They are also collectively rational, as a response to an ecosystem that's spun out of control and habitually consumes rats nests of dependencies.
Early participation and beta programs are outsourcing careful engineering via making everybody else guinea pigs. If we want to sling around accusations of free-riding (really?!), you're slacking on testing and free-riding on your early users.
I really wish we'd stop arguing about AI with an "some automation failed, so all automation is bad" approach.
Yes, AF447 crashed due to lack of training for a specific situation. And yet, air travel is safer than ever.
Yes, that Tesla drove into a wall, and yet robotaxis exist, work well, and are significantly safer than human drivers.
Yes, there are a lot of "witchcraft" approaches to working with AI, but there are also significant accelerations coming out of the field that have nothing to do with AI.
Yes, AI occasionally makes very stupid mistakes - but ones any competent engineer would have guardrails in place against.
And so a lot of the piece spends time arguing strawmen propped up by anecdotes. And that detracts from the deeply necessary discussion kicked off in the second part, on labor shock, capital concentration, and fever dreams of AI.
The problem of AI isn't that it's useless and will disrupt the world. It's that it's already extremely useful - and that's the thing that'll lead to disrupting the world.
I think you're maybe oversimplifying a bit. I dont think the argument here is that "AI" is not 100% so we shouldn't use AI. There are issues we need to be aware of.
Specifically, AI companies want to inflate the utility of AI because that's how they make money. There should be guardrails where appropriate. Unfortunately, as usual, we need to make mistakes before we can learn from them.
I think you may have missed a subtle point: there is an especial risk from automation which almost always works correctly. The aviation industry calls the phenomenon "automation fatigue". It's very difficult for humans to stay alert and monitor systems like these, and the use of the systems tends to lead to de-skilling over time in the very skills required to monitor them and fix the (rare but fatal - at least in aviation) error cases when they occur.
It also means you're so helpless as a developer that you could never debug another person's code, because how would you recognize the errors, you haven't made them yourself.
"We recognise you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore cannot grant you access at this time. For any issues, e-mail us at info@franklinnews.org or call us at (847) 497-5230."
This is extremely funny given it's an article about privacy concerns :)
A US based non-profit news organization isn’t going to spend money to pay lawyers to ensure they meet a regulatory burden that doesn’t affect their core demographic.
> A US based non-profit news organization isn’t going to spend money to pay lawyers to ensure they meet a regulatory burden that doesn’t affect their core demographic.
I like being covered by gdpr.
Though I really cannot see any country's gdpr peops taking anyone in the US to court.
A very simple "Fuck you" (along the lines of The Pirate Bay) would end any legal conversations.
It would be different if the news organisation had an office in the EU.
Anyway, i have a vpn, so....
The UK is not part of the US (yet?) nor the EU, but they're currently fining US companies - it doesn't surprise me at all that many take the easy answer of "ban them by IP".
I love seeing this, and love seeing regulations working exactly as wanted! What I see is basically "We're unable to serve this website without compromising your privacy, so instead of pretending or giving you a choice, we give you this message so you can turn around".
> "We're unable to serve this website without compromising your privacy... "
More accurately, "we do not have the staff or funds to figure out what every single random law around the globe requires of us, and since foreign countries are not a realistic advertising market for a local Michigan newspaper, there's really no reason for us to try."
Well, you don't have to do any of that stuff if you either are upfront about selling user data and ask if it's OK, or if you just don't do that stuff at all.
But to know that you would have to study the laws of other countries or in this case EU which costs money and in this case is not an obviously beneficial investment.
Why not? That continent is not their target audience.
It probably wasn't worth the effort to block foreign countries just from random unnecessary compute cost to serve a site to them, but when those countries start being serious about penalties you could face for serving their residents? Now it's justifiable to block non-US countries.
I'm sure they (or whoever sells the product they use to publish) did get legal advice, of the "what is the cheapest way to ensure this isn't an issue for us" and the response was "block 'em all, let God VPN them out."
After all, using a VPN doesn't absolve companies of the GDPR.
No, it can also be saying "I simply have too many other things to do than worry about what the correct data retention or ban appeal or DSA statement of reasons requirement or DSA statement of reasons transparency DB API or UK Ofcom age verification requirements or..."
Sometimes if you're just one person and the EU isn't a core market and you are a small business or non-profit, it's easier to just say, ok you know what, no thanks to all this for now.
That's absurd. Are you, right now, compliant with all relevant laws and regulations in Turkmenistan? Do you have legal advice to back that up? Why not? Is it because you're a criminal?
No! Of course not! It's because you don't care about Turkmenistan, to the extent you've never even bothered to look up what is and is not legal there, let alone get legal advice about it. That's a perfectly fine answer. This random Michigan newspaper doesn't care about the EU. That's a perfectly fine answer too.
No Turkmen official will approach you to ask that question. You would need to anticipate what the important questions are to comply with Turkmenistan's laws (or hire somebody to figure this out).
That would be rather surprising to the large number of law schools that teach European Law as a core subject, such as the Panthéon-Sorbonne (Droit européen), Bologna U (Diritto Europeo), and Humboldt U (Europarecht).
Also not a "European law" by any measure or understanding, that's a international organization that does police cooperation across the continent (and further), it isn't even a law enforcement agency... Not exactly sure how you could confuse that with laws, but here we are.
If your site is covered by GDPR and you do not have a physical presence in the EU you have to appoint someone in the EU to receive mail on your behalf, so people who want to make GDPR requests by mail can write to them. See Article 27.
There are services that will do this for you. Last I checked they were typically in the neighborhood of a couple hundred Euros a year.
Whether or not GDPR applies to a site not in the EU is somewhat subjective. It comes down to whether you envisaged serving people in the EU.
If your site does not need EU visitors it can make some sense to block them. That provides evidence that you did not envisage serving people in the EU, and then you don't have to figure out if you need to be hiring a service in the EU to receive GDPR mail.
>since foreign countries are not a realistic advertising market for a local Michigan newspaper
This may be true for in house ads, but there are ad networks that already are able to personalize ads and have ad inventory for such foreign countries.
But that's the thing, making them outright say "we don't care about respecting stupid laws in your country" (which for us means "we need to continue to be able to sell user data without notifying we do this") is not an "issue", that's the whole benefit of it in the first place.
Anyways, it sounds like a win-win here, they get to not care, and we get to be rejected with clear reasons why, so again, benefits all around.
What does GDPR get you that browser settings and an extension don't? I'm genuinely curious how random websites refusing to serve content / spamming cookie banners is a good thing?
The data download and removal side of GDPR seems useful for more "entrenched" use cases where you have an account and a long history on a service but... fly-by website visits should not be this heavily regulated. Blocking cookies and scripts is trivial.
I should not need extensions for a business to respect my privacy. It's as simple as that.
If you look at it through an equity angle, needing extensions relegates the negative effects to those that are already not "well off" — the technologically illiterate who don't know what to do or know someone who does.
So someone's refusal to make a couple clicks to install an extension necessitates: 1) millions of users having to click to get the annoying popup off their screen, 2) installing an extension to block those anyway, and 3) a more fractured internet where website operators outright refuse to serve content because of liability? I'd bet a very large sum of money that the technologically illiterate don't read anything on those popups and click "Accept all cookies"
How does someone's refusal to install an extension necessitate millions of users having to close the popup? I guess you mean someone as in "vast majority of population"?
> I'm genuinely curious how random websites refusing to serve content / spamming cookie banners is a good thing?
They refuse to allow visitors to visit their website without taking, processing and selling their data and letting those visitors know that this is happening. That they outright block me instead of doing those anyways, clearly is a good thing and in my benefit.
Right... as if can trust some random American or other non-European website that it really respects the law. What are you gonna do if it breaks the GDPR law? GDPR ruined the Internet.
I see we're once again missing the existence of indirect impact. There's a reason organizations look at revenue/engineer overall instead of trying to attribute it directly to specific teams.
I guess his students get to relearn that on their own.
Also, any post talking about building software and then contains the suggestion that "cost per unit" is an efficiency metric needs to come to the red courtesy phone, Taylorism would like to have a chat about times gone by.
> It's not a weird sentiment to want to know what benefits a gift is providing.
"I bought you tickets for your favorite artist for your birthday. I expect a detailed trip report" :)
Yes, you're right, personal gifts aren't donations, but then maybe we should stop calling donations gifts, too. Gifts are given without any expectations attached. Donations do and should have expectations.
Without showing the prompts and responses, it's yet another meaningless AI benchmark.
Many of those numbers do not really match what I've seen in the wild, and without clear illustration why you arrived at the number it's not a helpful number.
It's that your health care system the doctor is in builds a few extra hurdles. I've talked to my (non-tele) doctor about GLP-1. I've tried losing weight before, with her, there's a long history.
To get approval, between the hospital my doc is in and the insurance, I need to:
1) Have a BMI of >30. Since it's only 29.5, I get to stuff my face if I want to lose weight.
2) Have six sessions with a nutritionist. Which are massively useless, their advice is roughly equivalent to reading Cosmopolitan. I know because I had prior conversations, and they're documented. But still, gotta do it again.
3) Do six months on Weight Watchers. Which is one massive scam leading you right to disordered eating. Also, I've tried for years to lose weight via diet changes, documented and talked through with my doc.
4) Before I can get tirzepatide, I have to get semaglutide for three months to see if it works. Never mind there's study over study over study showing it's slightly less effective and has massively more side effects.
Or I can just cough up the cash directly and buy from Eli Lilly, if somebody signs that receipt.
I'm fortunate enough I could afford that, so I did. (After a second consultation with my family's doctor back home - both they and my doctor agreed it was appropriate, so it's not just a case of "wanting is enough")
And after six months, my weight was in a much better region, lipid panels were much improved, other related biomarkers looked better as well - exactly as numerous studies and my doctors said one could expect.
So, as long as I cough up enough money, sure, I can bypass all the hoops. My health didn't enter the equation, just screw the poors (whose treatment for worse outcomes because they couldn't get access will cost a whole lot more than GLP-1 would've cost).
So, fuck the "prescription hurdle" and the medical system in the US with a hot white glowing iron rod right up the ass.
As for "these are not drugs that anyone can safely take without guidance", that's not really true either.
They're neither hard to take - "inject one vial once a week into the flabby part" isn't rocket science - nor does it cause massive health risks by itself. (And the hazard ratios for diabetes 2 and cardio events are so spectacularly low that they dwarf the other risks)
Yes, talking to a doc is a good idea. No, the current gatekeeping is in no way necessary.
Those are coverage requirements from your insurance company. Consider yourself lucky to even have any path to get these covered under insurance -- most insurance plans do not cover weight loss drugs under any circumstances.
The diagnostic criteria is simply (BMI > 30) OR (BMI > 27 + a weight related comorbidity like high blood pressure or high cholesterol)
> They're neither hard to take - "inject one vial once a week into the flabby part" isn't rocket science
It's not that they're difficult to administer, it's that dosage needs to be managed appropriately.
Early participation and beta programs are outsourcing careful engineering via making everybody else guinea pigs. If we want to sling around accusations of free-riding (really?!), you're slacking on testing and free-riding on your early users.
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