Microsoft already changed what they are selling. Now they are renting document storage that happens to have document modification software integrated.
They long decided that owning access to the data was more leverage than the software used to edit it. Ditto for Adobe. Pretty much immediately software as a service encouraged “don’t worry about ever saving/managing your data” and it wasn’t about user convenience…
I remember a large company picking MS over Google Docs, because at least at the time, MS proudly advertised that you could show up with a wagon full of HDDs at their data centre and get your stored stuff. Although, a lot of enshittification happened since then.
It doesn’t have to be only symbolic, the capabilities of the current models have the potential to blow a lot of locked-down hardware and software wide open. Proprietary firmware can be decompiled and reverse engineered by an LLM, sometimes in literally minutes.
I’ve been deeply sceptical about AI for a long time, but the stuff it’s doing now can’t be ignored and isn’t going away. Personally, my stance is now that we should crack open everything we can and gain back control of our stuff while tokens are still relatively cheap and the AI companies are still solvent. Or they succeed in regulating open weight models and start locking down their own models’ capabilities.
Like, wouldn’t it be fantastic if all those proprietary vendor blobs in Android got decompiled and suddenly we get drivers that allow Linux to run with full functionality on any phone? What about jailbreaking our cars and nuking all the spyware? What about turning every cloud-dependent smart device into a local-only one? There’s so much we could do.
And probably burned half of the Amazon forrest to do so. What the hell.
I mean, I’m kind of for it not as a surface level practical solution, but as a symbolic fighting back against the big guys.
Like, if AI is going to make the worker valueless why not use it to make the products of rent-seeking software giants useless as well?
I’ve been wondering when/if this thought process will gain more traction
Microsoft already changed what they are selling. Now they are renting document storage that happens to have document modification software integrated.
They long decided that owning access to the data was more leverage than the software used to edit it. Ditto for Adobe. Pretty much immediately software as a service encouraged “don’t worry about ever saving/managing your data” and it wasn’t about user convenience…
I remember a large company picking MS over Google Docs, because at least at the time, MS proudly advertised that you could show up with a wagon full of HDDs at their data centre and get your stored stuff. Although, a lot of enshittification happened since then.
It doesn’t have to be only symbolic, the capabilities of the current models have the potential to blow a lot of locked-down hardware and software wide open. Proprietary firmware can be decompiled and reverse engineered by an LLM, sometimes in literally minutes.
I’ve been deeply sceptical about AI for a long time, but the stuff it’s doing now can’t be ignored and isn’t going away. Personally, my stance is now that we should crack open everything we can and gain back control of our stuff while tokens are still relatively cheap and the AI companies are still solvent. Or they succeed in regulating open weight models and start locking down their own models’ capabilities.
Like, wouldn’t it be fantastic if all those proprietary vendor blobs in Android got decompiled and suddenly we get drivers that allow Linux to run with full functionality on any phone? What about jailbreaking our cars and nuking all the spyware? What about turning every cloud-dependent smart device into a local-only one? There’s so much we could do.