Posts by Dinanziame 1328 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
I recall that each query costs a few cents, and Google has billions of users. It's all very well to speak of democratization of access, and Google says they want to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful... But these days, they also really insist on not losing money.
Self-driving cars have been around for quite a while, and they thought of that. If you attempt to steal the car it will simply not drive:
Man arrested and accused of trying to steal a self-driving taxi in L.A.
Arguably the John Oliver show was the greatest deciding factor in passing the net neutrality rules in the first place, all the way back in 2015, by encouraging viewers to write to the FCC:
https://youtu.be/fpbOEoRrHyU?t=757
Though this regrettably resulted in a massive roboted spam campaign when the FCC head wanted those rules removed...
No matter what Google tracks and does not track, nothing prevents third-party websites or your ISP from tracking you when you are in incognito mode; and there's nothing Google can do about that. Incognito has never been about tracking; the only use it to hide your surfing habits from your wife.
The fourth amendment only regulates what the government is allowed to do, not private companies. Just like the first amendment, as we've been repeatedly reminded these past few years: Companies are allowed to block your speech on their platforms, it's just the government who technically can't order them.
There are still people trying to sell them! I recently saw a hotel showing NFTs on a wall, and apparently all you had to do to buy them was scan a QR code.
I know a guy who claims he made money on every NFT he's bought and sold. He carefully neglects to mention that there's some he's bought, but never sold...
A lot of trouble could be avoided if people were using a real programming language to execute queries. SQL is the level of COBOL in language evolution, trying to have statements that sounds like English and ignore rules of logic. If people are not coding with statements like "ADD B TO C" they shouldn't be using "SELECT X FROM Y" either.
It's a travesty that database queries are transmitted by building a string from logic, and the string is then parsed back to logic. You might as well be printing them on punch cards on the way for all the sense it makes. Parameterized statements are just a bandaid to cover the flaws.
Interesting point: Fahrenheit 451 shows a very primitive user engagement, where there is no real personalisation for the viewer who obviously has no impact at all despite the claims. In the future, you could imagine a TV series where the story is adapted to the viewer, they can interact with the people on screen, and have some impact on the story. A bit like a real-life RPG.
There's already AI girlfriend chatbots...
They already have people paid to do debugging, who are simply not finding those bugs — what's their incentive?
On the other hand, paying your own employees by bug fixed is an excellent way to have a lot of bugs in your software: "I'm going to code myself a minivan this afternoon!"
That's still good, I guess? I think we can forget the notion of companies designing secure from the start — good luck with that — so bug bounties are at least a way to find new vulnerabilities, and to give some cash to third-party white hats. They could get better results by raising the bounties, but...
A pass for what? Giving ridiculous results only exposes you to ridicule. Being woke is not illegal, and definitely more accepted than the tiniest suspicion of being racist. Hell, they might even have staged the whole thing to give themselves some protection in case their AI does return racist results later.
I think you can count yourself very lucky if they only ask you to reconsider this one time, on the day the change happens. They definitely want users to think of Google as one big blob that provides dozens of services rather than a collection of unrelated services which can easily be replaced by a third party. They don't even feel bad about this — from their point of view, it makes their services better. They think they can provide better results on YouTube if they know what you searched for on Google, and so on.
Not that people will feel reassured by these new rules. A large number of people think that their phone is constantly listening to them just to choose which ads to show them, permissions be damned, with no more evidence than "I talked about cars and then it showed me ads for cars". The fact that DMA makes this explicitly illegal won't convince them.
You might want to check out this John Oliver video about people who try to gain your friendship on the internet: Pig Butchering Scams
Note: Even though you are posting a comment on a website and I am answering your comment, this should in no way be interpreted as a social contact. I'm not trying to be your friend!
I think they just got conned into following Google in doing something that's way outside their domain. I actually think it makes more sense for Apple to build a self-driving car rather than just doing software, because Apple is primarily a hardware company, not a software company. If they had created something high-quality they could have convinced people to pay double usual prices. By the time they decided to just do the software I think the project was already dead. And when they saw Tesla having to cut prices to fight off competition that was probably the last nail in the coffin.
Admittedly it does not technically make a lot of sense for Google to do self-driving cars either; that was the old Google that would spend billions on a white elephant project just because it sounded cool (They literally had the motto "do cool things that matter" for a while). The current Google is concentrating on raising its stock price, and would never start such a project. I'm actually wondering how long they will keep it around, considering that it's very unlikely to be profitable for a long time, much less reach the kind of profit margins that are considered successful within Google.
I think those models can be really useful to help writing boring stuff, like "write a letter in German to my landlord to complain about this issue with the building". It might help people whose job is to write things, though for the moment they might want to be really careful about fact checking the output, since the models tend to hallucinate. When it comes to automatically answering questions and queries though, I think their ability to put statement of facts into nice-looking sentences is mostly form over function — the form looks high quality, which we tend to think implies that the content is high quality as well, but that's not the case.
Offering features in your cloud that makes it hard to migrate to another cloud is something that all cloud platforms do. But here Microsoft has the particularity that it is using the fact they have a quasi-monopoly in one domain (Windows in enterprise software) to reinforce their position in another domain (cloud), by charging more for Windows licenses if it doesn't run on their cloud. It's the local electricity company saying "we are also an ISP, and if you get another ISP we'll charge you more for electricity".
Eye contact is a plus, though it's not strictly necessary — it doesn't work at night, for example. But on the other hand, we tend to concentrate on what humans do that self-driving cars cannot replicate, like eye contact, and we fail to imagine things that self-driving cars could do that humans couldn't because of their own limitations. For instance, self-driving cars could have a blinking red light on the front of the car meaning "I'm not moving, you go ahead", or multiple other indicators which would be too bothersome for a human to coordinate and trivial to implement on a self-driving car.
Now that I think of it, when eye contact is not possible at night, humans sometimes stop and flash the headlights to indicate "go ahead". I wonder if this has been implemented on self-driving cars.
I think Google is popular enough that most Apple customers want to use Google, and would complain not having it as the default. I assume they would complain even more if it is clear that Apple switched to Bing in order to receive billions from Microsoft.
Unless Apple goes with creating their own search engine (not entirely impossible, they did just that for Apple Maps), I assume the default search engine will remain Google, and Apple will just get billions less.
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...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2026
