bigfudge

Being “unenforceable” doesn’t stop them making your life a misery in the process, ruining your credit rating etc.

Can someone explain to me why any farmer buys JD? It seems like $1000 oil filters is something farmers would notice and talk about in that community?

I agree. Beyond scale and inertia against moving (and frontier AI models) it’s not obvious to me what would be hard to replicate in Europe given regulation that mandated non-US hosting.

Most companies using hyper scalers are doing weird superstitious things at the behest of overpaid consultants. And the huge margins they take make it easier to adapt to things like higher electricity costs.

Even if these companies monopoly falters after IPO the disruption and distraction to a focus on producing can be a problem.

But now your argument also depends on no opportunity costs for doing unneeded mri, or infinite medical resources.

As I said … we really don’t known how much harm billionaires are suffering (sob) and there are much simpler explanations for their longevity.

As someone who was self taught as a programmer and has a reasonable high level understanding of some CS concepts but not lots of experience applying them, and no good mentor, I’ve found working with an LLM really englightening. Asking Claude to think about “good ways to structure this” or asking how similar problems get solved in industry or high profile projects has really helped me design better solutions and avoid painfully reinventing wheels (recent eg was for a plugin type architecture).

I think a lot of academics and researchers who code but aren’t software engineers or CS majors are going to benefit, provided they take the time to prove what the model does and are curious about whether it’s doing something sensible!

Relative to a 1% coder hand rolling something then yes it’s AI slop etc. but it’s prob still raising the bar generally.

A good harness and engineering is important no matter which model you use. But Sovereignty of hosting is also important because without it all pii is being leaked.

The EU economy has absorbed covid and the Russian war in that time. It’s pretty unsurprising that things are flat.

The main thing Europe lacks is economies of scale in investment in tech, and a common language. Big data tech wasn’t a priority until we realised it was going to be weaponised against us by an ally. I think we’ll do fine. Most of AWS and Azure is expensive superstitious cover your ass bullshit anyway. It could all be regulated away with proper data residency laws, which I hope are coming soon.

First, many regular people are “stupid” in the sense that they do get anxious about things that ar slow probability and are not anxious about things that are high probability.

If you are a billionaire you also have a doctor with the time and expertise to properly evaluate the evidence in a Bayesian framework, and you have time to talk to them and understand and implications. That isn’t scalable.

Also, it’s quite likely that billionaires are having lots of unnecessary procedures and that harm is being caused. The mri scans are not the reason they live longer!

I mostly agree with you by one small wrinkle is that the evaluation of screening is normally against a criteria of cost effectiveness as well as safety. So for some conditions, if cost effectiveness was the barrier to rollout it might still be worth it if you are rich?

This kind of thinking (that it’s an obvious lie, perpetrated by a cabal) is the sort of superstitious bullshit that is going to jet us all killed. Look up Bayes theorem. As yourself how good a test would have to be if the base rate is low. Wonder what the probability of harm might be if the next advised test was invasive and the patients was anxious because a lump had been detected.

Europe is currently hosed because we made the mistake of trying to develop economies complementary to the US and china.

That was a big strategic mistake. In the US case it was borne of the mistaken belief that we shared values and were partners.

But don’t mistake the situation for lack of innovation of capability. Europe is currently adapting, but I think the success of Ukraine is one reason to be optimistic that current adversity might actually leave us better off in the long run.

Corrupt countries with broken legal systems tend not to fare that well in the longer run.

Support bots and question answering with access to sensitive pii?

But if a teenager says he’s going to spend 50k going to university to study engineering you might support then.

I agree there is likely some hubris in this sort of announcement, but investing in European expertise and industrial base in this area is important.

The culture shift that has generated this is the same one that causes the other story on HN this morning about xAIs gas generators being a national security issue. Ie one towards corruption graft and the public ill.

I don’t want Europe to model itself on the US, whatever the economic gain. Hopefully we are large enough to find a third way between China and the US.

https://xkcd.com/1319/

I think there will be a lot of this going on for the first few years, till everyone remembers this:

https://xkcd.com/1205/

Probably true. But that’s not the position we are in now. Apple is much better aligned with users interests than any one else, at least for short/medium term.

You’re shifting the goalposts somewhat, but the thing this misses is that the cookie banners are the least important aspect of EU data regulation. The principle of consent and of minimising data held has actually made a substantial different in European firms, mostly for the better.

It's shallow because it doesn't acknowledge that there is a real tradeoff. I share a lot of your cynicism about US tech companies, but I think you need to be realistic about the state of the market and how the incentives align.

Apples incentives are not, currently, as strongly misaligned with their user interests as many other tech firms (meta, google, random startups, etc). Going slowly might not be a bad idea for most people here.

That said, I hadn't seen the demo you mention. If they do do that (bank passwords etc) they are stupider than I thought they would be.

For me, it's real regulations about what data can reasonably be hoovered, what it's used for, for how long. And a culture where the majority don't blindly click yes to all messages like that because the only alternative is not to use the shiny new thing they have been sold. I don't think it could ever appear in the US, which is why it's a good thing apple won't be forced to open up there. But if the EU does insist, they should be careful what they wish for and plan for the negative consequences of a free for all.

I do too, but in this case the choice isn't between apple and the EU. It's between apple and the <random rapacious vc backed ai startup looking to hoover your data> your non-technical friends foolishly trust, without much understanding of the implications for them or society as a whole.

Ultimately I think it's important for the EU to regulate companies like apple to ensure competition. But in this instance, it doesn't seem like we have all the other pieces in place that would be necessary for a sensible rollout of that.

Yes, there's a lot of cargo culting in web development.

Many US based companies also do this for US visitors, which is absolutely not required by the GDPR and related regulations, because they don't apply there.

The law states:

Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.

Strictly necessary:

These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies.

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

You don't need consent for MOST reasonable uses of cookies. If compliance theatre wasn't such an industry the web would be a lot tidier and we could stop blaming the EU for implementing important privacy and data controls.

Nothing in the law requires the pop up. It definitely doesn’t require the obnoxious bullshit that most companies put up (aka the dark pattern to get you to agree to every unreasonable part of their terms just to read the page).

The alternative would be to just stop invasive tracking and add the cookie when it’s actually needed.

This is such a shallow take. There are obvious privacy and security tradeoffs here. The EU competition framework is good in many ways, but this is actually something I don’t think we have the regulatory frameworks in place to handle yet , or social norms and understanding about why giving any Tom dick and Harry root on all your data is a bad idea.

It’s paternalistic, but I agree with Apple that free for all access to this kind of data is not a great idea. Ironically, before this could work we’d actually need much more EU style data regulation, and more consistently enforced.

I think we’re actually agreeing the terms are confusing. The point is that Western European socialism is not the same as the thing that was essentially synonymous with communism in the USSR in the early 20th century.

In the UK at least, the distinction was important because calling oneself a socialist was acceptable, whereas being a communist during the Cold War was not.

I’ve installed Hex on os x. You just hold down a hot key to talk and it writes into whatever text entry widget is focussed.

I remember people saying the same thing. It was some time ago. Turns out some markets really aren’t that efficient and corporate capture really is a thing…

The funding bill is never getting past the Senate, and even if it were the money is unlikely to reach Ukraine unless the current admin has a fundamental change of heart.

But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.

You can’t have it both ways though. The policies enacted in Northern Europe would definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians, Democrats included.