the most generous reading of your arguments is that you are philosophically defeatist

That’s probably a fair assessment.

But I feel like the core of my argument remains: I’m not disputing that MS or Google or Amazon or Apple services are sold to people and orgs who use them to commit evil. Of course they are.

But these aren’t munitions. They are general-purpose computing products being turned to evil outcomes by bad actors. The article, for example, cites Microsoft’s open-source LAVENDER, which is a general purpose image and video analysis tool for AI. Describing it as:

‘Lavender’, an AI-powered system designed to identify bombing targets

This simply isn’t true. Somebody in the Israeli military used LAVENDER to process video data to identify bombing targets, like somebody might use a hammer to smash someone’s head in. The articles you cite are full of rhetorical tricks to imply that Microsoft corporate had some hand in the decision making, but it’s genuinely all “well the Israeli military has some Azure servers, therefore Microsoft killed people”.

Which militaries should Microsoft (or Google or Apple or Amazon, etc) be allowed to sell products to? Who makes that determination? A cohort of employees or consumers? NGOs?

If government makes the call – distilling a public consensus on the matter, one hopes – then I can see some reasonable way to approach this question.

EDIT: Details on LAVENDER:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/lavender-unifying-video-language-understanding-as-masked-language-modeling/

I just don’t see it doing any good. Why would Israel’s military, supplied with US military hardware, care about Microsoft? Or Apple or Google or Amazon or… I’m sure none of their critical military infrastructure is in danger if one or several of these companies turn on them.

And how does Microsoft even enforce this ban? Turn off Windows remotely? It’s not even clear how such a ban on Israel-linked business would work.

If world governments want to put sanctions on Israel and Gaza to try and make the two governments come to the table, I think that’s a much better strategy.

Honestly, I struggle to draw a connection between world conflict and non-military technology like Windows or cell phones or whatever.

Is every single Israeli resident complicit in what their government is doing? None of them should be allowed to use Windows? What about Israelis outside of Israel? What about people who support Israel? What about (gasp) Jews? How do you even enforce any of this without massive overreach by the companies?

Call on Microsoft or Apple all you want, ultimately I don’t think a company should ban sales to customers on the argument that those customers might not have morals aligned to the company. Not that it’s even possible, with world supply chains being what they are.

Capitalism does an extremely poor job of planning beyond the next accounting period.

With respect to the article, it’s wrong. AI help desk is already a thing. Yes, it’s terrible, but human help desk was already terrible. Businesses are ABSOLUTELY cutting out tier 1 call center positions.

LLMs are exceptionally good at language translation, which should be no surprise as that kind of statistical chaining is right up their alley. Translators are losing jobs. AI Contract analysis & legal blacklining are going to put a lot of junior employees and paralegals out of business.

I am very much an AI skeptic, but I also recognize that people who do the things LLMs are already pretty good at are in real trouble. As AI tools get better at more stuff, that target list of jobs will grow.

Took them 30 seconds to throw animators under the bus to make their point.

It’s hopeless. We’re all just gonna eat each other so the billionaire class can go live in a giant space station.

It was the style at the time.

Well, game journalists need to sell gaming hardware and AAA games. Those guys have the ad money.

Just play what you like.

Perhaps, but I don’t read anything on Substack unless I’m subscribed. Reputation is the entire point on Substack, without it, the content will get no traffic.

AI with dedicated nuclear power? I can’t imagine anything that could possiblye go wrong in this scenario.

Oh good, now when I search I’ll have to wade through the effluent of AI-produced pablum to find an actual human journalism product.

Remember when Substack, the home of many excellent journalists, started to defend fascist and white supremacist content on their platform?

Oh, wait, that’s happening right now.

\3. Asserting that their IT system is a “separate legal entity” and that they are not responsible for the accuracy of the system. They are eating legal loco weed.

If I remember correctly, at the time Valve justified the 30% by pointing out that Apple was charging the same for music and video content. And Valve immediately started building value-added services like forums, updaters, multiplayer support, achievements, etc. to justify the price.

If you compare what Valve was doing to the physical media distribution methods of the period, it was a MASSIVE improvement. Back then, you could sell 10000 units to Ingram Micro or PC Mall, or whatever, and you only got paid if they sold. And any unsold inventory would be destroyed and the reseller would never pay for it. And if you actually wanted anything other than a single-line entry in their catalogs, you paid a promotional fee. Those video games featured with a standup display or a poster in the window at the computer store? None of that was free; the developer was nickeled and dimed for every moment their game was featured in any premium store space.

Huh. So, I actually own Lugaru, which I purchased through Humble Bundle in May 2010.

It… was not a good game. Basically anthropomorphic rabbits beating the crap out of each other, which SOUNDS good, but was not executed well.

It’s not “inexplicable”.

DIMM mounting brackets introduce significant limitations to maximum bandwidth. SOC RAM offers huge benefits in bandwidth improvement and latency reduction. Memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is 400GB/second, compared to a max of 64GB/sec for DDR5 DIMMs.

It may not be optimizing for the compute problem that you have, and that’s fine. But it’s definitely optimizing for compute problems that Apple believes to be high priority for its customers.

Eh, I was there. The games were OK.

The biggest change is that we put up with a lot more repetitive gameplay back then, just because that’s how games were and there wasn’t enough horsepower to make complex stuff.

Today, you blow through a level of a modern first person game, or whatever, and see only a tiny fraction of what the game makers created for you. I played Titanfall 2 for the first time recently, and after playing the same level a few times, I noticed that a room that appears only briefly as you take an elevator past it has an extension cord coiled up on the floor. You can only see it if you look down as the elevator goes up, so you can see the floor of the room.

Old games didn’t have the room for those kinds of indulgences.

Before reading the article, I just assumed that N. Korea had hacked a game with loot boxes.

Your math is off somewhere. Wikipedia claims that NYC has 302 square miles of land, while Singapore has 283.

This article estimates that the cost of owning a car in NYC is $3000-$5000 per month. So, you pay for the privilege, perhaps not as much up front.

But NYC is surrounded by places you can drive to. Singapore is not. The mainland city of Johor Bahru is a relatively poor city of only 500K people, and beyond that it’s farmland until you get to the Malaysian captial, more than 4 hours away. So I wouldn’t expect the two cities to have the same preferences for car ownership in any case.

And it won’t need to exist locally on the phone anyway. Higher bandwidth cell and wifi signals mean more and more exotic AI processing can be offloaded onto cloud resources.

It’s great when you have an app that works well when not connected to a network, of course. But most phone buyers don’t really care.