Posts by Dinanziame 1143 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
Yeah, Hanlon's razor might apply here.
I'm not sure it's dynamite that policies require selling to the public? I thought that's half the work of politicians. I don't even find it controversial TBH. When politicians decide to raise the age of retirement because there are more and more old people and not enough young people to pay for their pension, I imagine doing the simple math is much easier than convincing the public that this is necessary.
In many ways, assistants were promised to be like artificial intelligence, in the sense they would understand what you meant and would react to your commands. That's when the movie Her came out. The problem is that there was hardly any intelligence behind, so each separate action had to be coded manually and maintained individually by an army of developers. They were already having trouble maintaining existing actions when ChatGPT came out, and that pretty much sealed their fate. I'm not entirely sure that AI stuff like Gemini can even replace them though. It's probably going to be a while before Gemini can be asked to turn on the lights or play a song — and I wouldn't be surprised if the connections to the light and sound systems and everything else still needs to be maintained by an army of developers.
Basically, Microsoft offering a rebate on Windows to customers who use Azure is similar to them selling Azure at a loss, which as you say would be anti-competitive. If your product has a dominant position in one market, it is not allowed to offer a discount on a bundle of that product with another product in a different market, because that means you are selling the other product at a loss.
Then they're being told: they can't bundle it, like a cable TV provider bundles channels. They can't optimize it for the systems that they're running it on. They can't do anything with it, unless someone else is doing it, too, in the same way, for the same cost. How does this make sense?
Because they have a dominant or quasi-monopoly position. Which means that by using that position as leverage, they could threaten users into accepting massively disadvantageous conditions and suppress their competitors. This is about as if the unique internet provider in your area would bundle their service with a bag of dog shit that you don't want, but that you are forced to buy every month if you want internet.
But, strangely, there is no circle in Dante's inferno for leaders who betray their people.
Hold on! At the very bottom of hell sits Satan, who has three faces and three mouths gnawing at the very worst people, which are Judas, Brutus and Cassius. I understand that this is because Judas betrayed God, and Brutus and Cassius betrayed the Republic. Doesn't that count?
I don't think that's correct that the theft is the only thing that matters — if it was, the big AI companies could have absolved themselves of any liability by just paying for one single reproduction of the works they used. Even the most prolific creators would hardly get more than a few thousand bucks for that, and that's clearly not enough to compensate them from the fact their style can now be copied at mass scale for cheap.
There are so many things you could answer to that, I have trouble which one to choose....
- Well yeah, that's his job
- "Guard dog too aggressive with burglars"
- "Politician too honest"
- "Driver not sufficiently focused on drinking alcohol"
- Clock reminds people of the passing time
What would you suggest? Let's find the best ones
It's interesting to note that, since so much of Tesla's value is tied to the hallucina^W visionary ideas of Elon Musk, his sudden untimely death would literally make billions for people shorting the stock.
Hiring a random Luigi would comparatively cost a negligible amount.
At some point, there were reports that Amazon was running out of potential employees for their warehouses in some places. This was due to the fact they had a very high turnover and they had a policy of never hiring again somebody they had fired. I'm not sure how they solved that problem.
Well they're not happy because so far Google said they would enforce this on their advertisers; now Google is openly saying they won't do anything about it so the ICO will have to do it themselves.
Funnily, this was one of those anti-competitive rules that Google created in order to minimize the data that third parties could have, so that everybody would be forced to use Google's services to target the users. I'm not sure if they removed the rules because they thought they could get more money from advertisers by being nicer to them, or because they thought that they were unable to prevent it anyway, or even they were afraid that this would be counted against them in the many anti-monopoly lawsuits they are fighting. Could be all three.
I think the biggest issue with Tiktok is that it can probably influence public opinion. If I remember correctly, Facebook did controlled tests which showed they could relatively easily manipulate the mood of their users depending on what they saw on their feed. In theory, it would be relatively easy to influence elections.
Technically I'm not sure that there is a law against influencing public opinion though. In the case of Tiktok it might be possible to use regulations limiting foreign influence, but if say Twitter or Facebook decided to actively manipulate users for political reasons rather than for clicking on ads, as they are US companies I don't know what would stop them.
If the default had been to keep the data forever, you can bet your arse that people would have complained that by default Google is not respecting their privacy. Ah well.
I'm glad I noticed a warning about this a couple of weeks ago though. It's been sometimes useful to check which exact date I was in a place, or which exact place I visited on a certain trip. I hope they'll eventually make the backup usable on the desktop.
The technology is problematic in itself. There are many corner cases and abuses possible. I'm not sure it's possible to design it so that it works when we want to and only when we want to.
There's a lot of technologies like that though, from end to end encryption to drones. Guns are sometimes useful and often used for crimes. And cars are sometimes used by criminals to escape the police.
Today’s sentencing is more than just a punishment. It’s a message
The way I see it, punishment is always a message. The whole reason we punish people is to deter them from doing it again, and to tell other people they shouldn't either. In the case of jail sentences, there is additionally the potential benefit of protecting the population from criminals.
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