It's different in that it's harder, most costly, and because of that no developer will offer it, and no iPhone user will actually do it. As designed an intended by Apple. Hopefully the EU will hit them with a fine in the billions.
Posts by FF22
231 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2013
Official: EU users can swerve App Store and download iOS apps from the web
AI spam is winning the battle against search engine quality
Sunday 14th April 2024 23:03 GMT
Re: Not interested
As long as people find the things they were looking for on Google's result pages, they won't care whether they found it in paid ads or found it through organic results that appeared for free. However, for Google it matters whether people find things through ads or organic results, because they earn on the former, but not (or not the full sum, if the page is using Adsense) on the latter.
That's why they're interested or even counter-interested in keeping their organic results also as relevant as their ads. Even if they show relevant hits ultimately, it makes more sense for them to rank irrelevant ones higher, because that increases ad engagement, and the number of ads shown to people as they have to scroll down to ultimately more to find the organic results they wanted.
Anyone not understanding that rationale needs to read again.
Sunday 14th April 2024 11:44 GMT
Not interested
There's a fundemantal misunderstanding here in that Google is somehow interested in making organic results better or even just good, but is unable to do that, and is hence losing.
That's not the case. Google is actually completely disinterested or even counter-interested in making organic results better. What they care about instead is how many ads they can show, and how much money those make for them. Until their revenue starts dropping - or even just stop increasing, as it has been doing every year anew, over and over - they have no incentive to make the organic search results better.
Actually, they are even interested in making the organic result as worse as possible, because that means that no one (no web site) will get a free pass and be able to appear for free on Google's result list for relevant results, but this will be a privilege only for those, who actually pay Google, through ads.
Ads will be kept relevant and organic search results irrelevant, which automatically increases demand and also prices for ads on Google's pages, while at the same time also makes it impossible for other sites to earn money through competing ads shown by them.
US legislators propose American Privacy Rights Act - and it looks quite good
No App Store needed: Apple caves, will allow sideloading in EU
Tuesday 12th March 2024 15:55 GMT
Misleading
This is just another attempt from Apple to fool legislators and users alike. Successfully- as proven by the article.
The apps downloadable from the web will be subject to the same agreement that applies to all other apps, meaning they will still have to be presented to Apple, and Apple will have to approve them in order for users to be actually be able to download and install them onto their iPhones. Apple will also charge the developers the same amount of money they'd have charged if the latter published their apps through an alternative app store.
Which means Apple will still have total control over what iPhone users can install, will know how and how many times installed it, and will still make everyone pay the "Apple tax". And it will still make no financial sense to make apps directly downloadable from a website, as that will actually cost developers more, than if they'd have just put their apps into the App Store.
Hopefully the EU will fine Apple into oblivion, because of the definitive breach of the DMA, and force them to actually open up the iPhone, so that app vendors and users will be able to sell and buy apps without the involvement of Apple at all.
Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little
Wednesday 6th March 2024 12:01 GMT
"Statcounter says"
You should have stopped right there. StatCounter has no clue how to do statistics.
They count page views, not even unique visitors. They are only used on the smallest websites, not on any that has a more than few thousand visitors per year possibly.
They don't know what sampling bias is, and don't even try to compensate for it.
Because of these their numbers are not representative, and completely useless to determine install bases or changes in them. For all we know, Linux's market share amongst PC OSes could be 10% or 0.1%, because StatCounter's numbers and statistics are not actually measuring that, and any change in the latter might not correlate with the former.
AI is going to need a global investment, just maybe not $7T, says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Thursday 22nd February 2024 15:01 GMT
Becoming "too big to fail"
He wants that much investment, because if you have so much money invested in something, then that alone will make you, the investors - who will want to see their money back - keep up the hype cycle, and also hinder legislation that would thwart the appropriation of everyone's work by OpenAI.He wants to become "too big to fail".
Apple redecorates its iPhone prison to appease Europe
Saturday 27th January 2024 06:27 GMT
Re: The Law Has No Teeth
"If Apple can weasel round the law so easily"
For one, nobody said Apple could weasel out its way. It just tried. Hopefully they will be slapped with a fine so heavy, that they will never ever try it again.
Also laws have a "spirit" that must be fulfilled and taken into account when they're interpreted - because you can't code every single instance and way that spirit could be violated into words. That's also why we have judges presiding and deciding over cases, because the law (as any text) in itself is ALWAYS subject to interpreration, and hence to reasoning that could potentionally circumvent it.
The point is that Apple is blatantly violating the intention and spirit of the law, and hopefully EU judges will make an example out of that.
The rise and fall of the standard user interface
Wednesday 24th January 2024 13:14 GMT
Got history completely wrong
This article seems to get history wrong from the very first paragraph.
Like it attributes common GUI to the SAA, which however was only published in 1987 first. That's several years later than the Apple Lisa and the first Windows came to the market, which all had standard UI elements (like menu bar, scroll bars, buttons, etc.) that virtually didn't change in the last 40 years. They all also had APIs for GUI management, which not only meant that apps running on them didn't have to invent their own GUI concepts, but were actually encouareged to use said services, which made them all use common looks and controls.
But even they all just mostly copied the Xerox Alto, which was the actual system that established the basic GUI elements.
OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'
What the AI copyright fights are truly about: Human labor versus endless machines
Wednesday 3rd January 2024 22:37 GMT
Re: "allowing their works to be used in AI models - as long as they get compensated for that"
"Again, labor versus machines. "
No, because it would be just as wrongs if it was humans who did the same thing that computers do. The point is that there's no real effort involved on part of the AI companies to create the results, or it's negligible compared to what went in creating the original works, whose authors do not get compensated for their works by any means, and it's the AI companies that reap all the revenue.
The situation is very similar to what's search engines and social media sites were and are still in, and which is also utterly unjust, because all they do is take everybody else's content, in most cases without even explicit permission to do so, slap ads next to them, and call this a product, not compensating the original authors by any means, despite those being the ones who supply the actual value in the service.
It's evident when you ask yourself: what would still have value without the other? Would search engines have still any value if they had no articles to show? Obviously not. Would articles still have value if there were no search engines? Definitely. Similarly: could AI companies provide a useful service to the general public if they couldn't take everyone else's content to train their models? Definitely not. Would everybody else's artwork, books, etc. still useful to people is AI companies didn't exist? Definitely.
Again, the problem with AI is not that AI "imitates" other authors. It wouldn't even be a problem if it would just plain out copy them. Most artists, authors don't mind if others are using their songs, photos, etc. in their derivative creative works, even if it's verbatim. Actually, most professional artists create their artworks with the explicit intention and assumption that somebody else or a lot of other parties will reproduce these works. But they only don't mind or even want that if this happens with their permission and when they get royalties for every reproduction or use. The real problem is that the AI companies 1. took all everyone's works without permission, 2. don't even want to pay royalties on the use of said works, not even after the fact, and not even pennies.
The "argument" the AI companies have that they're not using a single authors' works, and that the works their systems produce incorporate all influences from all authors in the world, and therefore they don't copy and don't even resemlbe in most cases the works of a single one of those authors or a specific work of them. But if anything, that should be an argument against the AI companies, because it means they violate the rights of not only a single author, but the rights of countless or all authors in the world, every single time their systems produce something.
Again, it's irrelevant whether the AI companies are producing what they do through algorithms or humans - and that's why it's not a humans vs robots issue. It would be just as wrong and unjust if they'd produce the same results using humans, by for ex. the humans clipping together pieces of text from others' works. The problem is not that, but the lack of permission and compensation.
Wednesday 3rd January 2024 20:21 GMT
They're not
These lawsuits are NOT about human / machine labor. At least not in the specifically mentioned cases. Most of the authors suing AI companies would be likely more than happy allowing their works to be used in AI models - as long as they get compensated for that, similarly to how they get royalties when their works are used or built upon in the traditional way. After all it's just fair, that if someone is making money by building on your works, you also get to make some money off that.
The real problem for artists and authors is not that AI could produce works just as good as they can (because AI can't, and with the help of AI they could produce even better works also themselves, at least for now), but that AI companies simply took everyone's copyrighted works without permission and built something on top of that, that now displaces the original works and authors. And not only that, but they will keep doing this also in the future, if they're not stopped and not forced to licence works and pay the authors.
It's like if some company employed millions of workers to build a huge building, and then won't pay said workforce, by arguing that the completed work does not resemble to any of the single bricks that any of the workers put into it. Obviously that's not how thing work, should work, or could work in the long term. Not in the logical and not in the economical sense.
The good news is that most likely AI companies will be forced to actually start licencing works from authors anyway, not only because of legal, but also just because of pure technical reasons. That's because that will be the only way they will be able to ensure in the future that they're actually using human generated high quality content instead of just feeding back AI generated low-quality content to their models which will lead to the degradation and implosion of those in the long term.
(Now obviously the fact that they will licence content won't technically limit anyone giving them AI generated content, but once the authors actually enter a contract and will be paid for their works, they will be also held liable for those - and that's why AI companies will pay them, even if pennies.)
Biden urged to do something about Europe 'unfairly' targeting American tech
Wednesday 20th December 2023 05:05 GMT
Says the country..
... that does not adopt international standards on anything (be it units of measurement, types of connectors, standard voltages, battery sizes,etc) just to other countries will have a harder time exporting their goods and services to them, but brings "freedom" all over the world where it can reap the natural resources and manpower.
Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP
Tuesday 5th December 2023 15:46 GMT
Not a renaming problem
The problem is not that the printers are renamed. Their name stays the same, as it always was. Instead what it happens is that their "type" and the device driver that's used to drive them is what changes. Most likely because there were false/too broad PnP identifier data submitted by HP to them, and because of that the devices are recognized by the system as a specific HP device, instead of what they actually are.
Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law
Sunday 29th October 2023 03:27 GMT
Re: Not this guy again
"(Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and many more) have been trying to change that since 2009 and have failed consistently -"
They have not, because there's no need to change the laws for ad blocker detection to be legal. That's why Google is using it on YouTube, you know, simply because it's legal and does not violate any EU laws. Actually, it's used by many other companies and publishers in the EU, especially in Germany where it is now quite common for all websites to greet you with a popup on which you either have give consent to showing ads or subscribe to a website. And that practice has been actually confirmed to be completely legal - meaning also in agreement with EU law - by German authorities and courts.
"And no, under current EU law a web site does not have a right to know you have blocked ads "
Wrong. EU laws say nothing about that.
" this is explicit in the ePrivacy Directive "
Wrong. It does not mention blocking ads anywhere, and detection of ad blocking does not depend on anything you claim would violate EU laws.
"in relation to serverside processing of traffic data - for example to detect if your IP requested a specific ad or not"
Wrong. For one, because you don't need an IP address to detect ad blocking. And also because knowing your IP address is necessary to service you anyway, so, you can't even make the argument that it's not. Also, your IP address can and will be stored by virtually all servers anyway because of security purposes, which they have all right to under EU law.
" perhaps use some of it to educate yourself on EU law..."
Yeah, perhaps educate yourself about not only EU law, but about technicalities of ad blocking detection, because you still seem to knwo nothing about it, and didn't learn anything in all these years. You still invoke the completely wrong paragraphs, because you assume for ex. that ad blocking detection needs client side storing of data, or collection of data for which consent is needed for - none of which is actually true.
That's why ad blocking detectors are still legal and always will be. And you know, the worst about your argument and crusade is, that even if it would not be legal to detect ad blocking, and even if you would somehow succeed with it (which you didn't in the last decade and doesn't look like you could in the following decade), all you could ever achieve is, I mean if you could somehow outlaw ad blocker detection, is that since they couldn't make money through ads anymore, Google and all the websites on the web would put all their content and services behind paywalls, and you could only access them after you paid for them.
Which is not only stupid because it's obviously nothing most of us (and probably not even you) would want to, ie. if we'd have to pay $5-10 for every single website we use and visit, every month, so we can access them, but also because in order to pay with a credit card or other means you'd have to give up even more personal (and more personally identifying info) than what any adblock detector technology would possibly collect.
So, your crusade is essentially a self-defeating one, which does not serve not only the interest of publishers, but not that of the users/visitors either. If you don't see that, it's bad, and if you see that and still do what you that, well, that's even worse.
Sunday 29th October 2023 03:02 GMT
Re: Not this guy again
You realize argument from popularity is not an actual argument, but a logical fallacy, right? No, you don't, because if you would, you wouldn't have posted your comment.
The up/down ratio means nothing, and actually, when something gets downvoted by so many people, you can know you touched on something those people don't want to face, just because it's the ugly truth. I mean like freeloaders don't want to be called out on their freeloading habits, and a clueless "privacy advocate" who's trying to essentially legalize content theft merely for personal gains won't admit that he's doing just that.
Then again who cares about these people's opinion, right? Any downvote from them is more of an acknowledgement and a confirmation that you were right, if anything.
Friday 27th October 2023 01:31 GMT
Not this guy again
He's been at this thing (ie. "challenging" adblock detection scripts via EU privacy laws) for 10+ years now, and he got nowhere with it. He obviously has no case there, not only from the moral, but also from the legal standpoint.
It's also an utterly sleazy thing he's trying to pull off. Because if he thinks he has the right to block ads on a website, then the website also definitely has the right to know that and block him from using its services or ask him to pay up. Nobody can be forced to allow freeloaders to steal from them with no means to recoup their costs, especially not by the freeloaders arguing that nto allowing to freeload them will somehow invade their privacy.
Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected
Monday 23rd October 2023 11:40 GMT
Completely wrong
The article is completely wrong. Because it's not that innovation is not happening in the tech space, even in OSes, or that it would be less in absolute terms, than before. It's just that our tech and OSes are already so complex and can do so much, that adding the same amount of new stuff to them will bring less and less change in absolute terms, because of the already existing huge base you compare it to.
Another thing is that just because you have so much and so many things in an OS, and they have to work with so many stuff, and support all kinds of apps and hardware, any change introduced in them would affect a lot of other things, which would also need rework, or would change to the worse. This makes it harder to introduce changes that are fundamentally different, and innovation usually happens in smaller areas and at the endpoints, where there's less stuff depending on them.
And finally, in today's connected world, what the OS itself can do will be less and less relevant, and the things it does it does not alone, but coupled with other services, devices and entities - be it a cloud service from the same manufacturer, or a social media site from a competitor. Sometimes this is inevitable because of how stuff works, like generative AI not able to effectively run on a local computer or the model weighs used in them being trade secrets. This, again, makes changes to existing stuff harder, but also makes it less important what the OS itself does, because the available functions can be extended also through the connected services.
All in all innovation is not slowing, but it will be less and less evident that it's happening, because of the factors laid out above, and also because as we get more and more intelligent services and implementations the advances will be less apparent to the end users, because they won't result in front end complexity (and actually might make things there even simpler), and because it's only the front end / UI and the results that the user is seeing, not how all this works behind the scenes.
'Influencer' gets 7 months in prison for plot to interfere with 2016 US election
Watermarking AI images to fight misinfo and deepfakes may be pretty pointless
Monday 2nd October 2023 22:25 GMT
A stupid idea
Marking anything AI generated is, regardless of how it's being done, a stupid idea to begin with, as it's equal to the evil bit (RFC 3514). Also because anybody can run a generative AI on their own computers (political parties and large corporations even more so, and even build their models from scratch), and circumvent the flagging occurring already at the source in the first place.
If anything, what could work instead of it is the opposite: ie. marking the reliable and verified content a such. And not by some kind of fingerprint, watermark or a flag, but by establishing something like a custody chain for evidence, which would allow you to trace back the info not only to the original source, and also allow you to compare how it was possibly altered or preserved as it passed through various channels or people until it got to you, also making evident the culprit who did the manipulation (both when it was intentional and unintentional). This could be done by using digital signatures over digital signatures. The technology for this has been available for decades and well established, you'd only need to slap a very thin application-specific layer on that.
That being said the real problem is that the Average Joe just generally doesn't care whether some info is from a reliable source or not, or whether it's true or not. He cares more whether it fits his world view or not, and anything that does not fit, his mind will refuse as some kind of conspiracy or "the fake" information, even when it's actually the verified truth and objective reality. So, in the end this is more a problem with the human psyche, which unfortunately can not be fixed by technological means, only by education and traning.
Then again, politics will not allow the latter, because then they'd also lose the ability to manpilate their voters and public opinion in general, which is the very and really only thing that keeps their sorry, incompetent and corrupt asses in power.
If the Linux Foundation was a software company, it'd be the biggest in the world
Friday 29th September 2023 00:49 GMT
Wrong
If the Linux Foundation was a company, it wouldn't even exist, because nobody would buy their "product", and it wouldn't be used anywhere. Well, at least not in more places than other obscure commercial OSes, like QNX.
The only reason Linux is so popular is because it's free, not because it's technically superior. Actually, it was already obsolete by the time it was created, and it has only gotten worse ever since.
(Of course Linux fanbois will downvote this, because the truth is hard to swallow.)
OpenAI could be valued up to $90 billion if deal to sell employee shares closes
Wednesday 27th September 2023 16:07 GMT
Re: Just wait
For one, copyright violation IS a criminal issue. But the more important thing is, that there are so many parties independently suing already OpenAI (rightly so, because they essentially used everyone's stuff on the internet, and beyond, that they were able to get their hands on), that they will not be able to settle with all of them.
Google on trial: Feds challenge deals that set your web search defaults
Thursday 21st September 2023 00:16 GMT
The end of Firefox
If search engine presets in browsers will be illegal, that will be the end of Mozilla and Firefox, as >99% of all revenues fo the former is from Google - or whatever search engine pays it for being the default. Now,
Mozilla could still earn some money through what's in essence search referral royalties (unless that's also plain out outlawed), but once it can not charge search engines directly for being the default, and the choice will lay with the user, the searches themselves will be worth a lot less, and Mozilla will only earn a fraction of what it does now.
Also, of course "the end" only means "as we know it", and that Mozilla will most likely change its business model, and will most likely become itself a kind of "ads dealer" or "ads marketplace", and will sell the ads it shows in the browser directly.
Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup
Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites
Friday 28th July 2023 03:11 GMT
Re: Scraping
"I don't think prohibiting web scraping through Terms of Service is legal or enforceable since it's public information that can be obtained by anyone."
That's like arguing that anyone should be able to legally drive your car, because when parked on the road it can be approached by anyone. Or that people should be allowed legally to post private pictures of you when you're in the house, since they can see you through the windows. Etc.
What you mean is not that something is "public information", but that it's "publicly available" (ie. not behind closed doors), which however doesn't mean that people can do it whatever they want. Just like you can't publish a book written and published by someone else as your own, just because anyone could obtain a copy of the book.
Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom
Tuesday 4th July 2023 11:46 GMT
Oh, the irony
"If you don't agree that AGI is coming soon, you need to explain why your views are more informed than expert AI researchers."
^ This "argument" surely was contructed by ChatGPT, not a human, and surely not by an expert on AI. Because what intelligent person would commit two logical fallacies (trying to shift the burden of proof and argument from authority) in one sentence?
Ex-FBI employee jailed for taking classified material home
Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors
Google denies Bard trained using OpenAI ChatGPT responses
Monday 3rd April 2023 09:04 GMT
They're wrong, even if not lying
It's virtually impossible that Bard has not been trained by ChatGPT responses, even if it has not been done deliberately so. That's because answers and content generated by ChatGPT has been all over the web for years now, and since Google was and is unable to differentiate between AI and human generated content (even in cases obvious to humans), the text base Bard was trained on has had to include several examples of ChatGPT-generated content.
That's the real problem with AI, which will be more and more a problem in the months and years to come: they all will feed more and more on each other's output, even if not deliberately done so, inflating and aggregating (literally) each others' flaws and misconceptions, and will gravitate to the same subpar average, as do humans, unfortunately, since content publication has been "democratized". Their answers will become as stupid and unreliable as that of the average facebook commentard's.
OpenAI CEO warns that GPT-4 could be misused for nefarious purposes
Monday 20th March 2023 16:36 GMT
Modus operandi
The "use for nefarious purposes" is not what it could be used for, but what it WILL be used for, in the majority of situations.
That's because its result are not reliable and it's not actually intelligent, therefore it can not be used in any situation where quality and reliability matters. It's only good for entertainment purposes and where it's the sheer amount of stuff is generated that's matters, and quality, verifiability, etc. is not.
It will be used for stuff like overloading people and generally the web with false information or just low quality content, filling up a ticketing system with false reports, clogging up any system that needs some kind of human intervention to validate the entries posted on it. Coupled with other AIs it will be able to emulate real people's voice and face reliably, and thus make anything but personal meetings unreliable when it comes to identity of the persons involved, and security.
That's what it will be used for primarily, and the public internet will be an even worse place than it already is.
FBI boss says COVID-19 'most likely' escaped from lab
Thursday 2nd March 2023 03:05 GMT
Nope
"It's been a popular theory among armchair commentators since the beginning. The outbreak started in Wuhan, China. There's a Wuhan Institute of Virology. QED."
Nope. That was never the argument of most, but the dumbest "armchair commentators". There were a lot more circumstances known, and all of them coming together would have to be a very strange coincident IF it was not a lab leak, but would be straightly following and consistent IF it was a lab leak.
The real smoking gun in the situation, however, is the fact that China tried everything to hide facts and hinder investigations at every point they could, which is NOT what someone innocent would do.
"An argument against that conspiracy theory"
Is your argument, that if there's a counterargument against something, then it's a conspiracy theory? Because by that definition the argument contradicting your argument also makes your argument a conspiracy theory.
The funniest thing about this article is that it still labels the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory, right after multiple credible agencies have confirmed that - based on known facts and evidence - it seems the most likely one.
Then again some people just can't even comprehend that "lab leak" != "intentionally released into the wild".
Google now won't black-hole all AI-made pages as spam
Thursday 9th February 2023 23:13 GMT
Google BS
For one, Google had this policy for at least a year if not two now. Also, they have this policy, because they're unable to tell AI generated content from human-authored content - so, they don't even try to bother.
That being said, Gogole also can't judge quality of content either, and they have been ranking low-quality AI-generated, machine translated content above high-quality human generated for years now. Any human looking at just the search result list could tell most AI generated content just by looking at the nonsensical domain names they're using or by the excerpt they're showing - yet Google itself is unable to do even basic filtering on these.
Unfortunately all this will (continue) lead to original, human content creators to stop generating content, and everything you will find through Google will regurgitated content re-written over and over by an AI, that will feed more and more on other BS content generated by other AIs.
AI will be the demise of Google, but not because ChatGPT will kill classic search, but because search itself (be it the classic form or that through ChatGPT) will become pointless and only serve up low-quality and unreliable content.
Now, the obvious solution would be to rank pages based on competence and such - but that would require an actual human understanding and evaluating the content, which, however, is something that's Google is terribly afraid of, because it costs actual money and would mean that they also have to invest, not only reap the benefits of content created by millions of others.
ChatGPT talks its way through Wharton MBA, medical exams
Tuesday 24th January 2023 06:26 GMT
Fire the CEOs
Sounds like it's about time to fire all those useless CEOs, like Tim Cook or Elon Musk, with their multi ten and hundred million dollar per year compensation packages, as AI has arrived at a point where it's perfectly capable of replacing them, for the cost of a PC and the electricity it consumes.
Then again, these people seem not to be there to make actual business decisions anyway, but to act as circus clowns for their respective companies and to generate attention to those. And there's no news of ChatGPT having mastered also the circus clown exam, yet.... so....
Russian meddling in 2016 US presidential election was weak sauce
Tuesday 10th January 2023 22:28 GMT
Except
Except this was an ongoing campaign for years even in 2016, so, only considering the direct changes right before the election totally misses the point and the magnitude of harm these troll/propaganda farms are doing (and have been doing already even by 2016) to democracies and societies in general.
John Deere signs right to repair agreement with US ag lobbyists
Monday 9th January 2023 14:30 GMT
Preemptive
This is obviously just an attempt to preempt or avoid the right to repair getting legalized by the force of law. Because if that happens, everything is lost for companies like John Deere. However, until it happens,
1. they can dictate the terms they want and strongarm consumers into accepting their terms,
2. even if they will break their own terms, if will be not breach of (consumer protection) law just breach of contract, which, again, means that consumers will have to sue JD themselves and pay their own lawyers, make it pretty hard to win against JD.
Claims of AI sentience branded 'pure clickbait'
Sunday 7th August 2022 16:30 GMT
Re: Definition
"Another important factor is understanding, an "AI" can spew out reams of conversations but it does not have any underlying understanding of the subject, it's just following (admittedly complex) rules."
That's true for most humans. You still won't claim that they are not sentient, will you?
Sunday 7th August 2022 16:29 GMT
Re: Definition
"Sentience means having the capacity to experience feelings and emotions. Consciousness is an awareness of internal and external existence. Something can be considered conscious and sentient when it has an awareness of itself in relation to external factors, and when it can experience feelings and emotions.The definition isn't difficult. "
Those are not objective definitions, because they rely on words that aren't well defined either. That's the exact problem I talked about, and shifting it will not solve it, just shift it.
Friday 5th August 2022 07:50 GMT
Definition
Until we have a universally accepted definition of what is "consciousness" / "sentience" and when can be something considered "conscious" / "sentient", this discussion is purely academic, and neither position (on whether this particular chatbot is conscious/sentient) can be objectively confirmed to be correct or incorrect.
Also interesting choice of wording: "_tricks_ humans into thinking".
The many derivatives of the CP/M operating system
Thursday 4th August 2022 11:00 GMT
Yeah, no
DOS was not a derivative of CP/M. It did not copy neither source code, nor on-disk structure from it. And mostly everything that CP/M and DOS had in common was also copied by CP/M from other operating systems that "inspired" it, like the TOPS-10, and included things like filename.extension thing, the naming of most built-in command line utilities, or even the concept of an API.
It was merely Gary Kildall who kept insisting that DOS (and really any OS that came after CP/M and wasn't absurdly distinctive in its concept) merely copied CP/M, which was in many ways similar to how Steve Jobs also always accused other OSes having copied the Mac OS - while in reality the Mac OS was also just a blatant copycat of the Xerox Alto (and not Apple's or especially Jobs' invention by any means), just like CP/M was copying the OSes that came before it.
Landmark case recognizes Bored Ape NFT as an asset
Elon Musk says Twitter buy 'cannot move forward' until spam stats spat settled
Microsoft points at Linux and shouts: Look, look! Privilege-escalation flaws here, too!
Wednesday 27th April 2022 23:36 GMT
Cry me a river
Linux fanboy's feeling hurt, because Microsoft did what for ex. Google did a million times over in the opposite direction (like publicize a Windows vulnerability, quite often even prior to public patch being released to fix it), and because his pet operating system has been exposed as "not even a tiny bit more secure" than the one he despises (and that not even just now, but every single month, for 25 years now). News at 11.
Ad-blocker blocking websites face legal peril at hands of privacy bods
Monday 25th April 2022 22:56 GMT
Re: Hrrrmm.. this feels like a stretch....
Funny how right I was with this consent wall stuff, half a decade ago. Nowadays every site greets you with the consent wall prompt, and you can't actually access the content until you click through it. If I would not be completely sure that he had virtually no influence on it because of his insignificance, I'd congratulate Alexander on bringing this plague upon all of us, for nothing.
China: Attacks from US IP addresses hit us, moved on to Russia and Ukraine
Cyberwarfare looms as Russia shells, invades Ukraine
Friday 25th February 2022 11:35 GMT
Re: Just disconnect them
"I commented on that in the comment to which you replied. I pointed out that, if you could block literally every packet, you could cause them a temporary problem but that they would find an alternative (E.G. put some people in a different country and relay instructions through a different connection such as phone, satellite, etc."
And your (invalid) point has been already addressed in the original comment, which explained, that even though the block couldn't be perfect, because Russia could circumvent it by phone or satellite, but it would still heavily restrict their bandwidth available to carry out and control such attacks, which in turn would severely hamper their abilities to do so. More importantly: it would make Russian people turn against their own government, because they would now be also paying the price directly and in many many way for Putin's ruthless actions.
Friday 25th February 2022 00:09 GMT
Just disconnect them
Just block all traffic coming from Russia. This will also block 99% of cyberattacks originating from them. Obviously there will be ways for them to get around this, but with the bandwidth available to them restricted to possibly 1/1.000.000th of what they had originally, will also mean that their capabilities to attack will also be dramatically decreased.
Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?
Wednesday 26th January 2022 03:23 GMT
Re: Windows 95 was more masterful marketing
Windows 95 was actually more a technical marvel than was NT (which was probably the most advanced general purpose operating system of its time when it was released and for decades to come), because it provided virtually full backwards compatibility with DOS and with 16-bit Windows drivers and applications, while also employing a fully 32-bit kernel with virtual machines and everything.
NT had it relatively easy, because it had a clean architecture and could drop compatibility with virtually anything, but Windows 95 had to be compatible with three different architectures, and it did do that to a degree that today's operating systems can't even provide between their own major versions.
Of course people not in the know will always moan about the remaining few percentages where the compatibility was not perfect, or about the unavoidable results of the trade-offs that had to be made to make this extraordinary feat possible in the first place, but this won't change the fact, that whoever at MS designed and implemented Windows 95 were geniuses of their time, more so than the designers of NT.
Turns out there is something everyone may agree on in Congress: Let netizens use mostly algorithm-lite apps
Wednesday 10th November 2021 04:08 GMT
Algorithms
You could at least put the word "algorithm" or "algorithm-lite" in quotes, because that word obviously doesn't mean what all these clueless senators and representatives understand it to be, and which is similarly stupid as 'understanding' the internet to be "a series of tubes".
And this isn't just pedantry, because not understanding what some words and concepts actually mean is part of the problem, and is a major hindrance in reaching a solution. For ex. if we'd call those "algorithms" what they actually are, ie. "filtering and prioritizing content in a way to optimize and maximize engagement, ignoring the societal and mental cost of this", then it would be more obvious what the solution would be or how to word a law that bans such behavior by social media companies.
But if we (well, they) will just keep calling them "algorithms", the solution will also elude us, because you obviously can't ban "algorithms" per se, and that's the last thing you really want to ban anyway.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
