Posts by v13 143 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2022
> The issue, she argues, is not that Europe needs to eliminate American providers entirely, but that it has allowed its own market share to collapse to dangerous levels.
Yeah, right. The problem is that Europe will strongly favour legislation over innovation. We're reaching a point where even some opensource software may be illegal in Europe or put authors in risk of being sued if someone uses their software wrongly. European startups need to pay more money on lawyers than in engineering. Not because they're evil but because they need to write a 50-page privacy policy in every European language, following the individual rules of every European country, that nobody will ever read because of how big it is. Only companies with big pockets can do that, and Europe doesn't have these.
Europe needs to start thinking how it can help its companies instead of how to restrict them. And maybe, why not, just throw some money on opensource software like KDE, to have alternative opensource options. Otherwise its just talk.
That's partially correct but not fully. WhatsApp should only return the results to authenticated accounts, not to anonymous requests. And for authenticated accounts it should have hard limits on the total entries they can download, and even lower limits on the number of entries they can download in a day. No individual account needs to access 100K contacts, or 1000 contacts in a day.
This article is all over the place. There's no model bubble because there are only a few major LLMs right now (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and whatever Perplexity is using).
There's clearly an investment bubble with billions being invested in AI startups but that's just VCs investing, hoping that a few of them will become unicorns. These investments go bust all the time.
The risk comes from a stock bubble but those startups haven't done IPOs yet so we're quite far from that. So it's only the few major players (Google, Microsoft, maybe Facebook, Nvidia, AMD).
Funnily, there's a bubble that burst already: Apple with its Apple Intelligence. But no other company has lied to their users successfully in order to monetise AI. So that's more like the exception than the rule.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. "Your systems" is the tricky part. Companies use a number of external providers for storing customer information and that's hard to say yes to.
And then there's the issue of global infrastructure: do you have a global CDN? If yes then you probably need presence in many external countries.
But it gets better: if you have a global CDN and the government just doesn't use it, you still have presence in other countries or use an external provider, so you need to abide by their laws. And how do you provide 24x7 engineering support without an office outside of the EU whose employees have access to the systems?
Things would potentially work if a certain company was dedicated to serving the EU government sector and didn't have any other customers. But in reality that's not the case and things get tricky. If anything, it's an uphill legal battle at global scale and small companies can't afford to fight it. That's the ugly truth.
Any new EU regulation is a regulatory monster. The only way to comply is to have an army of lawyers that can scrutinize it and tooling that allows you to be compliant. That's on top of what your offering. That's hard to do and small companies are being excluded with every new complex piece of regulation. That's the unfortunate reality.
Unless the laws are simplified (but not necessarily relaxed), small companies will be less and less able to be cloud providers for EU governments.
Well, no. All your emails are no match for the videos that you took and stored.
*but*
There's some amount of truth. And you know what? The government could pass a law that limits all these local spam emails that every eshop now sends by default. That would help reduce not just the storage but the processing too. Why aren't we doing that?
Governments should be using ChromeOS and Android. Say what you want but both OSs are opensource and ready to be used by non technical people, and they can be forked at any time. If governments start using them then that actually will create an incentive to branch them. Windows, MacOS and iOS will never be opensourced. They just get more and more entrenched.
Microsoft has done a great job hiding this fact even though they proved the logic when they used Chromium to create Edge. Opensource is the only way to prevent lock-ins.
The problem with computing is that it is seen as a bunch of nerds doing stuff instead of a science. No politician would go ahead and pass a law that affects medicine or physics without consulting with scientists. But the average know-all that sits in parliament thinks that they understand computing and then they have these crazy ideas. Normally you'd think they they're under the influence of medicine they previously banned. But that's just 50-50 chance with computing. The other 50% is pure ignorance and even ignorance of their ignorance. Good luck hitting all those brick walls that you've been warned about.
> At the UI and functionality level, there is nothing in ChromeOS that would be difficult to replicate for any distro vendor.
Not exactly.
The author forgot about security. ChromeOS is the most secure operating system after Android and iOS. Everything is siloed. There's no way for one app (website) to access another's data. (Also, Chromebooks are locked down fully, more than just using the TPM). Linux unfortunately isn't there yet and that's what's missing: a fully locked down distro where the user doesn't have access to their home directory. This prevents things like cookie stealing and more.
You could say "yeah, that's easy, just allow only the browser". But that logic fails when you need to update the OS. Because most Linux updates are per package, not atomic with a dual partition scheme like in ChromeOS. And package updates can and will fail.
A lesser version of ChromeOS is possible, like ChromeOS Flex. But it still needs quite some love. The devil is in the details.
AI systems can be and are made to reason. The reasoning models do actually reason the same way (and better) a human does. Are they experts in every field? Certainly not. Can they form a series of steps, follow them then continue to iterate? Yes. Do they do it by themselves? No, there's some code on top of it.
Do not confuse reasoning with desire. AI systems do not desire (yet) so they just do stuff based on goals set by the operator.
Check the thoughts of a reasoning model and you'll see a basic form of reasoning. If they were allowed to spend more time (read: cost) they'd do even more.
That's not the issue. The problem is this: you have a Windows server on-prem, and a license for it. If you move it to Azure then there's no license cost because Microsoft converts it to a Cloud License. If you move it to AWS or GCP then you need to buy a new license because Microsoft doesn't allow you to convert it to a cloud license. That's why everyone moves their Windows workloads to Azure.
Perplexity is small enough not to be targeted yet. But at the end it's an unethical engine that presents harvested text from other web pages. If I ask which OLED TV is the best, it'll extract the information from comparison sites and present it. Eventually those sites will block it or they'll die.
You can't just make a web page that shows information from all other internet web pages. Perplexity never compared TVs, so its results are practically stolen, even if there's a reference. They're providing a service based on other people's work without paying loyalties.
Traditional search engine keep the quoted texts at minimum for this reason. I expect the lawsuits to start sometime next year.
Imagine for a moment Microsoft owning Chrome. The horror of Christmas past. The path to the end of the opensource Chromium.
That's not fiction. Microsoft is the only company with enough money and a search engine, that can be used to fund the billions per year needed to develop Chrome.
I've lived through the 90s and 00s and seen the impact of Internet Explorer, actively preventing the success of any operating system other than Windows.
No, thanks. I strongly prefer the most popular web engine to be opensource and Microsoft isn't the one to do it, as they never did.
I'm on exactly the same page. Long term Linux desktop user, can't stand Windows. Mostly Debian. I've been using Linux for everything and today it is better than ever.
One thing that I am experimenting lately with is ChromeOS with Lacros for a laptop. The part that I like is that the Linux VMs open graphical windows on the host, so not only text works but also UIs. Firefox, KeepassX, konsole, all just work. The result is a Debian VM that has very similar functionality as my Debian desktop. The only thing that I miss are the keyboard shortcuts of kwin.
It requires you to be comfortable with using Chrome though. The underlying OS is Linux based and Lacros is so isolated that even the OS cannot enforce policies on Chrome profiles. But the host is still based on Chrome.
I use LLMs for software coding assist and for processing and transforming chunks of text. They don't invalidate my job but they do make me more efficient. A 5% efficiency boost at a scale of 100.000 people means approximately 5000 fewer employees needed in order to achieve the same result. This isn't any different than a good IDE, faster compilation times, automated bug catching, and better tooling in general. The only difference is that it is happening across all fields at the same time, and that it has bigger impact on creative professions (in aggregate).
Microsoft is the new Oracle. Making money from strict and potentially anti-competitive licenses that limit what competitors can offer and how users can use their products. They prohibit users from running normal Windows in VMs, then introduce disproportionally high licensing costs for Windows Server Datacenter edition which is allowed to run in a VM.
(And Apple is the new Microsoft, making money from a tightly closed ecosystem)
Oh Apple, you silly goose. With your shenanigans and your fat bottom line. Look at you. Living like there's no tomorrow. Being malicious and schizophrenic. Allowing other browsers on one of your OSes but not the other. Claiming insecurity for restricting them but also claiming security on the OS that you don't.
Ate you alright? You don't make much sense lately.
This is a good explanation but tying e2e credentials to TLS isn't something that would work on the modern Internet. It'd require the Application layer and HTTP to have information from and interact with the TLS session. That would make all cloud-based load balancers that terminate TLS (most of the Internet nowadays) incompatible. It also gets tricky to handle mid-session where the session cookie is actually being created or destroyed.
Overall, binding cookies to a device is certainly the way to go. Even without a TPM, having a device-specific storage (like a service in Linux running as a different user) would be a big leap. And for the cases where you can't trust the local system, you'll need a TPM-like solution.
Apple silently stayed on the side while the EU has been busy investigating Google. The end result is that they created the closest ecosystem ever of that size.
Their devices only work with themselves and the 1 billion users they have are unable to use a different browser engine, a different payment method, a different store, even a different charger. It is the greatest vendor lock in in the history of humankind. It's time things change a bit.
