Rov_Scam
1hr ago
These are all fake posts, AI, Russian, both, or otherwise. I've seen enough political posts on Facebook from verifiable salt-of-the-earth conservatives to be able to spot fakes:
- No selective capitalization; Caps Lock is either on or it isn't
- No recognition that the em-dash exists, let alone an old typewriter substitute
- No statistics that aren't from copypasta
- At least one spelling or grammatical error
Perhaps "most extreme" was a bit of hyperbole; when people bring up the Fox comment section to provide examples of conservative idiocy, someone always points out that it isn't representative, and I wanted to avoid that accusation. But it is representative of a certain kind of conservative idiocy, the kind of person who creates an account just so they can respond to a comment they agree with with "Bingo".
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Read the timeline again. They made an offer. Trump turned it down and made threats. Then he accepted their offer. He could have done without the bombast and got the same result. I've been down this road before as a lawyer—you and the opposition are at odds, they make an offer, you refuse, you threaten to go to trial, and you cave during jury selection. It's pretty clear that he thought he could get a better offer if he made threats to wipe out their civilization but when no offer was forthcoming as the deadline approached, he decided to cave rather than go through with it.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
So... I originally replied (without reading more than one sentence)
That's actually apropos for the discussion since Levin and his ilk evidently do the same thing—reflexively praise Trump without paying attention to what actually happened. Respond to the part where Trump declares victory without looking into what's actually on the table. With Israel bombing Beirut less than 24 hours after the ceasefire was announced Levin may find himself throwing more intense fits if the US has to put real pressure on Israel to get them to stop.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
Say I'm negotiating a settlement to a lawsuit. I offer $200,000; the plaintiff insists on $250,000. It's the eve of trial and I tell opposing counsel that if she wants to take this to a jury fine, I'm happy to see that she gets nothing. We start picking a jury and by the end of the first day I've agreed to the $250,000. If I told you this story and ended it with "Whenever we started picking the jury and opposing counsel saw that shit was getting real she begged me to settle" you'd tell me I was delusional. I could have made the exact same deal the day before without wasting anyone's time. What happened was that we got into a staring contest and I blinked first. This isn't the perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
As for all these dubious benefits we have to keep in mind that, for the past 20 years, there have been two reasons Iran has been a problem:
- Their nuclear program
- Their arming of proxies in the Middle East
I don't recall any point in that timespan where anyone has claimed that Iran's conventional capabilities were a threat to anyone. They had those capabilities for decades but hadn't used them since the Iran-Iraq War, a war in which they were on the defensive. Six months ago, no one was warning us about the threat from the fucking Iranian navy. And I don't think there was much of a question that US conventional forces would be able to damage the Iranian military to the extent they have. In any event, we couldn't do enough to stop them from shutting down the strait, the one thing everyone has been warning they would do for years if we attacked them.
As for the nuclear program, that was supposedly "obliterated" last June, and I haven't heard much about it in the present war other than that they were continuing to bomb nuclear sites, so how much the program has actually been set back is anyone's guess. My own guess is not much, considering that I can't find any information about it and Trump would certainly be bragging about it if it were true, and probably even if it weren't. The Supreme Leader's death was completely without consequence. The guy was 87 years old and in bad health. If he had died of natural causes on the same day and was replaced with the same guy, I don't think any international analyst would be saying that this was a positive development for the United States. By all accounts the guy was actually worse to begin with, and now we've just killed his whole family. And I don't know how you extrapolate the ability to kill Supreme Leaders with impunity when we've only killed one to date.
So I think I can confidently make quite a few predictions that will be vindicated, because these are American non-negotiables and because America won (America is winning)
Did you actually read the ten point plan that Trump himself was claiming will form the basis of negotiations? Because there's nothing in there about anything on your list. The fact that you're reading into the terms of a future agreement items from your wishlist that Iran hasn't done anything to indicate they'd be amenable to discussing and that they've said repeatedly in the past that they wouldn't be amenable to discussing is evidence that you're doing exactly the same thing that all the conservative commentators are doing, i.e. relying on your own blind faith in Trump to achieve whatever fantasy land outcome you desire. You might as well add that the Assembly of Experts will all concede power to a pro-American democracy who will recognize Israel and become a strong ally in the region. Sheesh.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
For matters of policy, sure, but I think there's a place for generals to offer opinions on whether the proposed military actions will actually achieve the desired strategic objectives. If the president and his cabinet tell the general that they plan on toppling the Xi regime by bombing all the belts and roads that China built in Africa, I think there's a place for the military to explain why this isn't likely to happen.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
Iran Ceasefire Takeaways
These are all based on my reactions as of early this afternoon and are subject to change with new developments.
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Per the article posted below, someone on the radio pointed out something interesting that's in it, or, more accurately, isn't in it. While the article includes details down to where everyone in the room was sitting and what kind of car Netanhayu arrived in, there's no mention of the Israelis saying that they were going forward with or without US assistance. This puts a huge implicit dent in the idea that the US had to do this to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.
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I also heard on the radio this morning that J.D. Vance will be handling the upcoming negotiations. This represents a serious change in approach from Kushner.
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The immediate conservative reaction I heard in-person last night and from commentators up to the present seems to be a cautious optimism that since the deal isn't finalized, the terms aren't as bad as they look. I'll admit that while that's true, the fact that the nuclear program doesn't appear to be on the table is already a bad sign, and the fact that some of the stuff, like tolling the strait, is even being talked about is also a bad sign.
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That being said, the Fox News comment section isn't even defending this. I know that's not representative of conservatives or even MAGA by a long shot, but I still like to check it out to get a feel for what the most extreme right-wing true believers have to say.
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Hesgeth this morning was trying to paint this as a decisive military victory. After Bondi was canned last week, there was some mention that other Cabinet members were on Trump's shit list and would be out soon, but no names were mentioned. I'd have to thing that Pete's going to be shown the door as soon as it is feasible. It seems to me that his failures are worse than those of Bondi and Noem, though I can't explain why other than that war seems worse than even being so aggressive that the administration is forced to back off of enforcement of its signature policy and reducing the DOJ to a shell of its former self. Unlike Noem, I expect he'll be replaced with an experienced general (or admiral) who will get bipartisan support in confirmation hearings. Honestly, of all the Trump cabinet nominations, Hesgeth has to be the worst. Bondi and Noem were bad but one was state AG and the other was governor. Hesgeth was a major in the reserves and a talk show host. The latter is perversely more important because if a president chose a random major as Defense Secretary then everyone would be scratching their heads. True to form, he seems more concerned with how he appears on television than with actually running the military. He comes across like he hired professional television writers to come up with good zingers for him, that he practices delivering in the mirror.
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Speaking of Hesgeth, I think the next presidential candidate could make some hay during the campaign of changing the Department of War back to the Department of Defense, with Hesgeth and his "Warrior Ethos" being Exhibit A. Spin it as a reminder that, unlike the previous administration, the goals of the military won't be waging wars that make us less safe but defending the nation, putting the American people first, etc. Honestly, I wouldn't be too surprised if Trump does this himself after Hesgeth is gone, since he's probably going to be the scapegoat for all of this.
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Foil hat time: I heard Mark Kelly on the radio last night and while I didn't catch the entirety of his comments, he alluded to the remarks about refusing lawful orders that Trump wanted to prosecute him for. My thought is, what if the reason for the sudden reversal was that the relevant military leadership indicated that they wouldn't follow his orders and invoked the UCMJ? Just look at the timeline here—Trump makes threats Sunday. Iran makes a counteroffer (the 10 point plan) on Monday which Trump publicly rejects. Tuesday morning he threatens to end Iranian civilization. 2 hours before the deadline he agrees to the Iranian plan he rejected the day before. If military leadership got the impression that the promised strikes were less about hitting legitimate military targets and more about inflicting pain on civilians, they may have refused to act, either from their own sense of morality and legality or for fear that they may be dragged in front on an international tribunal once the Democrats regain power, which is looking increasingly inevitable. While the current deal looks bad, it's not nearly as bad as if a bunch of generals refuse orders and resign in the middle of a war. Trump can threaten courts martial, treason charges, whatever, and it won't undo the immense damage that that would cause. I don't think this is particularly likely, since I don't think that what Trump was actually proposing would have necessarily been a war crime, but given how inexplicable this cease fire is, I'm willing to consider the possibility.
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If you look at the timeline again, I don't know how anyone who isn't literally retarded can buy the official explanation coming out of the White House, i.e. that after Trump made his civilization-destroying threat Iran decided to let discretion be the better part of valor by agreeing to come to the bargaining table. I shouldn't have to explain why this is obviously retarded.
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One of the analogies I've had since Trump seriously entered politics is that he's the equivalent of giving the loudmouth on a bar stool actual power. One of the divides between the so-called "elites" in media and politics and everyone else (regardless of political persuasion) is that everyone else says "Why can't we just do x?" and the elites explain that the situation is more complicated than it looks and give them 500 esoteric reasons why it's a bad idea. The biggest of these divides I've found (or at least the most obvious one) from the past 25 years is "Why can't we just bomb Iran?" I've had this exact discussion on actual bar stools dozens of time over the years, and few people making that argument have ever been persuaded by my counterarguments. I've seen that sentiment expressed here countless times as well, since it seems to never die. Well, it might have finally died, as the past month has been an object lesson in why you can't just bomb places, even in conditions as favorable as we had, where the opponent's air defenses are borderline useless and very few of their retaliatory strikes get through. Ditto for why decapitation doesn't work either. Trump seems to have fallen into the same trap where he assumed that there was an obvious solution to the Iran problem and that the only reason previous presidents didn't use it was because they were weak cowards or were too dumb to see what was obvious to everyone else.
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Speaking of things that the man on the street (and Trump by extension) saw as obvious but were actually more complicated: The JCPOA. When I criticized Trump for pulling out of the deal, his supporters were quick to point out all the ways in which the deal was inadequate. They weren't necessarily wrong, but criticizing the deal misunderstands a fundamental principle of negotiation. Any time you enter a negotiation you have to keep four deals in mind: The deal you want, the deal you'll ask for, the deal you think you're likely to get, and the minimum acceptable deal. The spread between each of these is proportional to the amount of leverage you have; the deal you want will always be the same, but with a lot of leverage you can push for a settlement closer to that ideal, while without leverage your expectations will cluster towards the lower end. The minimum deal you're willing to make is the point at which you're in a similar position without a deal at all. The lesson here is that sometimes a bad deal is better than no deal at all. Trump's mistake was to assume that the United States had more leverage in negotiations than it did, and that Obama was weak for refusing to use that leverage. The odd thing about this whole situation was that nobody was willing to say out loud what this leverage was. The implicit leverage that Obama wasn't willing to use was military action, but few Republicans other than John Bolton were calling for such; even Trump was unwilling to use this leverage during his first term. In other words, what everyone thought was leverage was no leverage at all.
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What Trump did in his first term was to essentially hand back the concessions that Obama had extracted from Iran, meager as they may have been, and got nothing in return. Okay, not exactly nothing, as he got some personal political benefit from dunking on Obama, and Iran was still obligated to hold up its end of the bargain to the other parties to the deal, but the long-term effect was to sow an increasing distrust between Iran and the US regarding our ability to hold up our end of the bargain. What this war proved was that the leverage Trump thought he had turned out to not be much leverage at all. On the other hand, it turns out that Iran actually had more leverage than Trump thought. The perverse effect of this war is that it put the United States in a worse bargaining position than it was before. If Trump can restore the status quo antebellum it would be a win at this point. The JCPOA, as much as Trump hated it, now seems like a pipe dream.
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With that said, I'm not criticizing Trump for making a crappy deal, because in some situations a crappy deal is better . I will criticize Trump for creating a situation where he was forced to make a crappy deal. Say what you want about Obama and his deal, his policies did not create the Iran nuclear situation; you can divide the blame for that among previous presidents going back to at least Carter.
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I don't understand how anyone, regardless of his position on the war, can defend Trump right now. Myself, pretty much all of the left, and a decent chunk of the right think that this was a bad idea to begin with, be it from and ideological or practical perspective. If you're an Iran hawk then this only proves he's too weak to fully commit, which would require a ground invasion, removal of nuclear material and full destruction of the program, and regime change. Saying that you're in favor of continued action as long as there aren't any boots on the ground isn't a position you can take any more, because even Trump admits that this isn't feasible.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
Mark Levin may be a shill, but he's more of a Trump shill at this point than an Israel shill. I flipped over to Hannity late last night and all he (Levin) could talk about was what a great deal this was, his argument being that Trump made it so it had to be a great deal and we have to trust Trump because he's the smartest president we've ever had with the best leadership skills and all the other presidents bungled Iran but he showed them who's boss... at which point I turned the radio off. He made noises about how regime change is ultimately necessary but since that was never in the offing and is even less likely now, I don't understand how someone so pro-Israel can treat this as anything other than a betrayal. There's no permanent deal yet, but it doesn't look like the US is going to get it as good as we had it before the war started. The JCPOA is looking like a dream right now.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
I think there might be certain limits to this patience, though. Not that Trump cares about anything that happens on the left, but even normally pro-Israel people there are looking askance at this war and at what's gone on in Gaza, there's a wing of the right that's variously anti-war and openly anti-Semitic, and we were just forced to accept humiliating cease fire terms to end a war that many commentators believe that Israel baited us into, and while I'd normally treat such a theory as a hallucination of the militantly anti-Israel crowd, Trump hasn't done much in the way of offering an alternative explanation to suggest that it isn't true. Given the political costs of this adventure, I'd have to imagine that there's a point where Trump runs out of patience. Then again, this is Trump we're talking about, and betting that he'll make terrible decisions is never a losing proposition.
Rov_Scam
18hr ago
It depends on how Iran responds. We have the leverage to convince them to stop. Whether Trump uses it is anyone's guess, but I have a hard time believing he'd want a repeat of the last month due to Israel's incontinence.
Rov_Scam
19hr ago
I don't think the US is going to be consulting Israel for much of anything going forward. Trump just agreed to one of the more humiliating cease fires in American history, in part because he got completely snowed by Israel.
Rov_Scam
19hr ago
I think it kind of did, though. He was already staring in the face of a wave election. If he could get Iran to capitulate quickly, he could prop up his numbers, and by extension the GOP's, by being the president who could solve the Iran nuclear issue once and for all by being the only president with the balls to attempt a military solution. Unfortunately, he believed his own bullshit and has such disdain for every president since Bush that he failed to consider that there were good reasons why nobody did it before. In the course of things, he pissed off the America First wing of the party and made fools of the hawks by insisting that he was achieving unprecedented success, akin to Germany in 1918. I figured he'd eventually be forced to yield, but not like this.
Rov_Scam
22hr ago
There's a cost aspect as well. If it costs $200,000 to find a glitch in a video codec that may, horror of horrors, cause your player to crash (and which, to anyone's knowledge, hasn't done so in 16 years), that's not exactly a selling point. $200,000 may actually be an understatement; they said it took 5 million tries to catch it. At 20 cents an attempt, more like a million dollars. We also don't know if they ran any of these tests on old code with known bugs. If they did and the software didn't catch half of the ones that were already caught, its utility isn't that great.
Rov_Scam
23hr ago
I understand what you're saying, and while I don't practice in criminal court or (presumably) your jurisdiction, my own experience suggests that this is unlikely to happen. As we all learned in law school, the practice of law is the application of the law to the facts of the case. Traditionally, pro se litigants who don't know the law argue the facts and appeal to a vague sense of justice. LLM is the complete opposite since the LLM usually doesn't know anything about the facts but will gladly generate pages upon pages worth of vague legal arguments based on the invariably vague instructions it was given. Even a really good LLM is ultimately limited by the facts the user inputs, which, most of the time, is few to none, because they see it as just a magic box that will spit out something that looks professional but really doesn't do anything. Hence you get a guy with a 300 paragraph brief that doesn't once even hint at the general kind of case that it is.
Overall, though, while I see this as a problem, I only see it as such insofar as acting pro se is generally. If a prosecutor is reduced to tears of rage because he has to respond to endless motions from a pro se litigant and cuts a favorable deal to get out of it, I don't see how that situation is any worse than if the same prosecutor has to deal with the same thing from a team of high-priced attorneys paid for by the father of a wealthy defendant. My concern here is less for the prosecutor and more for the pro se who wastes the court's time and doesn't get a deal when he would have got one had a public defender filed the one motion that had any merit. My concern with LLMs isn't much different than my overall concern with DIY legal solutions where people think they're getting a good deal because they save a little bit of money in the short term but end up getting screwed in the long term.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
In 2009, the Pittsburgh Pirates lost a spring training game to Manatee Community College. In 2019, Chelsea lost to their own youth team. By your logic, the Pirates should have forgotten about Andrew McCutchen (who played in that game) and signed some of the Manatee players, who were readily available. I do not believe any of them ever got so much as a rookie league contract.
The US Women's team thing wasn't even that level of a loss, because it wasn't even a real scrimmage, because national teams don't do scrimmages. They were sharing a training facility in Texas with the boys youth team and when the youth team came over to watch them practice/get autographs they ended up agreeing to play a kick around game. They don't play games like this a tune-ups or anything because the team members would have played about 60 games per year between the pro and national teams. The only reason anyone even knows about this is because that particular camp was interrupted by contentious contract negotiations with US Soccer, and US Soccer decided to release the results without any context to gain leverage (while sabotaging their own product). Just think about it for one minute: If you're a player or a coach, are you going to risk injury by trying to win the game? Or are you going to treat it like a fun treat for the kids that under normal circumstances nobody would hear about? Look at the NFL; they play fewer games than soccer players but are averse to playing in the preseason and absolutely allergic to the Pro Bowl. Now imagine that you aren't making nearly as much money and that your pro career can end in an instant.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
If the true value of AI is only in the hundreds of millions, the industry is even more fucked than an AI skeptic like me could imagine.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
That isn't really any different than it is now, though. If a dedicated NIMBY group wants to oppose a project by any means possible, they can hire a lawyer who will argue that §902(a)(4) requires a bat survey, and they might win. A citizen group that generates a massive filing that that nobody understands and basically just list arguments looks impressive from their perspective but gets shot down immediately whenever they have to go in front of a judge and the attorney for the municipality or whoever explains to the judge why §902(a)(4) doesn't apply in this case (which if it obviously did, they would have already done one), and may even produce a report from the guy who does the bat surveys explaining why one wasn't needed in his opinion, and the judge smiles and nods while the pro se NIMBY guy fumbles through his brief trying to find the part about the bats that he can't remember because he didn't even read the whole thing let alone understand the whole thing, and the judge tosses the complaint.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Like @faceh, I too have had the displeasure of witnessing a pro se litigant attempt to argue an AI slop motion in front of a judge. A 300+ paragraph AI slop motion. It was a post-trial motion. And I heard quite a bit of it because all the litigant could do was read it verbatim. After 20 minutes, I still had no idea what the case was even about, because he evidently didn't know that lawyers have to argue the facts of the case. After it became unbearable, I realized that since a TV show was filming in one of the courtrooms a friend of mine from high school who works in the industry might be there (I run into the guy once every few years), and even if he wasn't it would give me something to do while I waited for my case to be called. Sure enough, I saw him as soon as I left the courtroom and caught up with him for about a half hour. When I came back, the guy was still reading from his brief, and the judge told him he wasn't going to listen to the whole thing and cut the guy off while he gave the defense a chance to argue. It was only then that I was able to glean that he had apparently sued Hertz rental truck for being injured on their property, and that AI evidently didn't tell him that his mother was not qualified to act as a medical witness, or prepare a proper defense to their motion in limine that would allow her to testify as a damage witness. When the judge went back to the guy for his response he just continued reading from his brief.
Honestly, I think AI actually makes things worse for pro se litigants because at least before, judges were willing to cut them some slack and argue the facts of their case in a more informal way. Their deficit was that they didn't understand the law well enough to argue the facts effectively. Now they can generate pages upon pages of legalese they don't understand but think is the magic bullet that separates them from the lawyers and that they'll be able to wow the judge with their mad legal skillz. All the judge is going to do is smile politely during their argument and rule against them, because they haven't said anything.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I'm not a programmer, so what you just said is all Greek to me, but I'll take your word for it that what you described represents a significant departure from the expectations that the AI horny would lead one to have concerning the capabilities of the product. But they can always respond that these are problems that are solvable, and with the technology in a constant state of flux we can expect that in the coming years things will only continue to improve, since it was only very recently that even that level of functionality wasn't possible. My concerns with AI go beyond that, though, to problems that don't seem to be solvable in the short term and that have only gotten worse in recent years. These are more business-related than technology-related (though the limitations of the technology do factor in), and threaten the entire viability of AI as an industry.
I use Photoshop quite a bit. During the pandemic, though, my graphics card crapped out, and since they were in short supply, I replaced it with an old one from 2014 I had lying around. Since I don't play games or anything this was a perfectly acceptable solution, except that at some point newer versions of Photoshop started offloading some of the workload to the graphics card, for which mine was hilariously out of date. While the newer versions technically worked, there was a certain wonkiness that prevented me from adopting them full-time, and I continued using an install of Photoshop 2018, which was more than adequate for my purposes. In the meantime, I noticed that a newer version I had installed had incorporated "neural filters" aka AI into the program, which of course it did, and I fooled around with this a bit. Some functions were fun, if limited, while others, like upscaling and automatic scratch removal, didn't seem to do anything useful. But whatever. A few weeks ago I finally got a new graphics card after the old one gave up the ghost, and I looked into Photoshop 2026 to see what had changed since 2025. The answer was that the updates were basically all AI-driven, and not in a good way.
Adobe has been a convenient punching bag for the enshittification trend as of late, and the purpose of this post isn't to pile on, but to illustrate how it's representative of a greater rot in the software business and how AI only seems to accelerate that rot. Like previous iterations, some of these AI features are impressive, and some or stupid, but all of them cost extra. The way it works is that you get a certain amount of credits depending on your subscription (and as a long-time customer of the Photoshop-only plan I get a generous number of credits), and each time you use one of these features it costs a certain number of credits. And if you run out you can't just buy more, but you have to upgrade your subscription, and I already get the most credits you can with an out -of-the-box subscription that doesn't involve going through their sales department. To make matters worse, determining how many credits a given action will cost isn't based on a set rate but depends on 900 different factors, and is so complicated that the software can't even tell you how much an action will cost before it's run. And as a final blow, they don't even provide a way of telling you how many credits you have remaining; you eventually just get a message that you've run out.
The latter problem is obviously part of Adobe's slimy sales tactics where they want users to be unable to plan ahead so that they unexpectedly run out of credits in the middle of a time-sensitive project and are forced to upgrade, so I can choke that up to normal corporate bullshit. The former problem is due to the fact that there is simply no way of predicting how much compute an AI system is going to use until it's already used it. The real kicker is that, due to the inherently unpredictable nature of generative AI, you don't even know if the command is going to achieve the desired result, or how many attempts and tweaks it will take to get the desired result, and it may take multiple, expensive generations just to get something usable. The result is that the function is inherently self-defeating. There are lots of Photoshop functions that may require tweaking or not work at all, but they're integral parts of the software and aren't costing the user anything but time if they don't get things right on the first try, and the individual user will get more proficient with experience. The AI features are simply a black box that requires you to throw an unknown amount of money at it and hope it does what you want it to. I, as a user, thus am disincentivized to bother learning how to use these features because my access to them is liable to be cut off at any moment, whereas my existing workflow works fine as it is.
This is basically the problem with the whole "AI as a service" model these companies all seem to be banking on. If the response to Photoshop 2026 is any indication, customers want cost predictability and function predictability. If Microsoft Word cut you off after 1 million words per month it would seem less like you were buying software and more like a free trial. It would be even worse if the number of words you were allowed to type depended on font, font size, formatting, etc., and you didn't know how many credits each action you would take and were liable to be cut off while in the middle of writing something important. Luckily, I can use Word to my heart's content without it costing Microsoft any extra, so they have no reason to impose such a restriction. With generative AI, on the other hand, every action costs the company money, whether it benefits the customer or not, and the company can't predict in advance how much money that's going to be. So there's no way an AI company can realistically charge based on use without pissing off their customer base, who will cancel after getting that first $75,000 bill in the mail that no, they aren't paying.
Charging a flat monthly fee for unlimited usage doesn't solve this problem so much as stick the provider with the bill instead of the customer, so most of the AI services have resorted to a deceptive hybrid model where it looks like you're getting unlimited usage but has asterisks stating that it's subject to a cap, which caps are never explicitly defined. Some charge a monthly fee for access to a certain number of credits, which don't roll over at the end of the month. I'd find a lot to criticize about these models, which wouldn't fly in any normal business sales situation and would be relegated to the scummy end of the consumer pool in any other context, except that they still manage to lose money for the big players. Third-party agent developers may be profitable, but it's only because they're already buying their compute at a discount.
The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that software as a service, while loathed by customers, isn't really beneficial to companies either, other than as a cheap way of temporarily boosting numbers. And that's indicative of a deeper problem in the tech industry as a whole, a problem of their own making. From the 1980s through the 2000s, the computer industry grew exponentially. In the 1970s computers were things that large corporations and government agencies had to manage large databases. In the 1980s they became productivity tools that every employee had on his desk. By the mid-90s, home adoption had started in earnest, and by the end of the decade practically everyone had one. In ten years the internet went from being a hyped curiosity to an essential utility. The technology was also changing quickly, and the improvements were massive. In 1994, a typical home PC had a 486 processor clocked at 66 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, and a 500 MB hard drive. It would run Windows 3.1, which would be replaced a year later with Windows 95, a huge upgrade. Five years later that computer would be hopelessly obsolete; in 1999 a comparable build would have a 450MHz Pentium II, 128 MB of RAM, and a 13 GB hard drive. It would run Windows 98, which would be replaced 2 years later with Windows XP, and even bigger upgrade that eliminated the finickiness of DOS once and for all.
By 2010 CPUs would be clocked in the gigahertz and run multiple cores, RAM would be measured in gigabytes, and external hard drives of more than 1 TB would be affordable. Windows 7 was released the year prior to great acclaim. To put all that in perspective, I'm currently writing this on a Lenovo Thinkpad from 2024 that has the same amount of RAM as the currently-avalable model, which has the same amount of RAM as my home PC build from 2019. Or 2018; I can't remember the year I last did a major upgrade, but I haven't done any since before the pandemic, aside from the aforementioned graphics card. I haven't needed to upgrade it either, as there hasn't been any decline in performance in the tasks I actually use it for. And even that upgrade didn't appreciably improve performance from the 2014 gear I was running before that. Windows 7 was the last Windows release that was universally loved; every one since then has been met with varying degrees of derision. There had been flops before, but Vista was too far ahead of its time to be usable, and ME was a half-assed stopgap that never should have been released. The only mistake in this vein since then was 8, which completely misread the future of computing. Every new Windows since then has been an unexciting incremental upgrade that would probably have worked just as well as a security patch for 7.
I don't want to overstate my case here and suggest that computers haven't improved in the last 15 years; I'm sure my 2014 build would be woefully inadequate by today's standards. The point is that the advances aren't coming as fast as they did in years previous, and when they do come the improvements are more subtle. It feels like 2010 was the year that computer technology reached a mature phase where all adults, even your grandparents, knew how to use it, and good technology was as cheap as it was going to get. This wasn't clear at the time, but in a few years it was apparent that things had stagnated. In the early 2010s I listened to TWIT semi-regularly, and it didn't seem like there was much to get excited about. The two big things that the industry was pushing as the next frontier at the time were wearables and IOT devices. The former flopped spectacularly. The latter had better market penetration, though some of the implementations were ridiculous, and the whole concept has since become a metaphor of how technology has gone too far, trading simplicity and security for dubious functionality. As hardware stagnated, software quickly followed suit. Improvements in software follow improvements in hardware, and with hardware capability virtually unlimited, there was nowhere left to go. Sure, there would always be new features, support for new devices, and better security, but the game-changing upgrades seemed like a thing of the past.
So take a program like Photoshop that was first released in 1990 and had improved leaps and bounds by the time CS6 was released in 2012. A lot of users contend that this was peak Photoshop and that everything since then has been unnecessary bloat. I am not one of those people; the current software is significantly better. But CS6 was also the last version to be sold as a standalone product. Adobe had good reasons for doing this at the time—Photoshop was an incredibly expensive professional grade product that also had broad-based appeal. This meant that it was particularly susceptible to piracy, and lost more money to piracy than more modestly-priced products. They had tried to combat this in the past by releasing less expensive consumer-grade versions like Elements, but these never really took off, as consumers felt like they were missing something (most notably, Elements did not provide access to curves, which every photography book agreed was an essential tool). The decision to go subscription would give consumers access to an always-up-to-date full version of the product for less than it would cost to upgrade every other release.
The crowd who insists that CS6 is better is dwindling now, but even in its heyday it was mostly composed of people who had never actually paid for Photoshop and were mad that it was more difficult to pirate. But when Creative Cloud was first released in 2013, much of the criticism came from professionals and actual customers who were concerned about the new model. Sure, it was cheap now, but what was stopping them from jacking up the price in the future? Creative professionals aren't exactly the most highly paid. In the past one could upgrade whenever he could afford to and, if necessary, stick with a legacy version until things improved. But making one's continued access to software they needed for their job dependent on paying a ransom that they might not be able to afford was a different story. The reaction may have been better if CC offered a significant upgrade over CS6, but rather than wait a few years and offer a significantly improved version, CC came out earlier than one would expect and didn't offer much of an upgrade. Accordingly, the new subscription model was the only noteworthy thing about it. To Adobe's credit, the subscription price didn't change at all for over a decade, but in hindsight, there weren't any game-changing upgrades, only incremental improvements. If the company had simply relied on customers paying full price to upgrade whenever they felt it was worth it, they may have been waiting a long time.
As SaaS has matured from those early days, it has become less about preventing piracy and more about anxiety that newer products won't differentiate themselves enough from the old to merit the user to upgrade. Better instead to lock in that revenue stream with a user subscription that's impossible to cancel short of telling the bank to stop paying. Unfortunately, as a business move it's a one-time thing; make the number go up as all the old customers switch to subscriptions, but once they're aboard, the line flattens out again. In normal industries, this isn't a problem. In the computer industry, 30 years of exponential growth being not only welcomed but expected meant that the situation was unacceptable. Since there was nowhere left to go technologically, the industry had to resort to cheap gimmicks to keep the numbers up. SaaS was one. The aforementioned IoT was another; nothing better than announcing huge deals with appliance manufacturers who will be integrating your products. The problem with gimmicks like this is that, while they can increase revenue, they have a shelf life. A deal with Whirlpool to make a smart fridge may make both of your numbers go up, but once you have computers in every fridge sold, exponential growth is no longer possible. By the 2020s, the tech industry was running out of gimmicks. I think the reason Apple became the top dog during this period is because they were the only tech company that didn't seem to be peddling bullshit. I had a friend who was in and out of tech startups during this period (I even interviewed at one of his companies), and every idea was based on a free service that was really just scaffolding for advertising or data harvesting. A company like Apple that still sold products and services they expected customers to pay for was an outlier indeed.
So AI came to save the day. I'm not denying the fact that the technology is impressive and potentially useful, but it is just about the biggest gimmick one could imagine. Because simply being impressive and useful puts it in about the same league as, well, Photoshop, which, even in its first iteration, was a revolution to anyone who had ever worked in a darkroom. Unlike Photoshop, though AI promises to solve not one particular problem, but all of the problems, including ones that haven't been identified yet. This latter point is particularly salient, because exponential growth in the tech sector was never based on the present, but on the future. If the tech industry in the 2010s looked like it was in danger of stagnating and becoming a normal industry, in the 2020s the sky was the limit. It was now worth it for capital to invest all of the money in AI companies, because if they were successful, then money wouldn't matter anyway.
And if they weren't successful? Well, they never considered that possibility, because the line only moves in one direction. The equation is pretty simple: If AI companies are successful, then your support was worth it and will be repaid. If they aren't successful, then you need to give them more money. But what happens when the money isn't there? How good Photoshop's AI features are is ultimately secondary to how much they cost. Someone has to pay for them, be it the customer or Adobe. Some companies may be willing to subsidize AI, but if Adobe is willing to give product away for free, they'd do better by dumping CC and charging $500 for CS7, but we know that ain't going to happen. Instead, they've raised subscription prices by 50% in an attempt to get customers to pay for the privilege of having access to functionality they have to pay extra for if they actually want to use. I doubt it's a coincidence that the first substantial price hike in the history of CC coincides with the introduction of the expensive AI upgrades. I doubt Adobe will suffer much for it, because their business (like Apple's) is actually sound, and their products indispensable, but it's indicative of the perversion that's at the center of the tech world. Eventually, somebody is going to expect to get paid, and the party will be over. And as I write this, I don't see any scenario where the money is going to be there.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
If they set themselves up as legal gambling companies, they wouldn't have as much of a problem. But they don't want to deal with the regulation, which includes being banned in a lot of states, including some big ones, so it's worth it for them in the short term to insist that they're in some vague category that can't be regulated and do the minimum to appease the people who have the power to sic attorneys general on them. If they can stay out of the headlines it's better for business.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Force majeure is pretty rare and reserved for exceptional circumstances, not that they don't want to pay on a policy. If that's the case, they'll usually find another reason not to pay.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
You're entitled to your opinions on the ACLU, but they have very little to do with this case, other than that they're paying the attorney who handled it. Their participation is incidental, and if it wasn't for their public profile, would be entirely unknown. News coverage of high-profile lawsuits rarely mentions the insurance companies that are actually paying for them.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Sophistry? No. If I wanted to engage in sophistry I'd argue a lot more motions than I actually do.
Isn’t it also the case as I’ve read that most parties sue in order to settle out of court?
I don't know if that's exactly the way I'd phrase it. Cases going to verdict are certainly rare, yes. However, a good number of cases are dismissed before it even gets close to trial, and a lot of cases will just sit on the docket because the plaintiff isn't motivated enough to get things moving. If a case is actually going to get in front of a jury then it means it has some merit and the defendant isn't going to take the chance that the jury decides it's worth more money than the plaintiff is willing to settle for. The plaintiff, on the other hand, isn't going to get greedy and pass up guaranteed money when they could be walking into a defense verdict. Add into this that the courts have a positive bias toward encouraging parties to resolve matters on their own, with some even requiring pretrial mediation, and it's so surprise most cases settle. The Newegg case happened because the calculus changed whereby it was cheaper in the long run for them to countersue in the hope that it would discourage future litigation.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
As a litigator, there are any number of things I might take into consideration when making an argument in front of a judge, including favorable facts, unfavorable facts, favorable law, unfavorable law, and the kinds of arguments the judge tends to pay attention to. On thing I have never taken into consideration is whether my argument is intellectually consistent with an argument I've made in the past, even if I'm arguing for the same client in front of the same judge in a case with substantially similar facts to a case I've argued previously. Indeed, if a judge tells me he doesn't buy my argument, I'm not going to waste my time in a future case making that argument. If I did, I may be consistent in my opinion, but I'd be doing a disservice to my client, putting my own sense of moral consistency ahead of their very real legal jeopardy.
And here you are, saying you're infuriated because a lawyer whose prior stances you aren't familiar with is arguing in an area of the law that hasn't been relevant until very recently in front of a court that has repeatedly signaled that they have a tendency to find some lines of reasoning more persuasive than others. What's she supposed to do, proceed with an argument that she thinks is a loser because she is, in some abstract way, acting as a representative of "the left" and other people who have nothing to do with her or her case besides a vague association with "the left" have made similar arguments in the past? What kind of advocacy is that?
A smarter man would have done more to talk Trump out of it, or at least help identify strategic objectives and have an exit plan for what to do if those objectives weren't realized within a certain timeframe. I get the impression that Hegseth pretty much discounted the possibility that anything but bunnies hopping through the woods would come out of this, and that if he'd given stronger pushback from the outset, then we might not be in this mess. He's clearly the least qualified person in a major cabinet position and the only thing he has to offer is the role of sycophantic yes-man who's the only one in the room to tell the president his instincts are correct. Because let's fact it, if Trump wanted a qualified candidate who would tell it like it is, those guys aren't in short supply, especially when you consider the qualifications of the guy he actually picked. Unfortunately, unflappable loyalty doesn't keep you from being the scapegoat, especially when it's the only quality you have to offer, extra especially when the president trusted your word over all others. I agree that the problem wasn't with any of Hesgeth's individual tactical decisions. The problem was with his strategic decisions, of which there were none. Not once in this entire conflict did we get a clear picture of what the administration's goals were. If the administration doesn't know what its strategic goals are, then the whole enterprise is doomed. I hate to quote Sun-Tsu, since it's the realm of cringeworthy corporate assholes, but tactics without strategy is the fastest route to defeat.
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