fidotron

It's actually going to raise questions as to why the EU are A-OK with this now when a possible interpretation of associate membership is it's what Cameron was trying to negotiate the UK into when complete inflexibility on the EU side triggered the Brexit referendum.

All depends on what an associate member is of course.

The only "way" involves greasing the palms of every special interest group in the way until they have successfully accounted for the whole potential revenue of the intended enterprise, and that's what blocked everything repeatedly.

I'm in Quebec and very familiar with the exact territory this has applied to wrt getting resources out on the east coast, and unless someone was willing to rule by decree to bypass all those entrenched groups it's not happening, and we all know why such decrees would not happen as well.

And many of those products are not only good they're becoming good in ways nowhere else can do.

This is being heavily downvoted, but it's dangerously close to true.

In ten years the downvoters will not only agree with this, but have moved on to "and that's a good thing".

Welcome to Canada where the regulations are in fact provincial.

Canadian provinces have a harder time trading with each other than countries in the EU, although thanks to the sales tax and package transit changes the EU is becoming competitive in this area.

The LNG won't come from Canada either. Trudeau notoriously said "there's no business case" for it, but the truth is they can't agree with how to actually get enough of it to the east coast to make a difference, and that's what blocks it. (In fairness the route does go through some very unique environments).

Canadian provinces have a far bigger ability to screw things up for the whole than countries do inside the EU, and people remotely familiar with the EU will understand what a strong statement that is.

> CA is a scandal primarily due to account escalation, I thought. Not about who got elected

It quite clearly wasn't, and that's the point, for the simple reason "Account escalation" isn't/wasn't a thing, there were simply no controls on anyone at all, which is why the Cow Clicker game got everything as well.

As the parent commenter observed the Obama campaign were being promoted as geniuses for their online ad strategies that worked with information obtained this way. It only became a scandal when the others learned how to do it.

Indeed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/my-co...

And the entire FB app industry was doing it.

The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was one of the oddest most bizarrely specific media manufactured scandals that conveniently focused very narrowly and utterly ignored the bigger picture, much like the media are currently doing with something else.

Exactly. If we had the semantic web, content and presentation were separated, or any of the other dreams that died then AI agents wouldn't be so useful because we'd be able to do stuff like that already without them. Instead for decades piles of worthless gunk has got between people and what they're trying to do in order to prop up the whole ad economy that has wrecked it all.

While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.

Not only that, people have seriously memory holed the state the original iPhone launched in.

No App Store, only web apps, not even 3G, only Yahoo push mail, and tied to AT&T - who were loathed, because in many places they just sucked. And it succeeded anyway.

It was when Exchange push support came in the first major OS upgrade that corporate adoption exploded.

Hardware is hardware. At some point you have to run and test it on the real thing, and it always misbehaves in some previously undiscovered way.

A lot of software people live under the illusion that hardware bugs don't happen, but they're ubiquitous and it's the job of firmware and OS people to reduce their impact.

Edit: I should add anyone that's worked with me knows I strongly advocate offline fuzz testing of all software components, especially to deal with unexpected states coming from the hardware side. This has proven unreasonably effective, and absolutely is something agents can help with, but they won't solve the whole problem.

> you're bored by the mature form factor.

Actually, no. It's the irrelevant changes, such as Liquid Glass, which are the problem, where we all are made to learn new stuff to keep some designers busy.

> I don't see that happening unless the new hardware and the way people interact with it is truly "magical" in some sense.

But a truly AI enabled interface _would be_ magical. Being able to have a phone where your interface to it is completely built around your preferences, and not change at the whim of some external designer, for example. Where apps are merely things it uses on your behalf in the background . . . Neither Apple or Google could do this because it would disrupt their own cash cows too much.

There is also a lot of scope for using neural nets to drive peripherals (including moving parts) in non obvious ways which could add to it all.

App store inertia has to be the decisive roadblock, and yeah, there would need to be some workaround.

This could also be where China gets another win because of their de-Googled Android-not-Android ecosystem which would enable more competition in their local market than can be achieved elsewhere.

Android has a huge amount of battle tested stuff for running things like media codecs and GPUs connected to devices that are not rebooted for months on end by normal people. (The iPhone wasn't an entirely new OS either for a good reason).

The whole vibe coding an OS might become a thing in the next few years, but you still have to QA and test it, and there simply hasn't actually been enough time for that.

Both Apple and Google have dropped the ball enough with the state of recent releases that some iPhone-equivalent-disruption product from the AI industry is becoming conceivable, though I would be surprised if it turns out not to be running Android in some form.

Putting a lot of effort into pushing complexity into software to reduce manufacturing complexity is precisely the sort of thing you worry about when you're getting serious about building consumer products.

While 90% of Canadian tech grads work in the US on TN visas.

This stuff doesn't actually help Canada at all, it's in a bit of a development trap.

Does it really have enough fidelity of distinguishing gestures for that today?

I was under the impression the set is pretty limited and maybe not completely robust (like per person setup/calibration etc.)

The vibe coders have finally discovered their killer interface, and it is kind of cool, especially if integrated with voice inputs.

Yes he does - it makes him one of the most powerful people on earth.

I mean, this seems fairly clear.

Either OpenAI fails, and goes nowhere.

Or it succeeds, in which case IPOing will be a quaint aspect of history.

People really aren't following through on what it means for any of these companies to succeed.

So what you're saying is you're more valuable to advertisers . . . which means the amount you are worth to them grows with the amount you'd spend to avoid them.

Unless this stuff is made literally illegal they will keep doing it, because it's far more profitable than the alternatives. This is precisely why ideas like paying for a privacy respecting option on Facebook could never work.

Well if it proves useless presumably they'd stop doing it.

But if AI is to recursively self improve understanding and evolving its own foundations, which are clearly mathematical, is essential. There is no need for humans to grasp what is going on in that loop.

> It's a bit like a tree falling in a forest. If an LLM proves a theorem but no one understands it, did it make a sound?

But in future most proofs will be for consumption by other AI models in the pursuit of yet other proofs.

It's kind of surprising so many mathematicians act surprised by this given this was clearly where automated proof assistants would lead. I guess they assumed they'd always be the ones guiding them.

Given the rate of progress in robotics, if AI works then there won't be anyone left standing to worry about.

That's the whole point of doing it fast, otherwise yes they will attempt to slow things down so they can take advantage of the intermediate state where some are still standing, temporarily, to get rid of the others. And that is very much what a lot of the current pausing noise is in aid of.

I see you don't understand the point, and you're doing that thing of imposing on me trying to help you understand it, which seems highly unlikely to work. Going back, again, to your quote:

> I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it

And yet that is quite simply exactly what I have seen multiple times in multiple organisations on multiple continents, but for some reason you "doubt" this because it doesn't fit what you think of as "smart behaviour" when spelled out like that, and then spend ages arguing that now there's no intent to this comment? Or any of the others . . .

I am going to do what I always end up doing in such situations, of just giving up and walking away, which every normal person does way earlier in proceedings. Ils sont fou ces physiciens.

Disenfranchising everyone at once beats disenfranchising enough to be a problem but not enough to motivate a solution, which is what the drip feeding achieves.

> really rapid change always creates huge openings for assholes and opportunists to take over.

This all depends on where the change ends. If it ends with ASI existing then it all works out.

If it ends with only sufficient AI to weaponise against the masses but not smart enough to escape the people pulling the strings then it's game over, and a totalitarian surveillance nightmare awaits.

Right now we're approaching the level of the second scenario already, but remain quite a long way (relatively speaking) from ASI. Slowing down simply makes the nightmare version more likely in the long run.

Honestly, I don't think any of us know exactly what's coming.

The difficult part is preventing the humans from causing the collapse of civilisation in the time before AI actually gets to ASI.

> I can't believe the AI boosters were right.

Not even sure they can believe it.

The AI field has known, but repeatedly ignored, that the knowledge work group would end up first on the chopping block, especially for those where everything they touch is digitally encoded already.

I used to joke that we're all really in trouble when robots can sort out your socks, but as of about a year ago I started seeing disturbing progress on that incredibly gnarly problem.

Most people really are going to be in denial about this as a coping mechanism, but the truth is the worst thing would be slowing down the spread of this through the economy creating large minorities of disenfranchised. It would be far better to get to the end asap, whatever it proves to be.

> It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart).

But you expressed doubt of stated (and frankly not even remotely subjective) experience, so if we dropped you in an organisation your immediate response to anything you don't understand is "That doesn't match my mental model, so I doubt it actually happened", followed by either everyone giving up or you insisting everyone persuade you of absolutely every last detail of everything. It's enormously tedious, and the reason it comes across as arrogant is the demands put on everyone else to explain everything to you because you clearly see everyone else as incapable of the same level of insights that you are, all the while you are telling people what they experience is them being mistaken.

Just look at the way you questioned whether or not I could tell if someone is actually smart or not. It's just plain insulting. And it's not just me, it's everyone that has this same experience which forms the basis of the stereotype.