Are you sure of that? For years now I think Amazon and Apple have an agreement where only Apple or Apple-approved third-party vendors can sell Apple products on Amazon?
The replies to this thread cannot be serious, on a web forum populated—I thought—primarily by technologists. Surely you all remember the variations on, "If you make encryption illegal then only criminals will have encryption"?
The next step will surely be to make use of communication programs that law enforcement cannot read illegal, right? The police find some person who has committed a crime, caught in the ways that criminals are usually caught, such as with forensics, or simply with the guns and drugs in the boot of their car. Then they can see what forms of communication this person was using, and who was using it with them. At that point, it doesn't matter what those other people were doing: The use of banned encryption technology is the crime. You can roll them up for that, or use evidence of this crime to justify further intrusion into their meatspace lives. And so it goes, on up the chain of a criminal organization. Theoretically, at least.
I don't like this, I don't support this, but as has been said elsewhere in this thread: Let's not pretend this is some insurmountable problem for a government who has already shown an appetite for surveillance.
Sure, you could make unauthorized, fully encrypted communication illegal. But what would be the punishment for using it? Worse than for smuggling, human trafficking, murder? I seriously doubt it. If you're a criminal risking decades in prison for major crimes, using some illegal software is 100% worth it, if it significantly reduces the risk of getting caught for the real crimes you're committing.
You can't make laws that govern how criminals behave. All chat control will really accomplish is maybe a momentary string of arrests(which is meaningless in the long term; there's always someone to take over), and longer term, worse privacy and security for everyone except the criminals.
UK has the idea of contempt of court. Even as it stands, the court can demand you submit some evidence - say an encryption key for a document. And if you refuse, they can even imprison you until you surrender the key.
Another principle is that when someone is destroying evidence, you can presume it contained incriminating evidence.
I think you could make the punishment proportional to the presumed crime.
I was under the impression that, at least for models without "reasoning", asking them to be terse hampered their ability to give complete and correct answers? Not so?
> asking them to be terse hampered their ability to give complete and correct answers?
You can kind of guide both the reasoning and "final" answer individually in the system prompts, so you can ask it to revalidate everything during reasoning, explore all potential options and so on, but then steer the final answer to be brief and concise. Of course, depends a lot on the model, some respond to it worse/better than others.
Can you clarify, are you sympathetic of the person who thinks they wouldn't get an answer from the other team, or are you saying the person was wrong to not just ask the other team?
Asking since I've been in the situation many a time where the other team is too busy to reply in a timely fashion, and/or they don't even know the answers to my question, so I end up having to reverse engineer it.
I mean, he called the other engineers "those fuckers."
I was definitely not sympathetic. I was pretty livid, however, context is necessary.
This person didn't even try. Engineers at this company rarely ask for help from other teams or collaborate. Management has talked the talked, but there is no walk to actually take down these silos. I pointed him at product and BA people that offered to help, but he didn't ask them, either. Instead, he thought he could reverse engineer it, which probably took 3x longer than it should.
I have to say that I am worried that, by taking myself out of the loop for the 99%, I'm going to get worse at the 1% of things that occasionally fall into my lap because the LLM can't seem to do them. I think software engineering is a skill that is "use it or lose it", like many others.
There's also the question of whether I will enjoy my craft if it is reduced to, say, mostly being a business analyst and requirements gatherer. Though the people paying me probably don't care very much about that question.
Reading some of the comments in the "Layoffs don't work" right before reading comments here must have been one of the more surreal experiences for me :)
The takes are as different as (paraphrasing): "if a person can't create something with en empty text editor, I fail them", and "if a person can't speed run through an unrealistically large set of goals because they don't use AI-assisted development, I fail them".
I guess one should keep their skills at both honed at all times, even if neither are particularly useful at most real jobs, because you never know when you're going to be laid off and interviewing.
How many devs could debug both a K8s network configuration issue and a bug in an Android app caused by a weird vendor's OS tweak? Not most of us.
Some people will be better at pushing the LLM things to generate the write crap for the MVP. Some people will be better at using these tools for testing and debugging. Some people will be better at incidence response. They'll probably all be using tools with some level of AI "magic" in them, but the specialization will be somewhat recognizable to what it's been for the past decade.
If you're on the business side you still want a team of people running that stuff until there's a step-change in the ability to trust these things and they get so good you'd be able to give over control of all your cloud/datacenter/network/whatever infrastructure and spending.
And at THAT point... the unemployed software engineers can team up with the unemployed lawyers and doctors and blue-collar workers who were replaced by embodied-LLM-powered robots and ... go riot and ransack some billionare's houses until they decide that these new magical productivity machines should let everyone have more free time and luxury, not less.
Thanks for your comment. I agree with a lot of what you said, in particular that trying to have it both ways (hybrid) often ends up with everyone being frustrated, in my experience.
I want to say very clearly that I don't doubt that "grift and fraud" happens. What percentage of the workforce are engaged in this grift? If you have 100 remote workers in your average IT shop at BigCo, how many of them do you think are truly running a scam that would never pass if they were in person? My guess is 3 or less, but that's just a guess.
In case it's not obvious, what I'm working towards is: If 3% of your workforce is engaged in grift, but a lot of the other 97% are happier and more productive, is it worth pissing off a substantial portion of that 97% just to shut down the 3%?
> The majority of the quality of life improvements are really about time freedom. You’d get most of it by giving employees sufficient paid time and allowing them to use it.
This leaves out one of the main things to like about WFH for many (most?) Americans, at least: I get to avoid wasting 30–90 minutes of my day in a stressful commute that comes with its own share of expenses.
With contractors, I’d guess 40% or more. I’ve discovered things that are pretty shocking.
With employees, I agree it’s much lower, it’s mostly just lazy loafing that is harder to spot if the employer doesn’t have clear evidence of performance. The bigger issue for them are people who move away, lie and invent medical problems to avoid work rules.
The majority of my folks are in IT infrastructure and support. It’s pretty easy to spot on the operations side if you understand the tickets. The other side of the shop, who do more dev work relies on having good managers and leads. The documentation isn’t a fair evaluation— a single change may require weeks of work for a developer, so using counts isn’t fair unless you really understand the workflows. For those roles, hybrid makes hiding easier.
https://9to5toys.com/2018/11/09/apple-and-amazon-deal-iphone... https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-pumps-up-its-amazon-l...
(I think there may be a few other top-tier brands who get this special treatment from Amazon.)