That’s not how it worked. They were indeed awesome at backwards compatibility, but the proposition was NOT some principled mindset about long term ownership. It was that upgrading wouldn’t break what you have, overcoming a major sales objection. I think the proposition is better understood as one about FORWARDS compatibility — Windows was (and is) a brittle, poorly architected mess, and so the idea that anything built on it would stay working as the platform evolved was clearly insane and developers would never be able to keep up, so Microsoft absorbed much of the cost. This was actually something they did quite well — a good analogy here might be the heroic response the USSR had to the Chernobyl catastrophe, in which they skillfully managed a disaster whose scope was possible only through a long tradition of poor decisions — and this deserves recognition.
But the reason I think it’s better to think of it as forwards compatibility is that Microsoft gleefully used file formats as a means of driving the upgrade treadmill. Yes, the upgrade to Office 97 would keep everything working to approximately the same level of reliability you had already resigned yourself to — but by default, the files it kicked out would be unreadable in Office 95. There was Save As and an optional free converter… which tired 90s office workers didn’t know about, or particularly want to think about. In the age of literal floppy disks, the friction this created was a significant motivator for businesses to say “fuck it, fine.” Microsoft’s true genius has always been in knowing that “fuck it, fine” is the only bar they ever had to clear, and that through the power of lock-in and sheer institutional inertia, they can drive that bar deep into the belly of the Earth.
I think it fits in pretty well with Signal. As it stands, a group chat can control when a message is automatically deleted for everyone, so everyone can rely on that being a shared setting. That's an intentional design decision. There's no individual opt-out.
An individual can disable name or content in notifications in iOS, or set "mute messages" for a chat to prevent notifications from appearing for that specific chat, but there's nothing that gives group members any assurance that other group members are doing that.
Though interestingly, the observed difference in assessment suggests (though does not prove) that sampled AITA posters are not one of these models. I guess it’s possible they have a very different prompt though…
They go around barking orders at people who haven’t done anything wrong because they look “suspicious,” escalate what could otherwise be calm encounters by showing up to everything armed to the gills, make it clear they can’t wait to use force against persons and property, demonstrate a consistent us-vs-them mentality that looks the other way for clear cases of corruption, commit brazen armed robberies under euphemisms like “civil asset forfeiture,” bypass policymakers wherever possible and lie to them when they can’t, and then wonder why some people don’t like them very much.
What I hate about it is that I listen to that and hear not so much actual brazen idiocy, as yet another example of flaws in an obviously defective process being exploited to deflect accountability. The meta for depositions at this point is such that the ideal witness is a lot like someone who has just experienced severe head trauma. They can sound insane, idiotic, clueless, lazy, forgetful, obtuse, anything in the world except liable.
Well, the solution to the paradox of tolerance is to utterly void the social contract with those violating it as they have already seen fit to void it themselves. So the response is to immediately see their escalation and escalate beyond all reasonable measures. The wrath of a good man is not to be tempted and the fury of a patient man is to be avoided at all costs. Both wrath and fury are the appropriate response to one side of a social contract breaking said contract.
These folks will push until the dam breaks. When it does, all will be washed away by wrath and fury.
The problem is that wrath and fury of ordinary men will be countered by fascists with more power. And it can go to the very top. The entire system is designed to keep the chain of command, it doesn't give a shit about what you think your "social contract" is. Go figure how many criminals Trump has pardoned.
But America isn't a high-trust society. Roughly half of Americans proudly assert that their government must be small, gridlocked, and incompetent, and that's by design, because if the government becomes too efficient it will infringe upon Americans' freedom.
So instead Americans keep electing people who say "The government can't do anything right! Elect me and I'll prove it to you!"
Not exactly a mark of a high-trust society, whatever that means.
Are you pointing out the irony that the fraud and harm being performed in DC by the current administration outweighs by great orders of magnitude the fraud and harm that is meant to be a racist distraction?
If so, bravo. If not, whelp, let me know when you escape the reality distortion field and we can grab a beer.
I am not greatly relieved by this post of Anthropic's. That said, they seem to have lines and are willing to stand by them; I don't see where OpenAI has done that. So, for now and from my point of view, the point goes to Anthropic.
Moving my subscription is not terribly consequential, but since the products are so similar and easy to substitute with one another for my uses, it seems best to participate in what in aggregate is a signal that is being noticed and commented on and interpreted to mean that a significant number of people who buy AI access do care about this.
I’m skeptical because while I can totally believe that the deal presently contains restrictive language, I can totally believe that OpenAI will abandon its ethical principles to create wealth for the people who control it. Sort of like how they used to be a non-profit that was, allegedly, about creating an Open AI, and now they’re sabotaging the entire world’s supply of RAM to discourage competition to their closed, paid model.
I was aware of your bill and had some activity related to it. Kudos to you and EOE for doing great work! Sorry your bill got fucked. :(
I was seethed by what happened to it, and sadly unsurprised by the attitude LE took. I want restraint, but I felt like so many concessions had already been made to get it into work session. E2EE was important, but we're still left with two ends that are deeply untrustworthy, and a bunch of regulations about data governance that I don't trust the state to be able to meaningfully oversee... especially among a patchwork of LEAs across the state. When lapses inevitably happen, I think they're going to mostly undetected, and those that are will be quietly swept under the rug without consequence to anyone.
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