> In the Hot 8 Yoga burglary case, San Francisco police issued a search warrant that forced Waymo to turn over information on the account that ordered the ride and video footage from the white Jaguar that served as the getaway car, police records show.
> Faye said that he couldn’t discuss certain details of the case, but that the Waymo user’s account information didn’t lead police to the suspect. In general, he said, it’s not unusual for a criminal to order a service with stolen information or a burner phone.
> The video evidence didn’t help much either, Faye said. He said that the company had not retained interior footage of the car by the time the search warrant was filed in April and that it had kept the faces seen outside the car blurred for privacy reasons.
> “It’s highly unusual in the first place that a Waymo is even used by a suspect,” Faye said. “It was disappointing that the internal video was not able to lead to the recognition of a suspect.”
What actually happened is that AT&T and Verizon were penalized for mishandling customer location data by the FCC. They paid their fines, but attempted to contest them because they were levied by an administrative action, without a jury trial (which they claim would violate the Seventh Amendment), drawing an analogy to the case SEC v. Jarkesy, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the SEC could not impose civil penalties without a jury trial.
However, the Court ruled in this case that, since the law in question allowed the companies to appeal their fines to a jury trial, that the penalties are constitutional. This is unlike SEC v. Jarkesy, where the SEC civil fines in question had no provision for appeal to a trial by jury.
Furthermore, the Court clarified that the companies have the option to settle their obligations by either paying the fine, or by not paying the fine and appealing. The companies had claimed that the text of the law required them to pay the fine before their appeal, but the Court disagreed.
It costs a lot more than $18,000 to hire a decent developer, pretty much anywhere in the world. Also using a model is better than another developer in some ways, because there aren't two independent minds trying to work with each other.
No, but you do want Opus-tier models to do desktop and office software automation (think about people who intensely use Excel and the like). Actually those might take even more tokens that coding in a lot of cases. Why do you think Claude Cowork is successful, and why do you think Codex is leaning so hard into Computer use?
I wonder if you will see app makers begin to open APIs (MCPs) up in ways that replace computer use. Computer use via human interfaces is pretty hacky IME, and if you can use an app that exposes spreadsheets in a way that reduces token costs by 90%.
I'm optimistic that the demand for AI accessibility will drive programmatic interfaces in places where companies were previously reluctant to.
Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless? There's lots of random services sold to corporates that are not very useful (all the random benefits besides health care, life insurance, and other big-ticket items), but the per-seat charge of those is much smaller.
Google Jam Board (and other digital whiteboards) had high upfront capex and lowish opex. Probably close to the price for how often they were used before being killed off.
Same with the MS surface(?) tables (not tablets). I saw load of companies buy into the hype and then discard.
Companies love to waste money on that kind of service, before this website became everything about AI, every week someone would post how they saved a gazillion dollars by leaving vercel or AWS to self hosting as an example.
Hey I'm a consultant. They pay me to be a regular developer but they cannot hire since they just fired thousands of people which they apparently did need, turns out.
> Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless?
The Concorde turned out to be fad (not "useless" - which was your reframing.) Touted as the future of travel, each seat cost about $20,000 of today's dollars, but it turned out even at those high prices people and companies were willing to pay per-passenger, supersonic trans-Atlantic air travel is not economically viable, and was discontinued.
There are some objections here saying that some US firms are using Chinese AI providers, but I wonder if any of those are subject to compliance. Large firms that are disproportionately responsible for AI spending are all subject to compliance.
I am too. I've heard of the supposedly correct pronunciation, but I can't bring myself to use it. The "PRY-mer" pronunciation is more common in practice.
(Yeah, they're pretty useful, especially after you get an LLM to write all the boilerplate for you. The boilerplate was the main reason I preferred crontab before.)
Not related - many robber barons went bankrupt in the severe economic crashes of the time, such as the Panics of 1873 and 1893. The Gilded Age continued despite bubbles popping.
> Faye said that he couldn’t discuss certain details of the case, but that the Waymo user’s account information didn’t lead police to the suspect. In general, he said, it’s not unusual for a criminal to order a service with stolen information or a burner phone.
> The video evidence didn’t help much either, Faye said. He said that the company had not retained interior footage of the car by the time the search warrant was filed in April and that it had kept the faces seen outside the car blurred for privacy reasons.
> “It’s highly unusual in the first place that a Waymo is even used by a suspect,” Faye said. “It was disappointing that the internal video was not able to lead to the recognition of a suspect.”
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