Google for ‘perfect fit content’. Spotify was and potentially still is aggressively pushing AI content in some of their curated playlists because it’s cheaper for them to play it

There’s stupid from top to bottom here.

The company is stupid for allowing an AI full root access to their entire setup.

The provider is stupid for only generating full-access API keys. They’re even stupider for storing backups with a volume, so deleting the volume (zero confirmation via API key) also insta-deletes the backups. And they’re stupidest for encouraging users to plug AIs into this full-trust mess.

And the company is absolute stupidest for having no backups other than the provider’s builtin versioning.

The problem is it’s not just ‘form a union’. In most cases unionizing means joining a much larger union that covers many hundreds of companies. And it will mean that all questions of compensation or discipline then have to go through a union contract. It means more paperwork and less flexibility.

If there is trust between workers and management, then workers often don’t see much benefit to going through all this. And that’s why the guy said every shop that went Union deserved it, because those shots all tried to save money by screwing their employees and so the employees fought back and unionized which ended up costing the company more than if they had just paid the workers correctly in the first place.

In most cases here unions are fairly large organizations where the larger union covers dozens or hundreds of companies. So it wouldn’t be like ‘Bob’s maintenance shop union’ it would be like ‘international brotherhood of machinists union chapter #1234’.

And when that is done, the relationship between the workers and the company changes. The union will negotiate a specific contract with the company which all workers and all jobs then are covered under. This provides a lot stronger protections for the workers, but can also be less flexible in some cases. And of course the worker has to pay dues to the union, it’s usually not that much but it’s not zero.

Point is, if the workers are happy and have good relations with management then they often see no reason to go through all this.

On the other hand when management starts turning the screws and tries to make more profit out of the worker compensation, then it’s absolutely time to unionize and workers are even more seeing that.

I once was on a tour of a non union maintenance shop, in an area where most similar shops were union. One of the people on the tour asked the manager about this.

His answer- ‘Every shop around here that’s gone union, has deserved it. I pay my guys above average, I don’t flip out when they take time off, and we have decent health insurance. My workers are happy- when the union comes calling it’s the workers who tell them to get lost.’

If WotC is going union, they probably deserve it.

This is absolutely a thing. I remember reading a story about this, this was years ago, but this guy worked for the air force of some nation in heavy conflict. One of the most used weapons in this war was an anti-radiation missile, it would loiter for some time until it detected an emissions target then lock on and destroy it. Whenever they needed to use radar, they would hotwire a bunch of microwave ovens to work with the door open, then plug them in with like six extension cords plugged together. The missiles would lock right onto those microwave ovens and blow them up. He was joking about how the enemy would boast they destroyed 15 aircraft that week on the ground, when his force only had 10 aircraft to begin with.

Please understand that this is not due to any sort of bubble. Especially not with memory.

OpenAI has themselves purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory production for 2026. The negotiated in secret with two different manufacturers, announcing the deals on the same day. Neither manufacturer was aware of the other, and both have said if they were they would not have made the deal as it sent a significant percentage of the world’s memory production to one customer.
More interestingly, the deal was not for memory chips. It was for finished wafers, which themselves have to then be sliced into hundreds of individual chips, which each need to be tested and packaged in the black casing we call a chip. As far as I am aware, OpenAI has no capability to do this. Which means they may have purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory output only to throw it in the garbage and keep it from their competitors.

My understanding however is that this deal was for 2026 production. Go to next year, there may be an improvement.

This is why software patents were a horrible idea. We were all warned.

Still, I thought the whole objective of AV1 was to avoid any incumbrances.

Thing that bothers me is these guys are claiming to have patents over AV1.

The whole point of av1 is it supposed to be free of this bullshit.

I think this doesn’t go far enough. The problem isn’t just okcupid, problem is the data. Any company they sold face data to should be required to delete it, it should be treated as receiving stolen property that must be returned. The users of the site did not consent to have their faces shared with the database companies, so the only true redress for the users is to get those faces out of the database.

I think this is true with a lot of companies. Microsoft is a good example. Whoever is responsible for the current state of Windows 11 should be turfed as rapidly and efficiently as possible both for the good of Microsoft and to send a message that this sort of thing is not wanted anymore.

I really can’t believe this got the green light. GitHub has, or perhaps had, the trust of most of the open source world. It was used by everybody. This is so fucking short-sighted, it’s signing away your stock portfolio for a popsicle. Whatever couple bucks they get from this ad is worth absolutely nothing compared to the trust and good will they have flushed.

Quite true there is absolutely a place for both in all situations. And it’s why I hate absolutists who think gui’s are some sort of disease. GUIs are discoverable and intuitive, You can lay out all the options for the user so they know what they can choose and make the right choice. CLIs are powerful and scriptable, easy to automate.
Neither is bad.

Quite true.
It’s an argument I often have with the CLI only people, and have been having for years. Like ‘with this Cisco router I can do all kinds of shit with this super powerful CLI’. Yeah okay how do I forward a port? Well that takes 5 different commands…

Or I just want to understand what options are available- a GUI does that far better than a CLI.

Yup.
The problem is, how do you guarantee access control that works offline?

DVD DRM was based on a pretty simple system that was easy to crack.
HD-DVD (former blu-ray competitor) DRM was more advanced. Someone hacked a software player and extracted its decode key, which this was.
The DRM was designed to be updateable so any discs manufactured after this leak would use different keys (and anyone using the software app that’d been hacked would need an update). That didn’t stop this key from working on every disc in existence at the time.

That’s the problem with making software decoding available. It had to work offline, so you could have an authorized player software, and feed it any valid disk, and it’d Just Work. So even if you put a crypto enclave in the drive controller, the player software still needs its own way to authenticate itself to the drive.

Read up-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

Absolutely 100%. It is so frustrating to search for a couple of terms and have the search engine just ignore one or two of them, like no your stupid AI does not understand what I actually want please just give me what I fucking asked for.

Straight off to jail with you!

For those who don’t remember this- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

What about second breakfast? I’m not sure they know about second breakfast Pippin…

Exactly. The only solutions is to make keeping people’s data a liability rather than an asset. That if there is any sort of beach there are criminal investigations and make the company liable for any and all losses stemming from that breach. Plus if their security was found negligent, than every one of their customers gets cause of action to personally sue them.

The next company to have a breach like this will go bankrupt. And that will sufficiently frighten the others.