This is actually the biggest reason I own a Remarkable 2/Kindle Scribe, let's me "destroy" the book while also not having to worry about losing my notes.

> Is multiplied by each "system" you add

Was still the take away. The idea is the lost a single instance should cause downtown so it’s not multiplied. IE three instances of the database case tolerate a loss of a single instance for maintenance since the other two will take over the load.

There is of course an argument against the cost of this and sure I’d even accept the complexity argument since you probably need to add more tooling to manage the hand over but again the point of this complexity is specifically to avoid having a single point of failure / to naturally handle failure such that the possibility of downtime isn’t multiplied

> If you are on a current iPhone or Mac

Presumably if you don't trust apple you wouldn't purchase their products and even if you were for example forced to use it via work or something you wouldn't use this feature ... so it doesn't really change the calculus as presented by this article - IF you ALREADY HAVE a MODERN Mac (and trust apple) this is your best option

> What this means if you just want good transcription

> If you are on a current iPhone or Mac, the best on-device transcription engine for English is already in the operating system, and the private option is no longer the compromise option

Concretely, If your only goal is to produce "software" then learning about design, planning, project management, testing etc is all unnecessary friction when you can just ask an LLM to "make it so"

> That their actions make sense for their business isn't any reason for people to accept their deceitful, customer-hostile decisions.

While I agree it's a dangerous precedence to set, I think this is a "vote with your wallet" sort of situation. They shouldn't do it, but from their POV this is what they need to do to offer the product they do at the price they do. If the product wasn't compelling people wouldn't accept that they do this. However they've decided if you want their product you have to use their interface and whatever spyware it comes with, so it comes down to, is the value proposition good enough that people will put up with it? As of today, the answer is unfortunately yes

> I'm suspecting you just don't care about other people's privacy.

Quite a leap to assume I have neither basic reading comprehension skills nor care for privacy, but assuming I'm just misunderstanding you - I think this is the fundamental disconnect between security and privacy.

For one, most of this data is already collected openly by most apps and sites on the internet in countries all over the world, they just call it "analytics" and preventing tools like ublock from blocking them is an ongoing cat and mouse game.

Secondly - as someone who buys a bunch of electronics from companies headquartered in china (DJI, Insta360, Roborock immediately come to mind) they already have both normal analytics like in point one, and anti tampering/ anti forfeiting / anti reverse engineering features that are at least as, but often more, invasive than this.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly - as the author states, you're using a tool that by design and to be effective, uploads your private data to a third party for processing. You use it knowing that once the API request is made you have no idea what's going to happen to that data and this again is just fundamental to how (cloud hosted) LLMs work - the only privacy preserving option is to run your own LLMs at home or remotely on hardware you control

And no, IMO stenography isn't security by obscurity, in the same that using RSA and keeping the private key private isn't security by obscurity - keeping the private thing private is part of the security model.

Maybe AGI is possible and we'll have software defined human intelligence that's completely autonomous but that's not coming in the next slightly better RL trained LLM and if existed likely wouldn't be under our control anyway