Posts by doublelayer 7679 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
Not in itself--if they otherwise compete with each other, they just happen to agree that they think something is illegal. Of course, given that they're all charging massive amounts to restaurants, there may be other collusion there, although probably tacit collusion not to compete for restaurant contracts.
"or the business that has been subsidised by venture capital isn't actually viable unless there's only one or two players in the game."
It's that one. In 2020, a lot of these services got tons of orders. If they could make it work with their business model, they would have made lots of profit right then. Restaurants were signing up in droves, they had already built their platforms, people wanted spare income. In each case, they were well positioned even if they wouldn't be after the pandemic ended. Yet most of the efforts lost money.
"I do think they should receive some sort of recompense considering they host the app, distribute the updates, provide the APIs, development tools, etc. They are a business and not a charity after all."
Those things have minor if any justifications. There are two different ones there.
"host the app, distribute the updates": These two are basically the same--that they provide some bandwidth to download the app packages. Which is a fair point, but A) that costs very little at their scale and B) Epic wanted to host their own store and spare Apple the expense. Since Apple refused to let that happen, it ends up sounding like "They must pay for the thing we force them to use", which is a lot less defensible.
"provide the APIs, development tools, etc.": They write the OS, and software runs on it. They benefit tremendously from this; if there were no apps other than the ones they write, then many people wouldn't buy their hardware. Like other operating systems, their investment in encouraging developers helps them a lot. They can also choose to make tools which they charge for, and they chose not to. This asks the developers to pay for something they didn't choose to make and may not have chosen to use. App developers are businesses, not bank accounts for Apple's development teams.
I have heard frequently how Apple is owed gratitude in the form of cash from developers who get to users on Apple's platform, despite the fact that the users would be on someone else's platform if Apple didn't have those developers. In my opinion, you could make an equally cogent argument that Apple owes developers of popular apps for their users and should be paying them a cut of their tremendously profitable hardware sales. It makes just as much sense.
I have made exactly this point in my post. I would continue to be perfectly polite to them during this theoretical confrontation, but not for the reasons that the poster to whom I replied suggested. I don't do it because the police deserve my courtesy as they break the law. I do it because I know they have more power than I do and they will cheerfully use it against me if I displease them. That is not a good thing.
It's called anger. If I started demanding you give me information to which I had no right, and probably not in a perfectly polite manner, you too would get irritated. It is a good idea not to be belligerent when the other person has lots of ways to make you regret it, but anger is completely justified. A few things perhaps should be taken into account when making points like this:
1. Being annoyed at a police officer is not a crime. It is never a crime. It is inexcusable for them to treat it as a crime. Saying "I will not give you any such information" is not resisting arrest or any other criminal offense.
2. A police officer does not have the right to demand that information.
3. If a police officer gets angry at me for refusing an unlawful demand from them, I will likely have a similar feeling toward them.
4. They are expressing their anger at me, so there is no longer a social more that I must hide my own anger.
5. If I hide my anger anyway, it is because I am fearing their reprisals, which comes back to point 1.
Original: "It's like the TV Licensing people coming round to your house"
Reply: "Wrong jurisdiction there, pardner. The LAPD is in the US, not the UK."
It was a comparison, hence the word "like". They're making an analogy to something which occurs in a different place and using that comparison to draw a parallel which they can point out as a problem.
"If you don't create the information in social media it can't be used against you when an unknown (to you) acquaintance of a friend of a friend is caught doing something naughty while you're not far away."
That is not true and the conclusions that would come from it are not good.
If you don't create the information on social media, false links can still be created from other information. People's phone contacts, mail client address lists, or similar can be used to create a similar social graph which is as useless as the social media one.
Furthermore, though I don't like social media, the conclusion shouldn't be that you shouldn't use it if you like it because then the police will use it against you for no reason. It should be illegal for them to conduct this surveillance without proper controls, which would leave the decision of whether to set up accounts back at the justifiable personal reasons. I made my decision not to use social media because I didn't want to. I should not have to make that decision out of fear.
They will probably ask Google to add it too. This won't make them stop the legal battles by any means, but if they get Apple to do it, they win some money and if not, it becomes another legal argument (further abuse of monopoly power even when explicitly illegal), could hurt Apple, and more attention drawn to what they want.
I don't know about that. Perhaps I'm just too used to the if/then syntax, but I feel it makes more sense in code and in English. We use sentences like that all the time: "If your car isn't going, check the fuel gauge to see if you need to add more". Far from expressing a rule, you're specifying a situation that is possible and what to do under that situation.
I like that syntax in English for most conditional statements. The unless version can get very confusing if things are long. "If you see an alert on the security monitor, first press the acknowledge button, then alert the security station, then contact the police" makes sense. "Press the acknowledge button, then alert the security station, then contact the police if you see an alert" runs the risk that they will miss the important bit at the end which controls whether any of that should be done.
You can teach the basics just as well with a normal language where you don't tell the kids about the other parts. They start with the basic expressions and you eventually give them the rest. Or, for people who want to jump into more complicated programs, you provide a library which abstracts out such things until they know enough to read that library and understand what you wrote.
I remember creating several of these libraries when my sister showed interest. It started with some basic input functions and expanded to handle other operations, in each case with a limited interface which worked. Instead of writing a new compiler from scratch, I wrote maybe 500 lines over a month or two by adding new functions when asked. And as a bonus, once she knew enough not to need that library, she could start understanding the language reference docs and building more complex stuff. No learning of new syntax when new functionality was desired.
They may have requested that all contributors assign copyright and ownership to them. That's not unusual--even the FSF do that. The problem of course is that they can then relicense it at any time to whatever they wish (they can't take the old code away from you, but they can benefit from the work of others and make proprietary-only software). Some projects eschew those agreements for that reason, which is the primary reason Linux has remained GPL2 only (also because Linus prefers it, but even without him it would be nearly impossible to get everybody's agreement to change it).
I expect it's not the language that's the moneymaker, but instead the educational resources around it. They've said that a large number of schools are using this for education. Whether or not that's a good idea, that's a lot of schools who now have to purchase licenses, especially if their next version develops backward-compatibility issues. Whether the schools will do that or switch to something similar remains to be seen.
Factoring in taxes, but almost certainly. Especially if the educational opportunities available aren't comprehensive or convenient. If someone has shifts at all hours, they can't easily attend a school's schedule. If they're limited to a few courses of study, many won't be interested in that. Amazon may get a few workers with this method, and there are people who will benefit, but probably not as many as they or we would like.
I disagree. We use chunks of experience to make such decisions, but we don't link word choices to our conclusions. Those who speak English can recognize that "I don't know how to decide" and "I would like advice" are both long ways of asking for an opinion and can be treated identically along with at least a hundred other ways of phrasing that concept (which applies to most other things you might want to say). We know how to link experiences that are similar but not identical to draw conclusions. We can understand a person's emotions from their speech and use that to understand what they are saying and how they feel about it. We are not simply looking for memorized things that others said in order to respond. Therefore, it is not even a limited version of what we do, because GPT3 doesn't need to understand anything, just make a response that's related.
"I guess the question everyone asks but nobody dares to ask is "At any point does Samantha have a soul" ?"
Ah, but that's a difficult or impossible question to ask. You first have to ask what a soul is. Some think that you and I don't have one. Even religions that agree that souls are real things (broadly linking lots of synonyms that kind of work like 'soul') disagree on what it is, how it's made, what things have one, what it does, and what can happen to it. If you and I were theologians agreeing on what we thought a soul did, we could try to have this conversation though it might be pointless. However, I think the chances are very high that you and I don't agree at all about that first question, and therefore we cannot discuss any following ones with any certainty. However, one point might work if I assume your beliefs correctly, namely that since the program was not a single chatbot, the question should read "Did each chatbot have a soul?".
"wouldn't it be wonderful if you could have that kind of a 'box' with you, translating on the fly from what 'he/she says' to what 'he/she means'."
Oh no, that sounds horrible. Either I find out that people are mostly honest and nothing's gained, or I find out that most people are dishonest and succumb to misanthropy. That's easy enough to do already. I need no automated assistance to my cynicism, especially if the box just assumes everybody is dishonest even when I find a truly honest one. Actually that last one sounds like a good premise for a short story.
"Sad really - Samantha could have been someone eventually."
No, for three independent reasons:
1. Samantha wasn't a single entity. Each user trained a new chatbot and talked with it. Each chatbot was discarded at the end of the interaction. There was nothing which could have evolved, because the starting point was always the same. Any improvements came from changes to the underlying model or to the code around it, made by humans who were not part of a theoretical conscious computer.
2. There was no learning or evolution going on. GPT3 isn't taking the interactions and editing their database. It's a mostly static unit which gets tailored for a situation and used. Nothing was learned, and something which cannot change can't grow.
3. The words spoken by Samantha are not "hers". This is not an AI which is trained to understand an input and draw conclusions. The words come from someone online who got scraped, with the sentence created from a variety of others' thoughts massaged into a specific speaking style. It is as if you came to me for advice, but I merely copied your question into a search box, stitched sentences from each result together, and sent it back. It may be interesting or useful, but it wasn't me thinking of the response.
"What happened to 'innocent until proven guilty'?"
It never worked the way you think it did, I.E. when we see someone obviously commit a crime, we must sing their praises until they are in jail. We are not sentencing this person. We are correctly describing what happened, which is a matter of public record.
For the same reason, a person who killed someone gets legal assumption of innocence until the jury delivers their verdict, but those in the public who know what happened may well decide to speak ill of the person in the meantime. That is why jury selection usually ignores anyone who has heard of the person being tried, because they may have opinions which could bias them against the accused.
True, but unlike every other kind of storage, they're quoting a random number which is only true in the optimal case. They should just be honest: 18 TB tapes, and we've got a nice compression system available if you want it. Especially as I can also compress a database and get that large a decrease with a lot of other compression software. If a hard drive or SD card manufacturer said such things, they'd be lambasted and likely sued for false advertising.
Oh, they are. At least that's the word that gets used for it. It usually ends up boiling down to the following points, but at least you can guarantee to learn them nearly anywhere you study:
1. You will be assigned enough work for your team.
2. Someone on your team won't do any work.
3. Someone else will do work but not until the last minute.
4. Nobody likes having meetings to decide what they will do.
5. You will have to put together the pieces at the last minute from those who did it.
6. And also for those who didn't, so hope that those sections allow you to better glue together the disparate parts done in isolation.
7. Google thinks having a single document into which anyone can write helps. They are wrong.
8. If you have some mechanism for turning in members of the team who didn't work, it's easily abused to your detriment. On no account lead the unproductive one to the belief that you might use it.
9. Don't complain about points 1-8.
10. Don't complain about points 9-10.
11. Some people still think this works. It's too late to convince them otherwise.
And there are three kinds of suggestors: the interested, the motivated, and the demanding.
The interested describes their suggestion and leaves the programmers to think about it. Maybe it will get done.
The motivated makes the suggestion and takes up its case. If knowledgeable about the code, they may implement it themselves. If not, they still look for feedback, improve the idea, find developers who seem interested, and work to get the suggestion in there with their skills.
The demanding sometimes look like the motivated, but where the motivated interact with the other contributors, the demanding tend to have a more one-sided operation. If a problem's pointed out, they will dismiss it and tell the developer to do it anyway. If people are quiet, they will add more noise without finding out why. If they submit code, such things as reviews are beneath them.
It would help if more programmers were listeners, but there are reasons why they sometimes aren't.
There are a few problems though:
1. They don't do that with a lot of companies, making this a somewhat rare option.
2. If these people are banned as directors, they can find someone else to be the director while they continue to operate the new company.
3. The only consequence if they're penalized, which is not guaranteed, is that they're not allowed to direct a company. They do not serve a sentence or even pay the rest of that fine.
A new law adding these things as a crime resulting in personal penalties could do a lot for those who conduct it in the country. It may not be as effective against companies running everything from a different country, but I'd rather deal with half this stuff than all of it.
It is definitely illegal. The problem is that nobody wants to investigate it. The police don't know who it is and don't have the resources or desire to focus on a crime where you were harassed when there are larger crimes to deal with. Those regulators who do have that kind of crime as their particular remit frequently delay taking the necessary action, don't find their victims, or sometimes completely ignore all the reports.
"I've been using Linux for over well 10 years now and I can't recall the last time I had to look into a NTFS format drive."
So because you don't need it, nobody else does either? If I unleashed that theory on the Linux kernel, I'd sheer off a ton of things I've never used. Compatibility with a number of processor types which I haven't used and don't plan to? Drivers for hardware that I don't have and isn't modern enough that I'm likely to get one. Lots of stuff in there I don't need, but that's a terrible argument for leaving it out.
As for uses, I have repeatedly mounted NTFS disks on Linux recently. Sometimes, it's just reading (Windows laptop died, quick can I get the hard drive out and recover some documents). There are two situations which occur with regularity where writing is important. First, when repairing a Windows drive in some way, including disinfecting something that was strong enough to make it hard to delete in Windows. Guess what. In order to mount the disk read-write, Windows has to shut down cleanly and clear the journal, which Windows never does by default anymore. I have to boot the drive to Windows hoping the malware I'm trying to remove won't take any new steps on startup just to restart it. I would value a NTFS driver that didn't make me do that.
Second, NTFS is sometimes used as the default filesystem for large external storage devices. The users plug it into their Windows machines and it shows up fine so they don't change it to something else. So to share a hard drive that I don't have permission to reformat, NTFS support is useful. If the NTFS driver has vulnerabilities, by all means hold it back until they're patched. But don't exclude it just because you don't use NTFS.
Because anybody can create a GPG key, and a lot of changes are made by people who don't have a company behind them. A GPG key linked in some verifiable way to Paragon could be trackable, but a GPG key linked to an individual could lead to a real one as well as to a fake one. And they could also be stolen, so even if you know that someone is definitely legitimate rather than has submitted legitimate code thus far because they'll be inserting the dodgy stuff later, you don't know for a certainty that it's them submitting that code.
If you know everybody involved, having a system where you verify who the contributor is as your primary trust system can work. If you let everyone on the planet submit code, then that approach has reduced utility. It doesn't make it useless, but don't rely on it to save you from any particular situation.
Yes. I meant that the inventor on a patent must know how the invention works. If the training of the neural net is the thing which made the invention, then they need to understand at least that much. They don't need to understand existing tools they used, but anything which is new and contributes to the invention has to be understood in order to get the credit. So executing a program not written by you which then creates something doesn't count as invention even if whatever it created is patentible.
No, unless they understand what the tool is doing. The inventor of a concept is the person or set of people who understand what they've created and came up with the idea. A neural network certainly doesn't yet. If a sapient program is created, it could, but a statistical analysis program isn't. Neither can a data entry person unacquainted with the purposes be said to invent something, because the concept already existed when the person who came up with the software wrote that.
That also only works if whatever the software creates is really patentible. A lot of the time, a model created by a neural network isn't any more inventive than any other. Depending on the thing it was trained to do, it might be, which makes the neural network even less responsible for the outcome.
"So let's compare apples to apples (no pun intended). Google Photos' cloud storage scans uploaded photos for CSAM. Is that invasive of privacy?"
It's something you know when starting to use the service, so a lot less. More reasons later.
"Apple's plan is to scan photos that are headed for iCloud Photo Library, the iOS equivalent of Google Photos' cloud storage, but to do it in such a way that they don't have the results of hashes unless it matches known CSAM."
They are going to have the images. So they can recalculate the hashes any time they like. Your phrasing is incredibly misleading because it sounds as if they're keeping data off their servers when they're doing nothing of the kind.
"Is that invasive of privacy? More or less so than Google Photos' scanning?"
Yes and more. It is more invasive because it scans on a device which you own, not the server that they own. It gives them a probe into the device they don't own which can analyze information to which they have no right, so it's really easy to overstep the boundaries they currently claim to adhere to. Google photos only scans what comes to them, and they tell you they're going to do so. Definitely more invasive.
They lied. That's not the correct answer and they know it. You've specified why we know it's a lie already--they've repeatedly agreed to use their tech for repressive countries before, so we know they will do it again.
Which is why the on-device scanning is a problem. If Russia came to them and told them to write an on-device scanner, they'd grumble for a bit, maybe question it, then do it. But it would at least be public. Now, anybody can just slightly adjust the code they've already written. It's much easier to abuse and their use of it at all proves that their likelihood to grumble is quickly eroding.
"If you have iCloud Photo Library (iCPL) turned on, photos get uploaded. If Apple did server-side scanning, you wouldn't have any more choice than you would have with on-device scanning, because iCPL uploads all photos, and always has."
Would it surprise you to here that, on my iPhone, ICPL is already turned off? Because it is. For other reasons, but I didn't want that on. As for other things scanning, I make decisions on whether to install apps based on the scanning they're going to do. WhatsApp is not to be found on my devices.
The difference is that, if they're scanning my content on their servers, then they need to take lots of steps to start scanning data I never put on their servers. If they're scanning on my device, it's a two-line change in their code to scan all of the photo library and a few more lines to start scanning everything else. The traffic would already be expected, the software couldn't be disabled, and therefore the risks are much higher. And as I said at the beginning, an encrypted backup where they can't scan either is still my ideal solution.
"So if the government mandates it, you could choose to not buy any more equipment, but if Apple does this, you still are required to buy an iPhone? Your control is not buying the product. You said it yourself, but then go on to claim that somehow because it's Apple you can't do anything about it."
Yeah, that was poorly phrased. I'll try again. If the government mandates it, then there is information which can permit it to be avoided. It is not forced on my equipment until the software update which includes it, which I can refuse. Whether a device does it or not can be determined when purchasing a device, and therefore it can be avoided. If Apple does it without any mandates, then it's sneaked into devices (like they've already done) and control is much less.
Another point is relevant in this part of the discussion, which is that no government has mandated this yet. I would prefer to deal with a government-mandated version than an Apple without-legitimacy version, but at the moment, we could deal with neither because the government hasn't passed any such law. You're making me choose between a -95% option and a -85% option when a 0% option is also available.
"And do you honestly think if it was a government-mandated thing it wouldn't be completely classified as to how it works and what it does,"
No, I don't. The law which inserts it has to be public. The system used doesn't have to be, but to mandate the installation of code requires a law which can be investigated and challenged. Some countries might try to push through something without telling anyone, except, oh right, they haven't.
"So you'd rather they go along with what every other cloud company already does and scan it on the server side without explicitly making users aware that's what's happening?"
Over on-device, yes. Because then I can decide not to upload things and they don't run their scanner. Although an end-to-end encrypted backup would be even nicer.
"Further, I understand that there was never anything stopping any government from handing Apple on-device scanning code and forcing them to adopt it for sales to continue in that area—or even just passing a law requiring that device makers do it themselves. The idea that literally the only thing preventing this has been Apple not developing on-device scanning is absolutely absurd."
No, it's not. There is either code running on the device or not. If it's not, and the government mandates it, we can do what we want to about this. We could try to block the law. Or change the law. Or find a legal reason such a law is not permitted, which works better in countries with constitutional privacy systems but could also be enforced under human rights treaties. Or not buy any new equipment. If it's Apple doing it without any law, we have no control over it at all and moreover, no knowledge of how they're using it.
How would we know? Anyway, here's my guess: you posted it later in the discussion, so fewer people read it, so fewer people clicked the vote buttons. Or maybe the phrasing of this comment was more interesting than yours. I don't remember hearing about this before, so I didn't read your comment. There are a few factors that could contribute.
It seems long, but he traveled long distances for twelve days, so if you saw the headsets twice each day and mark each siting as an hour, that could get you there. Divide the time period for other options. Given the range and speed of the bicycle, it's unlikely they got pings for 24 hours unless this student's friends were pranking him, so I'm guessing some grouping of time observations is involved.
Oh, and there are lots of Bluetooth headsets with more than six hours battery life. I have one which runs for eight consistently, and it was incredibly cheap. I also have ones that can run for forty hours without a recharge, though it's a larger over-ear type so not great to use outdoors.
It works because they went to some rich investors and spun them a tale where their company is the only one that can provide some service. They get that power by offering very low prices until everybody else goes out of business and ruthlessly buying anyone who looks to be competing still. The theory is that they'd eventually get their monopoly, send the prices through the roof, and cash in. Investors listen to this, think about real monopolies, immediately stop thinking, and turn on the money line.
What those investors don't usually think about is how the monopolies that exist manage to keep that power, especially keeping in mind the barriers to entry which often don't apply to these companies' ideas. The leaders of the companies don't mind; they get a company to play with, a bunch of money to waste, a healthy salary, and a nice exit package when things finally go wrong. Some may run this as a scam, others are clueless, and still others actually have an idea that could work and try for it.
I wonder what the network traffic looks like for getting this "tip" information onto each victim, and particularly what happens when the part that needs to download the largest assets crashes most of the way through. I wonder how they would react to a bot pretending to be an unstable app which continually tries and fails to download their ad, especially if multiple devices started to have trouble with the downloads all day long.
Preinstalled adware is entirely unacceptable on any hardware unless it is stated prominently at the time of purchase, and I wouldn't mind if that were banned too.
I'm not sure about that. Sour grapes to me would be if he was fired and sent this, but he was unhappy enough to quit of his own accord. That implies that, whatever the reasons, it's not something done to fire back at the person who took his job.
As for a good boss or an informed one, a bad informed boss is certainly a problem, but in many ways an uninformed good boss is too. A good boss who doesn't know how things work might, in good faith, make promises about things that can't get done. They might pass every decision down to someone who knows what they're doing and harm organization. While a somewhat informed good boss will definitely beat a bad one, good management requires some basic level of knowledge of what the people below you are doing. Someone who lacks that knowledge is likely to be ineffective or problematic without needing managerial incompetence as well.
I have come to the conclusion that some cheap low-power electronics are magical. Sure, they will refuse to run if there aren't some batteries in the slot, but the device doesn't actually use them once you put them in because they will run for years. I want to meet the people who designed such things and ask how they managed to get so much efficiency in their electricity use, presumably requiring quite a bit of engineering time, while also building the thing out of really flimsy plastic. Unfortunately, once I've realized that it's functioned correctly for eight years on a pair of AAA batteries, they're nowhere to be found.
Does anyone want this? I admit I don't like auto-completion basically at all (it annoys me when the editor tries to close my parentheses). I understand, though, why suggesting function names and showing parameters could be useful. Trying to predict the end to your statements, though, seems to me to be likely useless and definitely annoying. It's not as if you don't know how you're ending a line you've already started writing, so if it guesses right, at best you save a little bit of typing. It's also likely to guess wrong at least sometimes.
If anyone reading this wants such a feature, I'd like to know why.
You'll just have to type the names out yourself. It might not even have guessed at that point that you're going to be naming countries anyway, even if it does see the word country, because there are a lot of contexts in which country could appear where individual names don't. But if it happens to guess right, it still won't suggest it. I'm sure you'll be fine.
I didn't see that as a commentary on all Irish people, but instead on the DPC. As the protection authority with the most power for most large tech companies, it has taken relatively few actions, those actions have been small, and they take a rather long time to get started. Given that Ireland is the European home for these tech companies primarily for tax reasons, it has an incentive to keep them there and competition for that desire, both of which can be helped by lax regulation. Whether that is deliberate or the DPC is just ponderous about enforcement, the desire for it to go faster is widely held.
".....so it DOES NOT HURT if the algorithm is hard to identify....does it?"
It does hurt if you made any mistakes because nobody else tested for whether you had a clue what you were doing. If you are infallible in designing encryption, which is unlikely, it provides a mild benefit the strength of which depends on the resources of the attacker. But we've had that discussion before, so I'll stop now.
Only if they did it wrong. If you have a quantum computer and you want to use crypto to earn money, there's more to gain by finding wallets that haven't spent money in a long time and cracking their private keys. That gives you money without making it obvious that a lot more mining is being done.
Yes, it involves the same actions as playing the game, but with a specific goal in mind. You're not playing for the challenge of it, but instead looking for things which don't go as you thought they would. It can be fun to do, but it's done for testing, not for pure entertainment. Programming is not a game, even if you're testing a game you wrote. After you're finished finding the bugs, if your own game is captivating enough for you to play, then it's a game.
"Literally no one can compete with them on base cost to deploy."
It depends who you count as their competitors. Geosynchronous satellite is the primary competitor for coverage where ground cable isn't available, and they absolutely can compete on price, not by having cheaper launches, but by having not very many of them. Launches for 42000 LEO satellites is more expensive than launches for 10 geosynchronous ones.
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