anyways, SaaS, for whatever problems it may solve, certainly costs the end user a lot more money and leads to a lot of broken products being sold up front, designed to require 'over the air updates' or 'additional downloadable content' or whatever they package the scam as. So you can't just buy the software and the "service" up front. You have to pay a monthly fee forever just to get something broken. Then you have to pay fee after fee on top of that just get it to work. One thing people may not know about buying a Tesla is they do this bait and switch all the time. Car often comes broken. Literally with a software governor keeping speeds down or battery capacity artificially low. Then it needs updates to tweak it. But worse, things like charging stations that begin free quickly shift to cost money. Even the wifi software updates are planned to morph into a subscription-based monthly fee service. You heard that right. And they won't be the last company to think up that shit, but the first. This is why car companies are hiring so many software engineers. The goal is to get you paying $100 per month for downloadable bullshit you don't need, since they couldn't sell you the gap insurance. Mark my words. The day will come when they'll remotely de-activate your key fob if you're late on a payment.

And as for security, I'm not so sure. Have no doubt the giant centralized command and control data centers are much better policed and patched. But there's real security in owning the physical storage devices and servers they're attached to. I've never been too impressed with buzzwords like cloud or AI. Cloud just means remote storage. AI just means logistic regression and maybe another stat tool or two. Yeah, it's a bit more complex than that. But that's it, in a nutshell. It's not magic. It's not even particularly difficult to understand. It's certainly not intelligence. Marketing ploys disguised as miraculous advancements abound.

We're probably at totally opposite ends of the philosophy spectrum on this stuff. But I really think the tech industry is charging more for less every day. And it's losing more and more goodwill. Google had mass employee protests. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If the reaction is just to deny there are any problems and refuse to change course and insist they're the future anyways, well, the supergiants will be lucky if their fates are as fortunate as IBM's. But those just smaller, so many more, I suspect, will probably go the way of Wang or AOL.

I don't have a philosophy on this subject, just interested in predicting and following where it might lead us, I would rather hear those with opposing predictions you learn more that way.
All the evidence I have seen says that this technology has hit the self reinforcement phase and will have a profound impact on humanity.

It's funny your logistic regression quote is what some mathematician's said about AI, and how it cheap trick they knew about a long time ago.

Fun fact the Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton is the great great grandson of George Boole. 1's and 0's have changed the planet and now his descendant is directly involved in doing it again.

In the end the hunt for General AI will teach us what it is to be human, intelligent and that there is no such thing as consciousness.

[Techdread]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

People won't even leave their iphones with their spouse and family, and yet companies can upload their data to a public cloud. Why? It might be because it's not your data, it's the company's data anyway. Who cares.

A black swan in the making. Sorry folks.

I don't understand your point, what is a public cloud?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

You putting it in Ohio? Calculus might be different a bit different out there. I think we're paying about double your natural gas rates everywhere east of New York.

Yup. In Ohio. Installing a pair of 16 cylinder engines equipped with heat recovery on both cooling water and exhaust. Looks like either Caterpillar or Jenbacher engines will do nicely, packaged as skid-mounted gensets with an alternator, controls, and ancillaries. Quite a bit of gas processing equipment to remove hydrogen sulfide and siloxanes.
Payback takes a hit by having two smaller engines rather than one bigger one, but owner likes the redundancy and the ability to turn down when gas production dips.

[seobook]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

The Tech sector has not even started yet, that sector with AI will change everything because the price of prediction is falling.

The rub here is it easier to predict market outcome or is it easier to manipulate people to engineer desired outcomes? "That's right, we deliberately manipulated the voting preferences of more than 2,000 real voters in the largest democratic election in the history of the world," he writes, "easily pushing the preferences of undecided voters by more than 12% in any direction we chose - double that amount in some demographic groups."

Facebook has lowered the ratio of news in their news feed while Google has turned their mobile homepage into a newsfeed that tracks every click. The YouTube version of keeping eyeballs glued is a series of small sells that often ends off in crazy land:

"It seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century. ... What keeps people glued to YouTube? Its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with — or to incendiary content in general."

This is sort of the glass half empty view that will come with all the good parts of AI (increased efficiency, etc.).

One other glass half empty aspect is quite often AI is driven by tracking what people commonly do & perhaps it also leads to an outdated perception of what is the best option. If the AI reinforces something incorrect it can make it more reinforced & more common. Something like the low fat (high refined carbohydrate) diet pitch of the past few decades that wasn't so good for anything other than widespread diabetes.

The 50 cent army could certainly create a reality of sorts that is mostly sort of true, but in certain ways absolutely not. People do not know to look for what does not exist: “Our findings suggest that censorship in China is effective not only because the regime makes it difficult to access sensitive information, but also because it fosters an environment in which citizens do not demand such information in the first place,” the scholars wrote.

Maybe they could use AI algos & avatars to read the news. "AI anchors may one day challenge the human variety because of their ability to work 24 hours a day provided human editors keep inputting text into the system."

Media sources getting defunded by the algorithms & companies that algorithmicly rewrite content or have machines read their content aloud could have the same sorts of outcomes. Disappearance of funding leads to either indirect monetization or outright disappearance.

In many cases people with an agenda are going to be more likely to invest heavily into getting their view across, while those without one might be drown out.

As an example of the above sort of thing, a few months back I sold a domain name to a Russel 1000 company which later changed their name to the name of the .com domain name they bought off me. A few months later I looked at the domain name to see what they did with it and realized they changed their company name. Within a minute of when Wikipedia was updated to reflect their new business name & ticker symbol the edit to adjust to the new name reflected on their site & the ticker symbol they changed to was quickly overrode.

3d printing might have a bigger future than you've said, but i think we haven't really figured out what it's good for. i recently came across an interesting albeit very niche application- prior to some complicated heart surgery they used echocardiogram information to construct a 3d model of the heart in question in order to determine whether certain surgical approaches were feasible. i also came across someone who was trying to construct a kidney by "printing" with living cells instead of plastic. i've heard of machinery repaired with 3d printed substitute parts. in general, though, these uses are not a technological revolution which could reshape society.

Lots of the uses will start off in medical because the consumer price is so high & the use case is so important.

Even in third world countries 3D printed teeth manufactured locally can run hundreds to thousands of dollars.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

I happen to be involved right now in designing and installing a CHP system (combined heat and power) using biogas as fuel. About 3 million watts total electrical output. It's pretty hard to make good use of all the thermal output from these - we actually can't use it all in the summer. Payback is pretty tough right now, with natural gas so cheap. Looks like about $15 million to install, including extensive work on boiler systems and associated piping, with a simple payback period of about 12 years.

Those traditional base load power plants are hard to beat - big steam turbines or gas turbines running 24/7, in the unit size range of 300 MW to 500 MW. I expect a sizable fleet of such units will still be up and running 100 years from now. The laws of physics put you right there when you run the numbers.

You putting it in Ohio? Calculus might be different a bit different out there. I think we're paying about double your natural gas rates everywhere east of New York.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

I think the key's been turning in the US. But it's like the frog in boiling water. Somewhat slow and hard to notice unless you're paying attention.

You can't get a job or rent an apartment anymore without Equifax, Transunion, and Experian saying nice things about you. Just try it with a credit score below 600. Many top grad/professional degree programs now want access to your social media accounts in exchange for scholarships or admission. Everyone "googles" you for everything. If you're single, better hope the fury of a woman scorned doesn't slam your lulu rating, or whatever app they're using this year. Uber drivers making less than minimum wage spend their own money on free candy and snacks and tissues and video games for passengers in desperate hope their star ratings stay high, falling below about 4 means they're fired. Adjunct professors with no tenure are afraid to fail students because they might be rated poorly and not just have trouble finding jobs, but have students avoid signing up to their classes, which brings enrollment numbers low enough the class gets cancelled. Small business owners know the assault on your business that can be done by protection racket rating systems like Yelp. 3/5ths of jobs now do mandatory drug testing. About half force you to sign non-competes. A smaller, but growing number, about 20%, force you to sign non-disclosures too. A similar number track their employees 24/7 in real time through mobile devices. Increasingly popular are tools like Cozy where landlords get not only your credit history but also detailed background reports.

And none of that is the crazy shit.

You know that Transunion keeps detailed records of everywhere you've ever driven, right? They have cameras following every license plate around. They also have 50 state access to DMV databases. They've got it attached to credit and insurance profiles of you. And they'll sell it to people with very thin credentials. They know if you've been sleeping. They know if you're awake. They know if you've been bad or good, so...you're gonna be good or you won't be able to get a job or have an apartment and you'll have to starve and freeze under a bridge somewhere.

China's social credit system seems to actually be going after major offenders. NPR had a sob story guy on the radio a couple weeks ago. He welched on a 7 figure loan because he was essentially making margin bets on coal and caught a falling knife. And it does interesting things, like prevents access to luxury goods, but not essentials. Dude had his face on a billboard, but he also absconded with a million+ dollars. I didn't feel terrible for him. If anything, their public sector credit rating system is probably more honest and humane than the private sector panopticon we've been building in the US, where the government's not really who's going to make sure your kids go to bed hungry at night, but your bosses and landlords gain ever more intrusive power to control your life, and a bad history with financial decisions lock you out of the housing and labor markets.

We've turned every damn aspect of life into a AAA guide book with a star rating attached to it. And the results are not always positive.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

FWIW, electric generation is getting more distributed and less centralized this lass decade, not less. And in much of the US, the local municipality is or owns the electric company. Distributed generation is huge and actually really growing thanks to the lower cost of solar and micro CHP, etc...

I happen to be involved right now in designing and installing a CHP system (combined heat and power) using biogas as fuel. About 3 million watts total electrical output. It's pretty hard to make good use of all the thermal output from these - we actually can't use it all in the summer. Payback is pretty tough right now, with natural gas so cheap. Looks like about $15 million to install, including extensive work on boiler systems and associated piping, with a simple payback period of about 12 years.

Those traditional base load power plants are hard to beat - big steam turbines or gas turbines running 24/7, in the unit size range of 300 MW to 500 MW. I expect a sizable fleet of such units will still be up and running 100 years from now. The laws of physics put you right there when you run the numbers.

[jk]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

my thanks to the contributors to this discussion. interesting stuff on which i am under-educated.

3d printing might have a bigger future than you've said, but i think we haven't really figured out what it's good for. i recently came across an interesting albeit very niche application- prior to some complicated heart surgery they used echocardiogram information to construct a 3d model of the heart in question in order to determine whether certain surgical approaches were feasible. i also came across someone who was trying to construct a kidney by "printing" with living cells instead of plastic. i've heard of machinery repaired with 3d printed substitute parts. in general, though, these uses are not a technological revolution which could reshape society.

saas annoys me in theory, but in fact i have no such software and so no such subscriptions. otoh, i can see why that model is taking root i can't count the number of times i used my old 3.5" hard-shell "floppies" to install windows office ['97 iirc]] in ANOTHER machine. i think windows word was something like 11 discs. one purchase lasted me MANY years. i didn't have the latest version with the latest unnecessary tools. i held on to xp as long as i could, until my lenovo x301 was literally falling apart. at the time the extant microsoft offering was windows 8 so i had skipped windows 2000, windows me, windows bob, windows 7 and i don't know how many other os's. [maybe bob was before xp, i don't recall.] i couldn't face the horror of windows 8 so i switched to a macbook pro, which of course has a different set of issues.

one counter-trend to saas is open source freeware. i don't use apple's native programs much. i mostly use libre office.

i briefly used a facebook account, maybe 7 or 8 years ago. i deleted all my information [or i thought i did- i'm now sure it still resides on some server of theirs] after it became clear that they were not at all respecting the privacy settings i had chosen. their cloying email notifications aimed to tempt me back into their system were kind of disgusting.

and it may be old fashioned, but i won't store personal data in the cloud. i won't use "iphoto" or google photo either. my work information, my financial information, whatever, is local, with local copies and backups. my paranoia matches yours, dc.

the only exception is evernote, but it's filled with nothing important, just stuff i've gathered from the internet: recipes; articles on neuroscience and meditation; travel-related information; audio equipment; music history; estate planning, whatever.

otoh, i use gmail and amazon. as long as the use is commercial, serving me ads which i never see because my ad blockers are pretty effective [ublock origin and script blockers] i don't care much.

my major concern is the gov't eventually using it for social and political control, like the chinese are doing with their new social credit system. we've created a panopticon, a turn-key tyranny. so far no one's turned the key here, as far as i can tell, but the machinery is there.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

You are not wrong, Cloud business is huge is THE growth market. It's like having local Electric generation or rely on companies that know what they doing.
Any small or medium sized company that thinks they can secure their's or customers data is living in cloud cuckoo land, sorry for the pun.

As for Sass it solves a lot of problems software companies customers have been screaming about for a long time, installing, keeping up to date, managing of licences, platforms (because the browser is the new operating system) etc.
I can understand why non businesses might have a problem especially older people and Americans whom like to own everything.

Microsoft has been making a lot of right moves lately they have produced the excellent VS Code a Chromium based text editor / IDE, and have gone all out on opensource buying up Github, defending Linux with patents and just opensourcing a lot of their software.

Goggle is Google they are a scientific incubator, who use ads to pay for their grandiose schemes, Steve Jobs called them the AI guys, I think they are the make an Oracle that can solve anything/everything guys.

The Tech sector has not even started yet, that sector with AI will change everything because the price of prediction is falling.

FWIW, electric generation is getting more distributed and less centralized this lass decade, not less. And in much of the US, the local municipality is or owns the electric company. Distributed generation is huge and actually really growing thanks to the lower cost of solar and micro CHP, etc.

Anyways, SaaS, for whatever problems it may solve, certainly costs the end user a lot more money and leads to a lot of broken products being sold up front, designed to require 'over the air updates' or 'additional downloadable content' or whatever they package the scam as. So you can't just buy the software and the "service" up front. You have to pay a monthly fee forever just to get something broken. Then you have to pay fee after fee on top of that just get it to work. One thing people may not know about buying a Tesla is they do this bait and switch all the time. Car often comes broken. Literally with a software governor keeping speeds down or battery capacity artificially low. Then it needs updates to tweak it. But worse, things like charging stations that begin free quickly shift to cost money. Even the wifi software updates are planned to morph into a subscription-based monthly fee service. You heard that right. And they won't be the last company to think up that shit, but the first. This is why car companies are hiring so many software engineers. The goal is to get you paying $100 per month for downloadable bullshit you don't need, since they couldn't sell you the gap insurance. Mark my words. The day will come when they'll remotely de-activate your key fob if you're late on a payment.

And as for security, I'm not so sure. Have no doubt the giant centralized command and control data centers are much better policed and patched. But there's real security in owning the physical storage devices and servers they're attached to. I've never been too impressed with buzzwords like cloud or AI. Cloud just means remote storage. AI just means logistic regression and maybe another stat tool or two. Yeah, it's a bit more complex than that. But that's it, in a nutshell. It's not magic. It's not even particularly difficult to understand. It's certainly not intelligence. Marketing ploys disguised as miraculous advancements abound.

We're probably at totally opposite ends of the philosophy spectrum on this stuff. But I really think the tech industry is charging more for less every day. And it's losing more and more goodwill. Google had mass employee protests. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If the reaction is just to deny there are any problems and refuse to change course and insist they're the future anyways, well, the supergiants will be lucky if their fates are as fortunate as IBM's. But those just smaller, so many more, I suspect, will probably go the way of Wang or AOL.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Economic Crisis Avoidance Deus ex Machina - Part I: Active Asset Price Inflation - Eric Janszen

I don't think this is about some sort of morality play. I don't even think it's criminal. So no good or bad people. Some of it's right in the EULA. Notice Part D in Item 11. You have to agree that you won't hold them liable for unauthorized use of your data right when you sign up. The "machine learning" customer features are chewing on all your private info running logistic regressions all day. I'm not trying to posit anything super nefarious. I think it's probably all above board. But I also don't think you're keeping any secrets from them. Store your business data there, and they probably know more about your business than you do. It might not even be corporate policy. They have a metric ton of employees with access to your data. Any one of them might find they could make more money ripping off a business model or being bribed to provide intelligence. Case in point, from this morning's Wall Street Journal. Dicey thing to risk if you're a customer. Not a problem unique to Amazon. It's a problem for cloud computing generally. When you lose physical control of your data, someone else gains it. Power is zero sum.