It’s strange how you think AI is some static thing that only produces the type of output you experienced and isn’t constantly improving. My experience has proven the latter time and time again.
It’s common for car companies when they enter a new market. It removes uncertainty from the second hand market.
By doing that, you know upfront what the value of your used hardware will be at the time you decommission it. It removes a lot of the risk for buyers in a volatile market.
Its restrictive, but not that different from other types of deals.
For example, when I worked at a VFX software company, we were exclusively with one hardware partner. This unlocked something like a 50% discount across all our infra needs (they were big enough to provide switches, racks, servers, storage)
The hyperscalers signing these contracts have decent legal departments. Think about Oracle for example - I'm pretty sure they know every trick there is about beneficial contract drafting.
I don't think they need some special protection against this kind of contract.
so are buybacks. you choose to sign the contract. there's no way they didn't have an escape clause, although likely it meant not using the cloud provider anymore
Yes. "You choose to sign the contract" is not a reasonable argument, for two reasons:
1. There is one supplier, so you have no choice.
2. Even if you had a choice to sign the contract, this still means that it's not the same as a trade-in, because trade-ins are always voluntary, but once you have signed the contract, a right of first refusal is not.
In general, the "you chose to sign the contract" argument is a poor justification for bad contracts. If the contract is bad, it is bad regardless of whether you chose to sign it.
Indeed. They forked Xbox Media Center back in the day, to produce a Mac version when none existed.
Then they became a client/server model.
They are supposed to provide the source code for Plex Transcoder, since that's a modified ffmpeg build. In practice, the version they share is not up to date with the version they ship.
In their defence, google searching anything about plants these days leads to awful results. It’s saturated with slop. A response from an LLM might be slightly more reasoned and targeted. It’s hard to tell. This is a category of knowledge that’s being destroyed by people gaming google and dumping huge amounts of bad LLM and image generation onto the web.
This is also true for pretty much any other category of search that you do as a layman. Specific, targeted queries for official documentation or research are fine, but if you look up basic information about cars, health, or basic computer troubleshooting a massive portion of the results are AI-generated.
If I'm going to be getting AI-generated results, I'd rather read the output of a model that has all the context of my specific situation than slop generated in bulk with a cheap model from six months ago.
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