nr2x

I wish there was still a path to have a profitable mid sized company, period. It’s either get acquired or killed by a big company.

Does it matter if you have no choice but to use said software?

M1 Air is hands down the best machine for the money available today.

Excited to see the competition though!

Odd statement considering the path they are is to conduct a societal wide experiment on mass unemployment as the robots take over more and more jobs.

Email still works, spam and all.

Depends on the definition. In my mind, a system that can write code, poetry, and suggest a recipe based on a list of ingredients has a form of “general” intelligence. So by that measure we are there.

If we’re talking about something like agency or free will, that’s trickier.

The problem in this space is people use terms that nobody agrees on.

Pretty sure that particular UX element is no longer useful.

Yup.

Blame the Irish.

It’s unequivocally not happening in other browsers and they are doing it anyway. Call it what you want.

I’m fine if they go tit-for-tat to be honest.

It doesn’t protect “privacy”, it at best limits a subset of reidentification attacks, and only in a vacuum where other fingerprinting vectors don’t exist.

If it’s so great it would be any easy opt-in for users. But it’s not.

That’s literally written by a PR team, see the quote I pasted from the w3c decision.

Since people seemed to believing Google PR at face value here is the w3c position in rejecting the proposal:

The intention of the Topics API is to enable high level interests of web users to be shared with third parties in a privacy-preserving way in order to enable targeted advertising, while also protecting users from unwanted tracking and profiling. The TAG's initial view is that this API does not achieve these goals as specified.

The Topics API as proposed puts the browser in a position of sharing information about the user, derived from their browsing history, with any site that can call the API. This is done in such a way that the user has no fine-grained control over what is revealed, and in what context, or to which parties. It also seems likely that a user would struggle to understand what is even happening; data is gathered and sent behind the scenes, quite opaquely. This goes against the principle of enhancing the user's control, and we believe is not appropriate behaviour for any software purporting to be an agent of a web user.

The responses to the proposal from Webkit and Mozilla highlight the tradeoffs between serving a diverse global population, and adequately protecting the identities of individuals in a given population. Shortcomings on neither side of these tradeoffs are acceptable for web platform technologies.

It's also clear from the positions shared by Mozilla and Webkit that there is a lack of multi-stakeholder support. We remain concerned about fragmentation of the user experience if the Topics API is implemented in a limited number of browsers, and sites that wish to use it prevent access to users of browsers without it (a different scenario from the user having disabled it in settings).

We are particularly concerned by the opportunities for sites to use additional data gathered over time by the Topics API in conjunction with other data gathered about a site visitor, either via other APIs, via out of band means, and/or via existing tracking technologies in place at the same time, such as fingerprinting.

We appreciate the in-depth privacy analyses of the API that have been done so far by Google and by Mozilla. If work on this API is to proceed, it would benefit from further analysis by one or more independant (non-browser engine or adtech) parties.

Further, if the API were both effective and privacy-preserving, it could nonetheless be used to customise content in a discriminatory manner, using stereotypes, inferences or assumptions based on the topics revealed (eg. a topic could be used - accurately or not - to infer a protected characteristic, which is thereby used in selecting an advert to show). Relatedly, there is no binary assessment that can be made over whether a topic is "sensitive" or not. This can vary depending on context, the circumstances of the person it relates to, as well as change over time for the same person.

Giving the web user access to browser settings to configure which topics can be observed and sent, and from/to which parties, would be a necessary addition to an API such as this, and go some way towards restoring agency of the user, but is by no means sufficient. People can become vulnerable in ways they do not expect, and without notice. People cannot be expected to have a full understanding of every possible topic in the taxonomy as it relates to their personal circumstances, nor of the immediate or knock-on effects of sharing this data with sites and advertisers, and nor can they be expected to continually revise their browser settings as their personal or global circumstances change.

A portion of topics returned by the API are proposed to be randomised, in part to enable plausible deniability of the results. The usefulness of this mitigation may be limited in practice; an individual who wants to explain away an inappropriate ad served on a shared computer cannot be expected to understand the low level workings of a specific browser API in a contentious, dangerous or embarrassing situation (assuming a general cultural awareness of the idea of targeted ads being served based on your online activities or even being "listened to" by your devices, which does not exist everywhere, but is certainly pervasive in some places/communities).

While we appreciate the efforts that have gone into this proposal aiming to iteratively improve the privacy-preserving possibilities of targeted advertising, ultimately it falls short. In summary, the proposed API appears to maintain the status quo of inappropriate surveillence on the web, and we do not want to see it proceed further.

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/726#issuecom...

Please, Google has explicitly made their products not work correctly in other browsers for years. This is totally playing fair, it’s just Google getting back what they give.

Eh, iOS doesn’t allow any alternative rendering engines, which isn’t exactly user choice.

Given that Chrome is aggressively pursuing privacy sandbox, which is roundly rejected by everybody in the web privacy community, is aggressively user hostile, and designed solely as a means to leverage chrome’s (current) dominance to support google ad business, it’s fair to start treating chrome as malware.

Don’t forget some of the most powerful applications are already being used by Google and others to tailor ads based on your behavior. The big adtech firms have deployed AI first and foremost as a means to predict and influence human behavior.

If they can show you the right ad at the right time, they sure as fuck can hammer in a “don’t procreate” message. And that’s what we have TODAY.

I think the enduring appeal of religion is rooted in most people’s inability to accept that the big explanation for life, the universe, and everything isn’t 42, it’s an RNG in the sky.

Yeah but that 1% owns the robot and feeds it data. It won’t kill THEM…in the first round at least.

Either it’s time to learn off grid survival skills or just keep repeating “it’s making stuff up, just a crazy LLM, nothing to *really* worry about”.

“ChatGPT 4.0 is much more... scary!”

I say this on average 5 times a day.

Basically yeah, just a pretty detailed set of prompts and then “turn the next message into an api call” and it basically works perfectly.

When I first heard the term “prompt engineer” I rolled my eyes, but now that I’ve gotten into it I see it’s really an art form.

LLM for the foreseeable future function most reliably as a user interface layer for other system. I use GPT to “translate” natural language down into the API calls that get real data and it works great. I’d never trust it beyond that.

OMG yes, the latest updates to the keyboard are a nightmare. I went so far as to turn off autocorrect as I’d rather have my spelling wrong but the meaning the same. It straight up makes up entirely new phrases I didn’t type.

With tsvector you have to declare the language, and if you are ingesting a diverse range of web documents you just end up applying English as a guess.

Yup, at a certain point you hit a wall.

Depends on the length of the documents as well. I’ve used psql with smaller datasets and it’s fine, but it starts to have issues when you go bigger.

Web Applets were pretty cool in theory at least, but a disaster in practice.

Also never fails to amaze me that if Adobe hadn’t been so lazy with making Flash performant on Mac, Steve Jobs wouldn’t have delivered the death blow. ActionScript was not a bad language!

Oh man, you must be too young to remember when companies had intranet sites that only worked on IE6 long after it was supported. That was pure hell as a young IT support drone. Good god.