Posts by Dinanziame 1150 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
I assume they remembered the Tay fiasco, and were determined not to fall in the same trap. And AIs have been slammed in the past for only recognizing white people and ignoring other races. Still there's a big jump from "include other races when appropriate" to "refuse to depict white people".
There was probably a judgement that it's preferable to be seen as woke than racist.
If Apple provides the infrastructure for iMessage, don’t they get to say who can access it? Or is it so big now it falls outside of that usual rule of business.
Indeed, it's about size. Nobody cares if a small barely used service makes it hard for competitors to work with it; but if it's one of the largest services around, that's when it starts being a gatekeeper and different rules apply.
For instance, Apple fought the EU's efforts to force open iMessage by pointing out that it is barely used in Europe compared to the US.
There are also network effects for large ad businesses. Your ads carry a big bonus if you can guarantee that at least X% of the population see them. For that reason, when you have a large ad business, you have a strong disincentive to offer ad-free tiers. The reason is that when people switch to the ad-free tier, you not only lose the ad revenue, but you can even charge less for ads, because advertisers know that their ads is reaching only part of the population so they are less valuable.
From what I've heard, they have interns whose task is to go do something very quick in the tunnel and run the whole way, because sooner or later they meet the total exposition-per-year threshold for being next to the slightly radioactive machines; and then they are sent back to their home country.
They claim to have a passthrough latency of 12ms, which is impressive to be sure. I suppose we'll soon know whether this is good enough to walk around for a long time without barfing. The field of view is severely reduced though, so even if walking around is okayish, driving is not, and will not.
I don't see a lot of people actually using the screen in front to display their eyes, it seems more creepy than useful.
One thing I haven't seen either is people asking angrily if the wearer is recording a video, which I remember was a feature of Google Glass. Maybe it pays to be second.
To be honest, I thought that had gone long ago, when the cached result link stopped being shown right under the search results. I never knew it had moved to the "about this result" screen.
I suppose so few people knew about it that the utilization was very low, and that's why it's going away? I can't imagine it costs a lot to maintain...
Just like the prices charged by companies to customers for their products, the salary earned by workers is not determined by the value they bring, but by how hard they are to replace.
The price you pay for a server is not proportional to the money you'll make with it. The salary of an employee is not proportional to how profitable they are to the company. Miners earn about the same in a coal mine or a diamond mine.
Oh ouch. Common mistake, but still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombia
It's important to note this is not a language thing, Colombia is the official word in English just as it is in Spanish. And yes, it's almost the same, but Oakland and Auckland are different cities in very different places, and should not be confused either.
It would be a very brave tech company these days who would try to change the mind of European regulators. Billion-dollar fines have been regularly meted out, and new regulations are coming up fast.
What I meant is that the fine is, all things considered, appropriate for the size of the business and the gravity of the infraction. A small company would have been fined in thousands rather than millions, because it is calculated as a reminder to be careful without actually hurting the business much.
And even with the hardware in place, what's the killer app besides games?
Well, Meta thinks that business meetings are better virtually than through a video screen, though I think the tech will need to get much better before that is true.
Other than that, who knows? Once we have really good AR, maybe people will prefer to walk with AR glasses rather than looking at their cell phones, for Terminator-style heads-up display. Or maybe Minority-report handwave interfaces will be found to be cool to read documents and work on some projects. Possibly art? If everything else fails, there's always porn.
The bigger problem is that it's not clear there's a lot of appeal to wear a device on your head. So far, it's only video games that have had some modest success. The day may come where a Metaverse-like experience is considered better than a simple screen, but we're probably at least a decade away.
"Regulating products is fine. But [regulating] R&D is ridiculous."
I can hardly assume that academics and enthusiasts tinkering in their labs and homes would be impacted by this regulation? Corporations mass-launching "beta services" to the public definitely should though. Possibly, the EU will go the DSA/DMA route and just clearly state which global tech companies this applies to.
It's not entirely wrong — some of the energy inserted into the grid is known to be green, though perhaps produced at a higher price, and companies can pay the higher price for the bragging right of being those who, if not use, at least subsidise this energy production. Ultimately, it's a matter of money — if you want to claim to be green, you need to pay more. This encourages the production of green energy, raises the price for companies that care about being green, and overall encourages using less energy when possible.
This article says: As an IT security consultant, it will be a long time before Cuthbert's reputation is restored and it is possible he will never work in the industry again.
However, it seems their current LinkedIn profile says "Experienced Senior Global Head of Cyber Security Research, skilled in Threat Intelligence"
Google has been in payments for a lot longer than X or Meta — They started about at the same time as Apple Pay, though with varying success due to the fragmented nature of Android. They've also created a dozen different apps to confuse users. India is one of the countries where they have been particularly successful and they've tried expanding on that for some time.
It seems that the DJI Fly Android app is not in the Google Play store anymore, and can only be downloaded from their website... There's been a scare before on DJI apps:
Chinese-made drone app in Google Play spooks security researchers
Then again, the iPhone app is still on the Apple Store. I'm sure everything is fine.
The victim, we're told, can't open the benign PDF, which appears to be encrypted. It's not, but this usually prompts a return email from the victim saying they can't open the doc. Then the phony email account responds with a link to a "decryption" utility that is actually the SPICA backdoor.
Oh come on
I think the point is that it is possible to recognize a style, whether it is real or a good copy, and that users apparently request for specific styles. Apparently style cannot be copyrighted, but it is an interesting point that an artist can create innovative works in a style that nobody has seen before, and similar works in the same style can flood the market immediately. At this point, there soon won't be a lot of artists who can make any money at all.
The plaintiffs claimed that Google can match Incognito Mode users to visited sites through IP addresses
... and so can your ISP, and the sites themselves, as was already indicated in the text written below.
We'll never know what are the terms of the settlement, but I'd be surprised the plaintiffs got a lot of money for this.
I also totally see it as possible that they wanted to get rid of somebody — anybody, because they decided the team didn't need to be as big as it was or they had a target to remove 10% of the workforce across the org, or any reason similarly unrelated to performance. Then, getting rid of somebody on the probationary period was much less work than somebody else, precisely because they was no need to build a case or justify anything.
And actually, you could also consider it's nicer to get rid of somebody on the probationary period rather than somebody who's been working for the company for X years. I believe in some countries like Germany, it's even mandatory to first lay off people on the probationary period rather than long-term employees.
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