cultureswitch

No need for a cookie banner if you don't collect data without consent. Every modern browser supports APIs that answer that question without pestering the user with a cookie banner.

To be fair, anyone who genuinely likes React is probably insane?

Plenty of great projects are developed by people working at Meta. Doesn't change the fact that the company as a whole should be split in at least 6 parts, and at least two thirds of these parts should be regulated to death. And when it comes to activities that do not improve anyone's life such as advertisement and data collection, I do mean literally regulated into bankruptcy.

What makes you think the regulators didn't predict the outcome?

Of course the business which depend on harvesting data will do anything they can to continue harvesting data. The regulation just makes that require consent. This is good.

If businesses are intent to keep on harvesting data by using dark patterns to obtain "consent", these businesses should either die or change. This is good.

Let's see, how many times did I get robo-called in the last decade? Zero :)

Sometimes the regulations are heavy-handed and ill-conceived. Most of the time, they are influenced by one lobby or another. For example, car emissions limits scale with _weight_ of all things, which completely defeats the point and actually makes today's car market worse for the environment than it used to be, _because of_ emissions regulations. However, it is undeniable that that the average European is better off in terms of privacy.

It is entirely unreasonable to prevent a general purpose model to be distributed for the largely frivolous reason that maybe some copyrighted works could be approximated using it. We don´t make metallurgy illegal because it's possible to make guns with metal.

When a model that has this capability is being distributed, copyright infringement is not happening. It is happening when a person _uses_ the model to reproduce a copyrighted work without the appropriate license. This is not meaningfully different to the distinction between my ISP selling me internet access and me using said internet access to download copyrighted material. If the copyright holders want to pursue people who are actually doing copyright infringement, they should have to sue the people who are actually doing copyright infringement and they shouldn't have broad power to shut down anything and everything that could be construed as maybe being capable of helping copyright infringement.

Copyright protections aren't valuable enough to society to destroy everything else in society just to make enforcing copyright easier. In fact, considering how it is actually enforced today, it's not hard to argue that the impact of copyright on modern society is a net negative.

You don't need cookie banners if you don't use invasive telemetry.

A website that sticks to being a website does not need cookie banners.

The article did in fact not make an attempt to demonstrate the claim in its title.

Imagine getting fired because you wanted to respect the DMCA of all things. I'd be curious for details, though you probably shouldn't tell.

In my experience long time contractors will absolutely "quiet quit" if put into the same catch-22 situations that push employees to do this.

The main difference at least in my region is that if you're a contractor then it's much quicker for you to quit and find a better job so the incentive to stay isn't as strong. In other words, tech workers who become contractors here usually are better contributors and have an easier time finding good offers.

It's getting sort of ridiculous how much each party is stuck in an electoral strategy where they have to pretend to be on one side of an issue which is objectively against the interests of the people they pretend to be representing.

Dems have to appear to be pro-immigration for reasons (honestly I don't know why this is like this, historically). They are genuinely less xenophobic than the Reps, so they respect the rights of recent immigrants much better. But when it comes to preventing more poor workers coming in, they are just as tough as the Reps. And I believe that's because ultimately they are slightly less captured by capital and therefore more amenable to balance the economy in favor of workers.

Reps on the other hand have to appear xenophobic once again for reasons that aren't super clear to me, but when it comes to actually preventing immigration, they always manage to torpedo their own proposals. And arguably that's because if they passed effective anti-immigration laws, that would negatively affect the interests of capital, the very obvious reason they're in politics for (and Trump is certainly no different).

Maybe now we can resolve this apparent paradox and simply accept that the Democrats are first and foremost the party of the educated, metropolitan and utterly disinterested in matters of material conditions. Whereas the Republicans are the party of people who are bitter towards the first group. Which leads to the conclusion that exceptionally few people in the US are voting according to their own economic interests.

I wonder what's the theory of harm behind such law. Employers competing over talent is... illegal? Explains a lot actually.

Reminds me of this technically true but still bizarre finding about electric bikes being ultimately more energy-efficient than human-powered bikes.

Everyone is ethically responsible for their own actions. As a software developer I don't work for ad companies. Why would a lawyer accept any client regardless of ethical concerns unless said lawyer is a scumbag?

Genius idea, though in the grand scheme of things this is probably bad.

Stanford doesn't need your money

This could also be simply due to the Ivy league institution providing the service being bought. In other words, the parents of Timmy might be fed up and stop being sponsors if he gets bad grades.

Of course in rigorous fields of study this is hard to do but if your rich kid is studying art, the grades are almost entirely arbitrary.

I'm going to have to agree with Scott Galloway here, however much I hate to admit that.

The problem isn't so much how admissions are selected, the problem is that admissions went from a fairly normal thing for any educated young adult to an extremely rare privilege.

To solve the problem, there should simply be more supply of quality higher education. And the government should stop funding institutions that profit from deliberately making their education exclusive.

Despite claiming the opposite, teenagers are sponges for whatever floats in society around them. When most of the highly valued voices in society tell them that they should be sad and anxious and traumatized, is it really surprising that it's exactly what they turn out to be?

There's a reason the amount of self-described gay and lesbians has dropped massively in regions where it is no longer transgressive at all (but being trans is, so there's a massive increase there). It could be that homosexuality was actually just a mask for a trans identity, but that's odd because it would invalidate virtually everything that has been said in defense of tolerance of gays and lesbians.

Similarly, all this "mental health awareness" has done anything but normalize mental health issues. I'm sure this is well-intentioned however intentions don't count for much. The normalization of "minor" mental health issues has led to a situation where many more people start treatment with heavy side-effects to address issues that are often less serious than the side-effects of the treatment.

Worse, and here I'm thinking mostly about ADHD, what has been normalized is not the fact that some people have less attention than others. What has been normalized is to diagnose kids with ADHD and start medicating them. We have done the opposite of normalization here: it used to be that people with rowdy behavior were just expected to naturally grow out of it. That their education would take a little bit more time. They weren't considered broken or lesser or, crucially, abnormal or sick. In effect, we have turned slight deviations from the norm in terms of this one personality trait into a disease that must be treated. And because I can already read the comments: yes, some people legitimately have ADHD to such a degree that it interferes with their life and it makes sense to medicate. However, basically nobody starts taking ADHD medicine when they're already an adult, the decision is always made for them. And few parents, doctors and teachers will advise _against_ making an annoying child more docile unless they're acutely aware of the risks. And this tendency is further reinforced because the entire school system is run by people who have no idea what being a 4-to-18 years old boy is like and don't want to know.

The parallels between real life and Brave New World are positively uncanny.

Even the demographic dynamics of the real world suggest that we're on the path to a state-driven reproductive system.

Having been on the receiving end of actual real-life bullying from 90% of my peers (the other 10% being bystanders) through high school because I was younger (among other things), I can tell you that Lord of the Flies is in some ways depicting the kids as less cruel than real kids are.

Sounds interesting, could you translate to English?

The cap and trade principle is sound however legislators have allowed naked scams to legally claim that they are offsetting carbon output.

Such as owning a piece of forest land and pinky-swear you're not going to exploit it. This offsets nothing. There is no additional carbon being absorbed out of the atmosphere. Yet this counts as emission reduction.

Big difference between allowing everyone build nukes and allowing everyone to share the information necessary to build nukes.

So you're admitting that an AGI that pipes into /dev/null is harmless even if given the directive to destroy humanity?

The danger is in what they're hooked up to, not the containerized math that happens inside the model.

I agree with the analysis though LLMs might not be the specific tech that makes it.

I think the truly humanity-respecting solution is to figure out and implement a stable and fair-er 50% post-labor society before we actually get there. UBI (not the unmanaged flash layer) sounds like one part of the solution.

Trying to preserve employment is demonstrably wrong when already today there are too few unskilled jobs that make economic sense for the large amount of humans unable to learn more complex tasks.

I don't think your example is very compelling but I completely agree with your general point.

I read the Go book by Donovan and Kernighan and I have been working full-time in Go for the last year (my work is otherwise interesting so this is tolerable). It is painfully obvious that the authors are stuck in 1986 in terms of language design. Go is C with modernized tooling (in some ways it's worse...).

It's a horrible idea that has been extremely well executed. And the idea is essentially to make a language as easy as possible for people with imperative language brain damage to learn, make it as simple as possible and then make it simpler than that.

A good example is that despite taking almost everything verbatim from C, the authors decided that the ability to specify that some variable is read-only (i.e. `const`) is "not useful", so one of the few redeeming qualities of C is simply absent from Go.

I'm hoping you're right but I have yet to see a gas heater that actually heats up the water that cooled down in the pipes since the last usage so that you actually get warm water instantly.

I generally agree with you when it comes to learning-focused content but there are definite cases where using an AI summary makes a lot of sense.

Imagine searching for a guide on how to disassemble your laptop. Unfortunately, you can only find a 30 minute video which is full of rambling, ads or other things irrelevant to you. You can at least in theory use AI to produce a textual summary which contains only the disassembly instructions and relevant snapshots of the video.

All professionals I've ever talked to seem to agree that videos are a terrible form of reference information (i.e. you need information to accomplish a task right now).

The same applies to recipe websites: an AI that can throw all the fluff away is useful considering the annoying habit of the authors to seemingly write about everything but ingredients and the steps necessary to cook the dish.

I think this relates to the https://nick.groenen.me/posts/the-4-types-of-technical-docum... as in any documentation that serves immediate work rather than learning should be straight to the point with as little clutter as possible.

I think it should always be legal to use the likeness of deceased people.

Could it be gross? Yes. But I'd rather have that than the absurdity of copyright be extended to beyond the grave for yet another case where it makes no sense. There is no theory of harm here, the person being impersonated is dead.

Could you damage the reputation of a living person by using the image of a dead one? Of course, but that's already illegal.

Stuffing explosives into civilian appliances is the definition of indiscriminate.

If doing this isn't already banned by the Geneva Conventions, it is only because it wasn't practical to do. But then again, very little that has happened in this region during the last 80 years has been following any international law.