Re: Lots of news sites use this model
Difference being news and blogging sites provide actual content - Meta just serves up other people's content provided for free.
777 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2012
"Either everyone should be able to offer "Pay or OK" or nobody should."
Nobody should. Simple.
I really hope this sticks. Since Meta pulled this cr@p everybody and his dog has been slapping 'pay or accept tracking from 1096 partners'* on their websites.
*Actually a real number that was on a website today...
The VPN I use (Windscribe) allows you to create a mock location in the system under Android. Works like a charm - if the GPS is turned off Google maps, Uber et al all dutifully report I am in the middle of the city where the VPN server is.
It's the only one I've stumbled across that has this feature but there are probably others that do it too.
(No affiliation with Windscribe, just a user...)
Phones are like computers. A couple of decades ago you couldn't wait to update your computer because the new ones were a huge jump in performance. Nowadays you only update your computer when it dies because the difference between a few years old computer and the new one is negligible.
Phones are the same now - the new ones don't do anything the old ones didn't it's a mature industry.
Hence the reason computer and phone makers are desperately spruiking AI to try and make someone buy their prducts again...
How is it surprising that people are holding on to their phones longer?
The market has long reached maturity - new phones are really just 5% faster than the previous model with a 5% better camera. Plus manufacturers are marketing their phones based on how long they get OS upgrades for, some are promising 7 years.
Under those circumstances the only reason you'd upgrade frequently is because you're a prat that always has to show off that you have the latest phone, or someone who gets their phone free on their phone plan.
If the EU have regulated themselves out of the market whinging about the lack of old phones on the market is not the problem they need to address...
Except the problem is that this will get abused. Google know that the majority of users just click OK, especially when the don't give permission button is reduced to a greyed out text link buried in the permissions box (like they always do with cookie permissions). It also opens the interfect up to a full screen 'approve this or you can't use the website' boxes like the Admiral ones demanding subscriptions.
"good results from asking AI complicated things"
I'd argue you get answers that would please you - not the truth. These things are trained to be yes men that provide believable results you'll be happy with. Sometimes these coincide with the truth, but that is a secondary consideration.
It's the real danger of AI - it's a slightly more sophisticated 'I feel lucky' button from Google search. When was the last time people genuinely thought the first result from a Google search was 100% accurate?
"the scrote is still back on the street nicking phones the same day."
Perhaps you should actually read my comment - it talks specifically about getting them off the streets.
Besides letting 'scrotes' skate with no police intervention achieves nothing.
"Nick the bell end who pays scrotes for stolen phones, and you have a whole bunch of scrotes that have to look elsewhere for their drug money"
Yeah they'll just mug you for your wallet instead, which involves a LOT more risk to the victim. You really need th¡o think things through.
"If you want more cops, then pay more taxes"
I don't want more cops, I want the ones I'm paying for now to actually do their jobs.
"Proven not to work"
Utter garbage. If you take 1 criminal off the street that is 1 less criminal that can potentially break the law and potentially many, many more who will now think twice about it.
Letting criminals run amok and not doing anything about it does nothing to make people safer.
Let's cut through the smokescreen eh?
The solution to not having a global IMEI ban list is to make one.
This is about the UK authorities demanding the ability to kill any phone they choose, just like their demands for backdoors into encryption.
Google and Apple know that if they say they can do it every third-world dictator and authoritarian in the world will be demanding the same power to shut down their opposition.
BTW I have zero skin in this game - running Graphene with zero Google stuff installed so I could care less about their cloud or any bans...
If his move is a negotiating tactic, whereby other countries then come to the table and drop their already-existing tariffs on US goods in exchange for Trump dropping these tariffs then it's better for US businesses selling overseas. If you look at what was happening with Canadian and Mexican tariffs earlier it could be the case.
So the glass-half-full view could be that this is a short-term measure to prompt trade deals where the US had the whip hand. The half empty view being that Trump really thinks the US can ever be cost-competitive with developing countries and import tax his way to prosperity...
The problem with that for browsers is that they have always been free, and there are no new features to add for a browser.
It's the same problem Adobe faced when they inflicted subscriptions on the world - Photoshop had gotten to the point where it did everything people wanted it to do and didn't want to pay for new versions (heck I'm still on CS6 and frankly there's still no new features I'd pay for...) so from a corporate perspective their revenue dried up. S***y deal for users though...
"Privacy costs in inconvenience as well as financially. The de-Googled version of the Pixel Tablet costs rather more than the ad-subsidized version from Google"
Privacy doesn't have to cost. OK I get this is a Murena puff piece, but you can buy a normal Pixel tablet and install GrapheneOS for free.
"Often it will drop something in the summary that I look at and decide "no, that bit is important, I really want that in" and I put it back in"
Serious question - if you have to review things in that depth anyway, and it's only 100 words, is it actually more efficient?
I could do a 100 word summary of a doc I wrote in about 2 minutes and not have to revise it - is the AI really helping all that much if you have to apply so much effort into review? Let's leave aside the nightmarish reality that probably 90% of people wont bother to review output at all...
Every person who enters a US airport is run through facial recognition and identified by the system - that mass surveilance is the problem.
What you linked to is opting out of that identification being then used for things like boarding, not from being identified and tracked in the first place.
No, you were a citizen of what was an EU country thereby making you a citizen of the EU by extension. Now your country is not part of the EU ergo you aren't an EU citizen.
If EU citizenship is important to you them become a citizen of an EU country. In most EU countries that means living there for 5 years.
"Students all over the world already recognized that writing "good" prose and correct grammar has become as easy as using correct orthography."
Those students haven't learned enything except gto get a computer to do their work for them.
And I'd hardly call what GPT produces as good prose. It's grammar is hit and miss as well...
"how do they 'know' what is 'reliable'?"
100% this. Skype builds language models locally for incorporation into MS' larger models. These local models are built on my language lessons in very rudimentary Italian and somewhat better Spanish. I can't imagine how horrific the models Skype is building based on my terrible 2nd and 3rd languages are...