Posts by Filippo

Re: And how would that work?

You seem to argue that personalized feeds are impossible without tracking.

That is just not true. Users can explicitly declare their interests. There are real applications, right now, that work just like that, and they work fine. I myself have feeds that don't track me. This thing that you claim to be a logical impossibility, not only it's possible, but it actually exists.

Or, you could also track what the user is doing on the app (and not elsewhere), keep that data isolated from any usage that's not strictly necessary to build that specific user's feed, and obtain informed consent. That would also work, and result in a working automated feed that respects the law.

You are arguing that opaque and pervasive tracking is necessary to build a personalized feed, and that's just not true. Multiple people on this thread have shown alternative models, some of which are actually used and have been used for a while.

I too don't have any adverts on my Win10 boxes. I vaguely remember doing a right-click then "remove" on something after installing? A start menu group maybe? I definitely did nothing more than that.

Yup. I'm a Windows developer, but I'm sticking to C++ and Win32, or .NET and WPF. Basically, the things that Microsoft is now stuck with and pretty much has to support forever, regardless of what insanity the next guy comes up with.

Re: Begging the question

>Reading what is visible online is no different from what you or I do.

LLM developers are not "reading".

LLM developers are "downloading and using as input to a computer program, which produces an output (the model), which is then commercially exploited". That is not "reading" and does not even look like "reading", not even if you squint.

The LLM itself might be doing something that might be seen as "reading", if you feel inclined to anthropomorphise, but nobody is suing the LLM itself, because it's not a legal entity.

Re: Wait, so...

I don't worry too much about AI power consumption, in the long term. There are some neat use cases, but I believe most of it to be a hype bubble. The masssive investments are not really seeing returns yet. The jobs that analysts say will be automated away are not getting automated away. The guardrails that are supposed to fix hallucinations are not fixing them. The copyright issues are not solved. Ever larger models are ever better at party tricks, but they are not fixing any of the fundamental problems.

Investors can and will throw money at it for a while as they go unicorn hunting, but eventually they'll need profits. Ultimately, I don't think there will be enough money in it to sustain the enormous running costs associated with drawing gigawatts.

If I wanted to feel particularly optimistic, I'd hope that the hype sparks the building of large amounts of more-or-less green power generation, which will still be there after the AI bubble collapses, and will be put to better use.

Re: A physical visit is a lot more reliable

I too wondered this for a long time, until someone pointed out to me exactly how violent US hurricanes can get. The wind can and will pick up a car and fling it at your house at over 200 kph. This falls short of getting hit by a missile strike, but not by very much. In most of Europe, that just doesn't happen (well, or didn't happen until relatively recently).

Now, you can build something that can take that, but there are several problems. To start with, unless you are building an actual bunker, you'll have windows. The windows will not stand, and the wind will get in. That means that everything inside of the building will get totalled anyway, even if the walls remain standing. Secondly, even if the structure stands, the damage is going to be massive, and fixing it is going to be anywhere from "horribly expensive" to "impossible, the rebar is compromised from getting a direct hit from a flying bus".

Factoring all of that, it turns out that at some point it's cheaper to just build crap and get good at rebuilding from scratch quickly.

At least, that's what I got told; make of that what you will.

Re: Shared on social media ??? WTF ???

Either they alerted the crew immediately and shared the accident later, or someone else had already alerted the crew, or, most likely, the crew was already alert on account of all the screaming. I honestly can't fathom why you would think that this was an "instead of" situation. There's enough in this story to be outraged at already, no need to make up more.

Re: What was the point of releasing .NET 7

Okay, but we really ought to put in perspective what "not supported" means exactly, in practice.

Just for reference, I made a bunch of .NET 3.0 software, way back then, and it's still working fine on the latest Win11 machines.

I suppose it might "have vulnerabilities", in theory, but it's not web-facing, it doesn't run as admin, and, anyway, the same could be said of any software that hasn't been recompiled against the latest libraries in 20 years.

It also could be recompiled on .NET 8 or whatever with minimal changes, if I wanted to. Yeah, they don't guarantee the APIs will be identical for decades, but in practice that's very nearly true in most cases. Which is about the same deal or better as what you can get on every platform under the sun.

For comparison, I was also making Win32 programs in C++ in the same period, and running them on Win11 was about the same effort. The executables would mostly work, some pain with recompiling with the latest toolchain. I honestly doubt there's any platform where you wouldn't get at least that, except on extremely static platform that seldom see major updates.

Re: > A nice view of a burning planet is preferable to a few wind turbines in some peoples minds

Usually, people calling someone else 'snowflake' are insecure and projecting. See also the use of 'sigh' and 'completely deluded', terms which basically mean 'I don't want to engage with you as a peer'.

At a guess, I'd say that maintaining a belief that climate change is not a real problem is getting harder and harder, resulting in the need to display inflated certainty.

But that's a technical problem. It can be fixed with better batteries. The consumer electronics problem is not a technical problem. If tomorrow someone invented batteries that don't degrade ever, the EV problem would vanish overnight, but we'd still have to buy new phones frequently.

Re: maximising

>It's the language I object to. Clearly they are not maximising public safety and claiming so is disingenuous.

No, it's not. "Maximising" in no way implies the absence of any constraints, such as "being a rocket company", on the variable you are maximising. In fact, I can't think of any case where you maximise something without constraints. The language is perfectly accurate (whether they are actually maximising, of course, is harder to figure out).

Also, I reiterate that having a space program is good for public safety, because of weather forecasts if nothing else, and that has a hard requirement of launching rockets.

Did that actually work? I mean, was the crime rate lower?

Yeah, thought so.

No, this is not what's happening. The article is mentioning the parody account, but it is explicitly stating that it's just a parody. The accusations of using deepfakes for propaganda are leveled at an entirely different person, who is not a parody maker and who was doing exactly that.

Either you stopped reading after the first paragraph, or you're attempting another deception for propaganda purposes.

Re: It is not left wing extremists

You don't really need to have someone to blame immediately after the event. You can wait until at least some proper investigation is done. Even if it turns out to really be whoever the finger was first pointed at, just because you didn't point the finger too right away doesn't make you complicit or anything.

Well, I can phrase it more accurately, but those are all separate things, despite what Meta would have you believe.

Having account functionality, so that you can store user preferences and subscriptions and whatnot is one thing. The user explicitly puts data in their account, by logging in and then toggling settings and subscribing to threads and whatnot. That is how you provide the service, it is expected functionality, and it is not a problem. If done right, you wouldn't even need a cookie consent banner.

Tracking, where you record all user interactions and build a profile, is a different thing. The user is giving you data, but they are doing it without informed consent, often without even awareness. That is not required to provide your service, it is not necessarily expected functionality, and it is a problem. It is arguably required to fund the service, but nobody has a right to a business model that breaks the law. Meta could make this above board by obtaining the relevant consent, but so far they have done everything they can to avoid it.

Tracking on third party websites, and tracking of users that don't even have a logged-in account, which is also something that Meta does, is a slightly different thing too, and it's a bigger problem. I don't think that there is any way this is legal, but enforcing this would hurt Meta immensely, and they know it.

Serving ads is not a problem. You can fund a website this way. You probably won't become the richest person in the world, but it's been done.

Serving targeted ads is only a problem because in order to target ads, you need to track. But it's not really a problem in itself. Because of this, asking money in return for not showing ads and/or not targeting ads doesn't solve anything, if you keep tracking. Meta could get explicit informed consent, track what happens on their websites alone and only to logged users, and then use that tracking data to target ads, and this could be made to work. But they don't want to, and they'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it, because it would be far less profitable.

Selling a service for money is also, obviously, not a problem. Again, you probably won't become the richest person in the world.

Meta is trying to convince everyone that user accounts are the same thing as tracking, that ads cannot exist without tracking, and that websites cannot be funded without ads. None of this is true.

Re: Embrace the verbatim

>Spotify for news

Nice concept. I'd pay for that.

Re: Unless I'm mistaken...

That detour is in the right spot, but it isn't anywhere near 60 km long, and the satellite photo suggests a fairly reasonable dirt road. It still doesn't really make sense for Google to suggest that instead of the main road, but it doesn't look outright suicidal. Either Google fixed something recently, or the couple did something worse than just follow Maps. Both sound plausible to me.

Re: Game Theoretic Analysis

There's the problem that while nobody likes being nuked, the value of history is subjective, and can potentially go all the way down to zero for a sufficiently ruthless leader. If the enemy can predict your analysis, and does not care about going down in history as the baddie, then you are giving them a strong incentive for them to execute a first-strike.

The best overall result is actually achieved by maximizing the chance of a successful strike for both sides. If both sides have a 100% success chance, then a first-strike is guaranteed not to yield any advantage, regardless of how you feel about history. Therefore nobody initiates a first-strike, and the world is saved.

Mad, I know!

Okay, but then you can just shut it down like any other computer program. You don't need a fancy hardware killswitch.

Unless the scenario is the sci-fi, rebel-AI, can't-be-shut-down-and-has-independent-power-supply-and-killer-robots-guarding-the-facility-oh-and-anti-aircraft-batteries-too one, which is not really worth serious discussion, let alone large-scale screwing around with hardware design.

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

>Even though France and the EU keep wibbling about our responsibility to police their borders between NI and Eire. Politics is weird like this.

I don't think it's that weird. France doesn't have very much reason to deal with this problem. Nations don't really do favors to other nations, nor do they feel gratitude, or shame over hypocrisy. They just don't work that way.

That's why we have formal international agreements. Well, used to, anyway. You can no longer complain to the European Council, nor can you threaten to veto EU initiatives that benefit France, nor can you elect EU parliament members that could mess with France's agenda. You'll have to find some other lever.

Re: "poses no danger to Earth"

500 years until leaving Venus, 10000 before possibly threatening Earth.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/524522_Zoozve which has a note with the actual academic source.

Re: "Oh, it's ah ... Neo ... um, Enterprise ... uh ... Executive ... uhm ..."

One of my clients got a consultant to make them a dashboard. They asked me to export some production data.

I gave them a big CSV where each row was a production batch, with start and end timestamps and quantity.

They said that they needed the total hours and quantity by day.

I pointed out to the customer that they have the start/end timestamps and quantity per operation. Turning that into totals by day was just arithmetics. Some tricky bits if an operation is active at midnight, okay, but still nothing that doesn't get routinely taught to teens.

I could change the exporter in the production software, of course, but surely the dashboard software, whose entire reason of being is to visualize data, would already be set up to do something like that?

Some time passed, and then they confirmed that they wanted me to export total quantities per day.

So I did that, and the CSV now had a row per day, with the total.

Some time passed, and then they asked me to add a column with the quantity-per-hour.

I pointed out that this is literally just a division.

I'll do it, of course, for free even, but a question comes to mind. This dashboard software. It's just a thing that makes a time series plot out of a CSV, isn't it? Like, literally three mouse clicks on Excel? How much are you paying for it?

Still have to get an answer.

Okay, I realize that when I said "force carriers" it could sound like the kind of thing that comes with missiles. I'd be happy with just authenticated caller ID, though.