FriendOfDeSoto

The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure.

Nothing has gone through parliament yet. That’s not to say that a majority of twats couldn’t be found there. But crucially I think this is not something a floundering PM can decree on his own authority. So far this threat is about as believable as any statement by the incumbent American president on Iran.

The ruling isn’t final.

On that we are agreed. The headline speaks of a landmark ruling, which I think is too much acclaim for a decision a higher court could just dismiss.

I think my sniping at Bavaria speaks for itself.

They don’t need sway as much as money and lawyers, which I imagine they have. And this verdict is probably on the worst outcome end of the scale for them. I cannot imagine they will accept a ruling that calls them daft like this one does. They will try to water down liability for their model’s fantasy summaries. Whether they succeed is a different question. But they will try, so they will appeal, so this verdict isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Yet.

All I said is that this verdict isn’t effective yet. These headlines and sadly this article buries this fact in a sentence in the last paragraph. Blink and you miss it stuff. Lemmies tend to overlook this and declare victory over Google when this was merely the first battle of the war.

This isn’t final. Google has time to appeal. Let’s hold off on the label “landmark” until it reaches legal effectiveness. Which it probably won’t, however good a verdict by a German regional court, much less one based in Bavaria, this is in my opinion.

Google lawyers arguing in court that Google’s so-called AI results are shit anyways and people should know it is chef’s kiss.

“We will change the law” means they haven’t changed it yet. And this PM is so god damn popular in his own party, they are just trying to get his possible replacement in in an otherwise unnecessary byelection. This sounds decisive but isn’t a fait accompli by any stretch of the imagination. The tech big guns will sound amenable to such a policy but will do fuck all.

Even for a non-bank website, I imagine there is an octogenarian federal judge somewhere in the States who is still puzzled by fax machines who made a ruling holding website owners liable if they didn’t do this when they know of any vulnerability that could affect the user. So there is a possible legal angle as well.

The people who use browsers other than the ones listed will either never see this message or know how to upgrade on their own.

I think this is not a clean cut case of evil planned obsolescence. There are valid security concerns, as browsers are a common attack vector. You should get that updated, also to protect your privacy while surfing online. So for a banking site or similar, I kind of get it. (I recognize there is a possible conundrum when people can’t go bank in person because the bank no longer has branches and/or get excluded by their old hardware/economic reasons from doing it online. Should they be able to choose risking it if the bank knows about a flaw they then leave exposed? Shit’s complicated.)

That being said I’m sure this banner of corporate concern was not primarily motivated by the security and privacy of their users.

Any post formatted like this one looks like it was spat out by a model…

Just don’t block the ads or pay for premium. That makes YT so thoroughly unenjoyable you’ll be on TikTok in no time.

I guess something’s gotta give because when it comes to finishing their prey they are playfully underwhelming.

I think you’re paranoid.

The estimates vary a bit but you can say a significant portion of the people fired in the tech sector lost their jobs for financial reasons, not AI as is often purported. The tech sector over hired a lot during the pandy and that meant they’re correcting that. And the investment into so-called AI are so big they need to save somewhere else, i.e. overhead.

Can you check the manufacturer of the frame? Maybe their website offers a clue. If not, where did they buy them. If it’s a brick and mortar optometrist, go there. Or convince your partner to get new frames with more standardized lenses.

Unless you’re running a model on an air gapped machine that will never connect to the internet again, there is no privacy preserving way to use so-called AI today. All the providers will tell you it’s no problem. But then you read the news about which model fucked up what today. And it’s a lot. Anybody using so-called AI today is voluntarily participating in a massive, not well organized beta test. At their own jeopardy.

So don’t give it your medical history and don’t talk to it about your innermost thoughts. Try to keep it out of your internet browser and history if you can.

New account, Vader?

Only the shittest superpowers imaginable.

I can imagine such a scenario as well because we are humans and we would do dumb shit like that.

FTL can mean different things. It could be the Trekkian warping space around you. It could be the Galactican jump to somewhere else. Or a portal. Or something else. Which tech it will be will matter. And different to most sci-fi, there could be more than one way if indeed c can be smashed.

The problem with space is that it isn’t completely empty and stuff in it moves like evil landmines. You don’t want to warp into a moon or jump inside an asteroid belt. Which means you will need this sort of highway or scenic spot system of space that is actually confirmed empty so travel along the route doesn’t blow you up or jumping doesn’t mean you accidentally end up in a black hole. In my mind, that would prohibit the use of the technology inside a star system because there are two many moving parts to consider and keep track of. So you need to take a year-long sub-LTS access ramp to reach the highway at the edge of the solar system before you can move safely faster than a flash. The same is true for the resource rich destination.

That’s why I can also imagine a scenario where having the technology might not be as impactful as we fear and thus not lead to war. The infrastructure would have to be so massive to make this work, it isn’t an immediate advantage to have it. More of a burden really, provided the economy still roughly works as it does today. And if we have the tech to reach the edge of our solar system in a shuttle bus service kind of way, we will be already enlarging our resource pool with stuff we find inside our solar system in an early Expansian kind of way. Better ROI on that than stuff from further away.

One of the funniest videos of politicians that I’ve seen recently was a casual meetup of Poland’s PM Donald Tusk and the then incoming Hungarian PM Magyar. He had just defeated Viktor Orban, Putin’s fifth column in the EU and authoritarian asshole of the year. Magyar introduces one of his ministers to Tusk. I don’t remember which ministry but her name is also Orban. Tusk is ever so briefly taken aback by the mention of that name, which Magyar realizes and quickly adds: “No relation.” They giggle at the mixup and Tusk just fires off nonchalantly something like: “Well, my name is Donald.” They laugh and move on.

Citations needed

Didn’t have it for ET but for Disney movies that weren’t published on VHS at all because in my region they just kept rereleasing Snowwhite and Jungle Book in theaters periodically.

I’ve recorded songs off the radio too. I have copied VHSs as well later in life when a buddy had to bring over their recorder so we could hook them up to each other.

And the first music torrent was in maybe 7th grade and up. Somebody would get a new CD for their birthday or xmas and after a couple of weeks of exclusive listening Guns’n’Roses or Metallica would go from friend to friend where everybody got themselves a copy on cassette tape. There would be strategic planning like you get Michael Jackson (we didn’t know back then) and you get U2 or whatever around December.