Posts by Dinanziame 1153 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
It is notable that she was probably the executive who had the longest-lasting career at Google; the founders and most of the C-level from before 2010 have left, retired or been otherwise replaced long ago. For somebody who joined the company essentially by chance, she was one of the most successful.
So, to summarize, Apple used to forbid app creators from linking out from apps. This has been deemed anticompetitive by the EU. So now, Apple allows linking out from apps, but demands a prohibitive license fee for that right...?
Yeah... I find it pretty astonishing that they think this is going to work. I do hope the EU extract a punitive amount out of them for taking the piss in this way.
Though I suppose this is pretty similar to the way Facebook allows people in the EU to opt out of tracking... if they pay for Facebook. And I hope the EU responds similarly as well.
There is still a significant share of people who just leave the default. In the United States, Bing has 18% market share on desktops and 1.86% on mobile:
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america
And Edge has a 15% market share on desktops, just above Safari, and 0.47% on mobile. On mobile, Safari has a higher market share than Chrome, and even "Samsung Internet" has a 3.5% market share:
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america
In passing we can note that Windows has 64% desktop market share in the US vs 25% for OSX, so we can estimate that 60% of Mac users stay with Safari rather than change to Chrome, and 25% of Windows users stay with Edge rather change to Chrome.
Personally the internet provides me with a job, but mostly it provides me with endless entertainment. I haven't felt bored or needed to watch daytime TV since 1999.
So, panem et circenses.
But seriously, just the existence of Wikipedia and YouTube are a considerable improvement to my life. Also, accessing government services on the internet is a considerable improvement over queueing.
Well, the internet did massively change the world and upend many industries. It just took many years until people found out what worked and what didn't. Most dotcom companies went bust, but a few that didn't are now worth trillions. If you want to win the lottery, you have to participate...
Without much knowledge of the sums involved, I rather doubt Google is making money on Maps. The cost to maintain the whole thing is certainly much higher than the paltry sums they get through those licenses. The biggest point is to get people to use Google for all their needs, so that the ads revenue keeps flowing.
I don't think anybody who has a clue takes seriously the idea that Tesla could launch a general service in which cars drive themselves without a human behind the wheel, this year or for a number of years from now. The most advanced system, Waymo, only works in a small number of cities, and they have humans ready to take remote control of the cars in case of problems. Getting rid of these emergency drivers is orders of magnitude more complicated than the massive work needed for Tesla to even catch up with Waymo.
Knowing Musk's standard operating procedures, it's likely the "robotaxi" will be a taxi whose human driver is nicknamed "Robo".
I would particularly worry about one of these two bits outfit storing the selfies, then getting their database stolen. Especially since it won't be the most tech savvy companies using such a low level security measure. At least, when your credit card number gets stolen, you can change it.
Many right-wing people in the US will tell you that the government was deliberately designed by the founding fathers to be dysfunctional, so that only the most commonsense decisions that absolutely everybody agrees with can be made. This makes it very hard for congress to write sensible regulations. This is why agencies have been making rules since much-needed laws were not being written. Alas, this means the government is somewhat efficient — can't have that — which is why agencies are losing their powers to fix the bug.
the Army is the largest user of AI and algorithms across the six branches of the US armed forces because, unlike the Navy with its ships or the Air Force with its planes, "our resource is our people."
There's a fallacy somewhere. I'm pretty sure that the Navy and the Air Force also have people. This sounds a awful like "we don't have cool toys so this is how we will spend huge sums of money".
I hop you'll forgive me for saying so, but it sounds like you are in the business and have your own agenda here. Also, you claim that there is currently no proper real-time solution and people should not try, but the nature of the business is that those who wait until they have a proper solution will get eaten by those who'll offer a half-baked solution right now.
Seems hard to prove that a particular case was discrimination. They probably need to get statistics showing that H1B are much more likely to get a job than US citizens, and even then that's not necessarily a smoking gun; considering it's way easier for a US citizen to apply they might have to filter out a lot of low quality US candidates compared to the H1B candidates, who are more likely to know what they want and where they're going.
The robots.txt file is fundamentally different from a copyright notice in that it does not have any legal strength. And even if it did, it would be unenforceable. It is the equivalent of displaying a poster in public with the note "please only read this if you are allowed". In the first place, it was not created to protect the content of the site, but to prevent server overloads and unintended actions ("click this link to delete this wiki article").
In any case, technically there should be no need for a copyright notice — all content is protected by copyright by default, notice or no notice.
The misinformation is meant to trick actual human beings into believing those stories, so it's not surprising that AI is fooled too. Then again, it seems that currently if you have one reddit post saying you should put glue on your pizza, the AI will repeat it because there is absolutely no website that bothers to make it clear you should not. I'm not even certain that AIs are trained to give higher value to fact-checking website, so you might need a vast majority of sources debunking bogus claims in order for the AI to figure out that they are bogus.
You have to take into account that they are hostages to Elon delivering on whatever crazy he has promised. If he slams the door of Tesla in a huff, the shares they own are going to lose most of their value. Even if they didn't believe his promises, it's better for them to let him have his massive bag of gold.
analysts are expecting the split to boost Nvidia's stock in future.
I'm sorry, those are analysts that should be fired. Now that people can buy fractional shares, stock splits hardly have any importance whatsoever apart from marketing purposes. It's true that stock splits happen to companies that are doing well — their stock has gone up and the share price is now expensive — but saying the split boosts the stock is like saying windmills create wind.
The valuation of Tesla these days has more to do with Elon than with how many cars they sell. He claims Tesla will become an AI company. He claims Tesla will create robotaxis. As absurd as these sound, the stock jumps on every of his announcements. If he does not get his money and leaves Tesla aside, the stock will crash. People who own the stock don't want to see it crash. So they'll approve his $56B pay package.
Admittedly, it seems fusion does not get a lot of funding compared to the benefits it's supposed to have. Maybe there's a catch that well-educated people don't talk about? Or maybe it's just really really hard and the research is too frustrating to attract a lot of interest.
There are other differences between the articles as well. There seems to be two versions that got translated to different countries: The nice version, for UK and France, asks you to please remove your SIM card before sending the device for repairs, says it cannot guarantee accessories will be returned, asks you to provide a proper address, has a link to the privacy policy. Then there's the nasty version for US and Belgium, which declares they will not repair your device if it fell in the water or was fried by a surge, states outright accessories will not be returned, threatens not to return the device if you don't provide a proper address within 30 days.
I find the second version very rude: "You will not send in a Device containing non-Google-authorized parts", "You will not send in a Device with accessories", "You will backup all data"... Feels like somebody has been reading the old testament too much.
Looks like the rules are different in the US and the UK:
https://store.google.com/intl/en-GB_uk/about/device-repair/ "If You send in a Device containing non-Google-authorized parts, CTDi will return Your Device to You without making any repairs."
It looks like they also return it without repairing it in France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Japan; but they don't return it in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Portugal. Why yes, I have too much time on my hands.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if they somehow fucked up the translation.
We wanted the language to look as closely as possible to natural language so they could read it and understand it, like it was an English sentence
This may have advantages to appeal to non-technical people, but personally I consider it a fundamental issue. Cobol was also designed this way, but there is a reason we now use algebraic-like notation for programming and not Cobol.
It's relatively easy to write and understand a declaration like x1 = (-b + sqrt(b^2-4*a*c)) / 2*a, but if you try to express that as an English sentence you are going to be in pain, and anybody trying to read the result is going to be in a lot of pain.
I think it's very weird that a lot of SQL queries are built by concatenating strings that are afterwards parsed by the database engine. I feel like asking if the transmission should done by printing and scanning punch cards as well. We have so many ways to structure data in a logical way, it would make much more sense for queries to be defined, transmitted and read as a logically structured object rather than a string.
And yes, non-technical may be able to use SQL and would not understand structured data. They are also able to understand spreadsheets and not C++, but we still code in C++.
I'm fairly impressed by the practicality of the North Korean government deciding to make money by modern-day privateering on the digital high seas. Considering they are practically unreachable, protected as they are by China and holding a gun to South Korea's head, there is virtually no downside to doing this.
Google archives or used to archive data on media that could not be overwritten or deleted. The way they handle the fact that it must be possible to delete data for legal reasons is by encrypting the data, and storing the decryption key separately. Instead of deleting the data, they delete the decryption key, so the archive becomes unreadable for all practical purposes.
I'm mildly curious of what issues will come from using in UK systems that have been built for the right side of the road. One would think that "you just need to flip everything and it's all the same", but I'm pretty sure that the engineers are going to have surprises, and at some point somebody will facepalm and say "oh yeah wrong side". In how many places does the code need to be adapted? How do you make sure you catch all these places?
Of course, in theory you would start the code on the very first day by defining the boolean variable driving_on_right_side and use it everywhere, but it's almost certain nobody thought of it at the time, and even after they did, programmers would still often automatically assume the side of the road without thinking about it.
It's rare these days to get an insight into the workings of crypto stuff that is still understandable, though I suppose this particular story is technically not really about cryptography.
To be honest, I'm not even sure that what they did is illegal, though they apparently exploited the system to get more information than they were supposed to. It reminds me of the high frequency trading algorithms which apparently offer the same trade at multiple prices and cancel them after getting confirmation, just to find the maximum price that the trade can happen.
Apart from that, it seems they were able to briefly corner the market for some particularly illiquid cryptocurrencies, which again is not particularly illegal.
I don't think this really seems a threat to cryptocurrencies in general either. Not only did they immediately get found out, the problem of laundering the money is always going to be a problem.
Actually no. The good websites will starve, and the crap ones will survive... Because it takes orders of magnitude more work/money to build something good than something crap. Nowadays, you have thousands of websites that just auto-generate content and try to push it onto you. They don't get a lot of revenue, but it costs peanuts to maintain so they still end up ahead. The good websites, however, those that pay actually people to write good articles, need a more stable source of revenue, and if they lose that they will die out.
For car deaths, we don't have enough data. Though you'd think there's a lot of car deaths, the number in the US is only 15 deaths for one billion vehicle miles. Proper self-driving cars haven't driven nearly enough to get a reliable estimate, partly because they generally don't drive on highways.
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