gond

That possibly cannot be the common notion to frame this.

I agree with some parts it but also see two significant issues:

1. It is even statistically implausible that everyone working at the EU is tech-illiterate and stupid and everybody at HN is a body of enlightenment on two legs. This is a tech-heavy forum, but I would guess most here are bloody amateurs regarding theory and science of law and you need at least two disciplines at work here, probably more.

This is drifting too quickly into a territory of critique by platitudes for the sake of criticism.

2. The EU made an error of commission, not omission, and I think that that is a good thing. They need to make errors in order to learn from them and get better. Critique by using platitudes is not going to help the case. It is actually working against it. The next person initiating a EU procedure to correct the current error with the popups will have the burden of doing everything perfectly right, all at once, thought through front to back, or face the wrath of the all-knowing internet. So, how should that work out? Exactly like this: we will be stuck for half an eternity and no one will correct anything because if you don’t do anything you can’t do any wrong! We as a society mostly record the things that someone did wrong but almost never record something somebody should have done but didn’t. That’s an error of omission, and is usually magnitudes more significant than an error of commission. What is needed is an alternative way of handling and judging errors. Otherwise, the path of learning by error will be blocked by populism.

——- In my mind, the main issue is not that the EU made a mistake. The main issue is that it is not getting corrected in time and we will probably have to suffer another ten years or so until the error gets removed. The EU as a system needs to be accelerated by a margin so that it gets to an iterative approach if an error was made. I would argue with a cybernetic feedback loop approach here, but as we are on HN, this would translate to: move fast and break things.

> and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than compliance,

And that is exactly the point. Thank you. What is encoded as compliance in your example is actually the user experience. They off-loaded responsibility completely to the users. Compliance is identical to UX at this point, and they all know it. To modify your sentence: “and most site operators care about focusing on their actual business rather than user experience.”

The other thing is a lack of differentiation. The high penalities you are talking about are for all but of the top traffic website. I agree, it would be insane to play the gamble of removing the banners in that league. But tell me: why has ever single-site- website of a restaurant, fishing club and retro gamer blog a cookie banner? For what reason? They won’t making a turnover you dream about in your example even if they would win the lottery, twice.

Interesting framing. If you continue this line of thought, it will end up in a philosophical argument about what kind of image of humanity one has. So your solution would be to always expect everybody to be the worst version of themselves? In that case, that will make for some quite restrictive laws, I guess.

No, the EU did not do that.

Companies did that and thoughtless website owners, small and large, who decided that it is better to collect arbitrary data, even if they have no capacity to convert it into information.

The solution to get rid of cookie banners, as it was intended, is super simple: only use cookies if absolutely necessary.

It was and is a blatant misuse. The website owners all have a choice: shift the responsibility from themselves to the users and bugger them with endless pop ups, collect the data and don’t give a shit about user experience. Or, just don’t use cookies for a change.

And look which decision they all made.

A few notable examples do exist: https://fabiensanglard.net/ No popups, no banner, nothing. He just don’t collect anything, thus, no need for a cookie banner.

The mistake the EU made was to not foresee the madness used to make these decisions.

I’ll give you that it was an ugly, ugly outcome. :(

“Increasing Success by Lowering Expectations” That is from Despair Inc. This was obviously meant to be funny by them, now it looks like the state of play.

Are you saying that if some person is making a mistake, is angry about making the mistake at all, that this person will just happily do the mistake again because being angry about one’s own mistake is such a beautiful state of mind?

I am unsure of how your mental model of ‘error correction’ is working without starting at the point of recognising an error in the first place - just deliberately ignoring for a moment whatever you emotionally might attach to it.

I would say the just checked the fist step with bravery by openly admitting the mistake.

I think we won’t have to endure that again.

Contrary to popular belief, the EU organs are able to learn. About half a year ago, I read statements of members which, if one would translate the political jargon, would amount to: “We haven’t foreseen such a blatant misuse of the law. These banners should never have happened and we would not have dreamed that corporations would shift the burden to the user. We are, in fact, quite furious about the whole thing.”

Thanks!

I wish this would be the solution. What I would like specifically for Linux are alternative desktop environments like the resurrected CDE. Themes don’t update well and are in my experience, sluggish.

>We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.

I agree with the huge disagreement. That 2006-2013 era was, in my opinion, horrendous and takes the second spot as an offender just after “peak flat”.

However, I never denied that visual appeal matters. But design is how it holistically works, not how it looks.

Maybe, at some point, some team will get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles and hammer it into an UX experience. We were so close in the 90’s.

Maybe we can agree on: make the os maximally unobtrusive by default but include options to customise to taste?

That is actually a feature. An UI should never be, under any circumstances, in line with a trend, fresh or different for the sake of being different.

It should, however, be as invisible as possible. Being only functional is a compliment.

Disregarding the downvotes, I mean this as a serious question.

From the liked article: “We don’t know an “algorithm” for this, and we can’t even begin to guess the required parameter budget or the training data needed.”

Why not, at least the external ones? The computational resources and the size of the training dataset is quantifiable from an input point of view. What gets used is not, but the input size should.

> Just call them properties with unknown provenance.

They would if it would be the correct designation, however, it is not.

Emergence does not equal non-understanding or some spooky-hooky force coming from the unknown.Reductionism does not lead to an explaining-away of emergence.

Interesting. Is there a quantitative threshold to emergence anyone could point at with these smaller models? Tracing the thoughts of a large language model is probably the only way to be sure, or is it?

Ah. Not semantics, that is cybernetics and systems theory.

As in your example: If a bunch of x in a jar leads to the jar tipping over, it is not emergent. That’s just cause and effect. Problem to start with is that the jar containing x is not even a system in the first place, emergence as a concept is not applicable here.

There may be a misunderstanding on your side of the term emergence. Emergence does not equal non-understanding or some spooky-hooky force coming from the unknown. We understand the functions of the elements of a car quite well. The emergent behaviour of a car was intentionally brought about by massive engineering.

Reductionism does not lead to an explaining-away of emergence.

Not at all. Here is an analogy: A car is a system which brings you from point A to B. No part of the car can bring you from point A to B. Not the seats, the wheels, not the frame, not even the motor. If you put the motor on a table, it won’t move one bit. The car, as a system, however does. The emergent property of a car, seen as a system, is that it brings you from one location to another.

A system is the product of the interaction of its parts. It is not the sum of the behaviour of its parts. If a system does not exhibit some form of emergent behaviour, it is not a system, but something else. Maybe an assembly.

You approaching this the wrong way. What you are listing as disadvantages is, for the most part, the USP.

For example, if you are in the target group, you buy it exactly because it does not uses AR glasses; If you are proficient, you are sleepwalking the damage/distance/all other calculations within seconds in your head, you don’t even have to take a single look at any rule book. The biggest selling point, however is: there are others sitting in front of you, it can be very competitive, you can see the reaction, like in chess.

Regarding missing features: Is anyone around here who has found an alternative to the original “quick launch toolbar”?

I mean the ‘real’ one which was introduced in Windows 95 - up to Windows 8 (IIRC), which could be separated from the Taskbar and be docked at any side of the desktop, horizontally or vertically, and could also be stacked in both directions.

>not to waste our lives talking about politics.

In case you are an U.S. citizen, I wish you good luck living your life if everything around erodes. And before you ask, no, there is not a single bit of irony in this post, sadly.

This is a gold mine, too:

https://www.unoptimal.com/automated-ragequit

Love it! Now needed more than ever.

Interesting that you think to have the authority to tell others what “the real world” actually is. That doesn’t seem to work.

Maybe you should try to get out of the technofacist mindset?

>Failure #5: “One by one, every bank that had initially responded positively changed their minds. Worse, not a single one of them would tell me why.[…] I never got a straight answer from any of the banks about why they changed their minds.”

Is anybody around with enough insight in that business to make an educated guess as to what happened?

Have a look at these: bluesound, audiopro, bang-olufsen, denon.

Depending on which software is in use for streaming operations, you could also use ‘standard’ WiFi-enabled speakers like something from KEF (LS50) or dynaudio.

Just from top of my head. Maybe someone else has a comprehensive liste at hand.

I made a mistake here, leading astray. It's second-order cybernetics, not second order systems theory. I melted the two in my head, reason is that (Social) Systems Theory according to Niklas Luhmann [1] incorporates several parts of second order cybernetics (most of the people mentioned before show up there) and blends it all together to a point where I have difficulties to distinguish the separate parts.

This is all not 'new' in the literal sense. Luhmann died in the late 90s. I tried to come up with a spot-on-book of Luhmann, but that lead to nothing. It's all spread out (papers and books) as far as I know. There is a (transcribed) lecture given in 1992, which may come close, but I couldn't find a translated version of it.

One of the parts which hit home for me was the introduction of a differenciated form of distinctiveness, in turn partly enabled by the introduction of an observer, and observation in general. Heinz von Foerster gave an often cited sentence which I think fits the part, albeit Luhmann gurus will probably moan my simplification : "Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer."

Apart from that, sorry for not being more helpful here.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann

Agreed. I wonder if this is still the aftermath of the chasm which resulted when ‘Marvin Minsky et al‚ disowned Cybernetics, took some parts out of it and gave it a shiny new name.

Especially Systems Theory in its second manifestation (Maturana, Luhmann, von Förster, Glasersfeld - and Ackoff) is extremely powerful, deep and, reasons beyond me, totally overlooked.

Have to say tho, most MBA‘s I encountered sadly never ever heard of Cybernetics or Systems Theory. :-(

“Though this pheonomenon is often discussed, it doesn't seem to be named. Let's call it the strong version of Goodhart's law“

I wonder why the author called it that way when this seems to me clearly derived from Ross Ashby‘s law of Requisite Variet[1], predating Goodhard by 20 years. As I see it, it is not even necessary to put more meaning it Goodhard as there actually is. Requisite Variety is sufficient. Going by his resume, I strongly assume the author knows this.

Russel Ackoff, building on countless others, put into two sentences for which others needed two volumes:

“The behaviour of a system is never equal to the behaviour of its parts. - It is the product of their interactions.“

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)

> you don't really care about what things look like anyway.

That statement has no connection to the premise.

There are multiple reasons to use an old screen besides the mentioned reason of not caring for x.

> DP is still missing HDMI features like ARC and CEC, which are important for TVs.

ARC could also be considered as a bug, a hindrance, or both.

ARC and its various implementations would not exist if the HDMI Forum would not be so fanatically force copy protection on everything. The whole problem, or feature that ARC is or is not, would disappear with the reliance of protecting every stream. The alternative would be a full datastream, decoded, going back to the device in question. The prerequisite would be to remove the shitshow that HDCP is and allow full-blown HDMI-in and outputs, which is the exact opposite of what the Forum wants.

HDMI in its current implementation hinders technological progress in the audio segment by forcing everyone to output analogue signals after the decoding stage or not allow decoding at all.

The absence of a web presence is not a sufficient indicator that a business might hide something from you. There are multiple reasons which can lead to the decision to not participate in this playing field.

>So if we can’t have one without the other we should throw the whole thing out?

To remove mind-numbing activities, you would remove mind-stimulating activities?

If you let this out of the bag, I do not think there would be any end to this application.