This is only going to get worse in the foreseeable future.

4. No guilt when violating human standards of ethics.

Having AI robots do the work does not materially change or reduce that basic cost structure, as labour is one of the smaller inputs to the cost of the service call.

I get that people on the outside of the service industry looking at 5x or 10x markups see them as being "ridiculous", but that is because they aren't looking behind the scenes to see how the sausage is made. The service industry is nothing like tech where the marginal cost of delivering software drops as the number of the users (and developers) increases. A single truck equipped with the required tools can only be used for so many service calls in a given week, and swapping out the human with a robot isn't going to change that. Moreover, increasing utilization significantly beyond 8-12 hours per day seems unlikely to happen as there probably isn't much appetite in the general population to meet and greet a service robot into their home at 3am then explain and show what the issue is that needs to be resolved. There's no way that a 3am service call can cost 50% less than daytime service call.

In contrast, the marginal cost overhead of spinning up one more software developer for big tech is almost nothing. You might spend $2000 for a computer and another $1000 for a desk and chair for them to sit on, and virtually everything else (data centers, servers, networks...) is shared infrastructure. That's nothing compared to trades where you have to buy a truck and outfit it with tools for $100k to support 1 employee. [The bucket truck I have cost $125k, and equipping it with the bare minimum of tools required was another $25k on top of that.]

Sometimes I wonder if anyone has done the basic napkin math to figure out if pushing AI into certain jobs is going to be even remotely economically viable. Personally I view this as a symptom of the larger problem that there are very few "good" ideas left for VCs to throw piles of otherwise idle money into, which directly leads to a kind of VC slop where unprofitable ideas get subsidized and offered to the general public "for free"... until it isn't. Then we'll be stuck with monopoly AI HVAC firms and their 27B stroke six forms making everything miserable for us.

[ Intel has yet to prove that it can sustain itself as a foundry for third parties, and until they do, I have a hard time believing the massive culture shift required across the whole company can be achieved without splitting the company up into separate parts. Samsung has fallen behind, but at least they have diversity across a variety of markets including HBM. Neither have leading edge fabs in Europe, so everything continues falls back on TSMC. ]

Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.

  bcrl@home:~/electronics/vrm/lm5017/test-lm5017-isobuck$ host -t txt _dmarc.gmail.com
  _dmarc.gmail.com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=none; sp=quarantine; rua=mailto:mailauth-reports@google.com"

  bcrl@home:~/electronics/vrm/lm5017/test-lm5017-isobuck$ host -t txt _dmarc.google.com
  _dmarc.google.com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=reject; rua=mailto:mailauth-reports@google.com"

The low bandwidth / high latency lossy link problem is still a major issue. Cell phone service is sufficiently shitty in the area I live in that I have to use mosh to get a usable remote connection many times a year. Mosh is also quite useful while travelling! Got a crappy connection on a train or airplane? No problem. I have so much muscle memory with the mutt email client that nothing else has ever come close. Where's the equivalent of mutt's limit command in Thunderbird?

Try getting a usable VNC session when your cell phone hot spot is hitting 2-30 second ping times (yes -- thirty seconds) with only a handful of packets getting through.

Version 2 of the Amiga's operating system did a great thing in version 2 of AmigaOS which explicitly spelled out what conventions to apply (see Amiga User Interface Style Guide at https://archive.org/details/amiga-user-interface-style-guide). Modern GUIs that have weird meaningless buttons are infuriating. Even moreso when they lack obvious keyboard shortcuts.

The real issue at hand is that humans need to decide to start resource constraining AI before it consumes the entire world.

If it were possible to charge $0.25/email for delivery, I'd be more than happy . However, I'm sure large tech firms will need to say that is "too hard to implement at scale".

My scale is that I ran an ISP for ~500 users before the network was disassembled last month. At that scale, you will encounter people that make mistakes with their email setups. When the people who make mistakes are customers which DMARC prevents delivery of emails, it is an issue as those are exactly the people for which I want to see the emails from.

I get more spam with valid SPF and DKIM via Google's own mail servers than DMARC blocks.

It says something when even gmail doesn't use DMARC as a signal that an email is valid, as gmail regularly blocks legitimate mailing list emails with completely valid signatures and non-spam content from a reputationaly sound IP.

The problem DMARC was supposed to solve (impersonation to reduce spam) isn't solved by DMARC.

DMARC does absolutely nothing to prevent the kind of impersonation that occurs in the real world. It doesn't block homoglyphs or or typo-squatting or all the other forms impersonation that matter. It has failed at preventing impersonation.

Just a few days ago I had a phishing email from an elderly woman I had previously done some work for. The message passed DMARC and everything else, and the domain it was sent from was valid. But it was not legitimate; it was an impersonation of her which became obvious once the content was read.

DMARC is noise, not signal. It has to be ignored in the real world as it provides virtually no value beyond blocking emails pretty randomly because someone made a mistake when rotating their DKIM keys or one of a million other mistakes that do happen.

The core problem is that the real need of email end users need is a way of determining whether or not to trust a given sender. Signatures are purely a technical measure which provides no information on the trustworthiness of the sender. The end result is that email scoring still has to be content based, and the signature check technologies are pure noise with no useful signal for the purpose of determining if an email should actually show up in my inbox.

The tech industry has a bad habit of providing solutions to problems adjacent to problems the user actually needs solved while leaving the user's actual problem unresolved.

That said, there are lazy hardware designers that just slap on a block to recompute the CRC and replace the old one with the new. An experience I had years ago at Red Hat taught me that the hard way as a shiny new Cisco ethernet switch IT deployed ended up costing us weeks of frustration and delayed a release when it caused bit flips in NFS packets during stress testing. The switch was so awesomely advanced that it recomputed the CRC on the bit flipped packets causing kernel builds to fail.

Personally, I find it better to have multiple low end access points (like the TP-Link Archer C80 which has 3x3 MIMO on 5 GHz) deployed to achieve excellent coverage in a house. Sadly, the U7 line is a bit too expensive for that. Plus, I'm loathe to deal with UniFi deployments now that I am well versed in the glass jaws in the platform.

There really is space in the market for a product line that is basically what UniFi is, but done "right". Ie: can be debugged or you can fix it without an internet connection or recover the system when the owner forgets the password and lost access to the email account used for 2FA. UniFi is an absolute nightmare the moment anything goes even slightly wrong.

This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.