I actually like AI tools, but I don’t use Apple Intelligence. It’s literally the worst in class. It feels very late 90’s Microsoft. They are shoving it on us when we don’t want it and it’s worse than everything else out there. It’s the Windows Media Player of the AI industry.
Yet something like "Call <name of a person>" will still immediately call someone with a completely different name without even letting me cancel, right?
Just today: “give me directions to the ferry terminal”. I’m on an island with one terminal, I shouldn’t have to be specific.
“Here’s a list of three ferry terminals that are on different islands, none of which are the island you’re on.”
“Give directions to the Orcas Island ferry terminal.”
“Here’s directions to the Port of Orcas Island, which is on the side of the island opposite the ferry terminal.”
If I weren’t driving a camper van on narrow roads, I would have taken her up on the “other island” option. “How do you propose we get there, Siri? Maybe start by driving to the g-ddamned ferry terminal?!”
Oh, nice, they added a confirmation screen before you call! I'm not sure when they're planning to roll that feature out to Europe but once they do, maybe Siri will be occasionally slightly useful when I need to call someone while my hands are dirty or while I'm driving.
I was around in the 90's too, which is why I can confidently say it is that bad. What Apple is doing with AI today is exactly the same formula as some of the worst stuff Microsoft put out back then. I'm not talking about the big things. More like the bundled apps where they see someone else getting traction with something and then they go and bundle their own K-Mart version of it that no one asked for.
> Siri AI is dramatically better than old-school Siri. [...] it just works.
Yeah, after 30 seconds, assuming it doesn't fail outright. The only thing I use Siri for is to set timers on my watch when cooking. This used to take 2-3 seconds at most and even worked completely offline on the watch itself. That functionality is now effectively broken for me.
> It’s the Windows Media Player of the AI industry.
I personally found WMP great. I never felt any urge to install alternatives (and the few times I did end up using another media player, I always thought it was a worse experience than WMP).
They have their own problems. They may be "open source", but they don't accept contributions. I'm skeptical it will ever become more than a hobby project.
Is not accepting contributions the only/biggest issue you have with the project? I'm honestly becoming more and more okay with the "cathedral" style of open source. Depending on the project, catering to "the community" can lead a loss of focus, lack of a cohesive "vision" or scope, and just generally trying to be everything to everyone without the resources to maintain a giant beast.
With something like a browser (engine), I'm totally okay with someone saying "I'm an expert and I'm trying something with my own vision/priorities. I don't want input from random people that I have to spend time evaluating."
Does "external" contributors effectively mean drive-by contributors? I assume there's still more than a single developer, and it's somehow possible to be admitted as a member of the project if you have some existing public reputation.
The 2024 screenshots I had forgotten about involved
A) an X by Denys Davidov - a youtuber commenting on the Ukranian-Russian war - where commented on IS suicide bombers
B) an infographic on the Israel-Iran war with a map with explosions
C) another one i have forgotten about
I can understand that if a machine detects something questionable and my phone has these things, that that could be reason to search and question me thoroughly given a general high alert.
This is a little harsh. What about requiring companies to carry management liability insurance? Or to list individual managers on cybersecurity insurance policies? Premiums will rise when a company employs managers with claims history. Eventually, it becomes difficult to employ them in key positions if they have a bad track record.
Holding actual people liable sounds like a more effective option. The insurance would just be included into the cost of doing business and make everything more expensive. Insurance makes everything worse.
Holding actual humans liable (with appropriate levels of harshness) would make actual humans more likely to take preventative steps. Holding shareholders somewhat liable (maybe extra taxes on sales of a companies stock) might be useful also.
Sarbanes-Oxley in the US holds top management personally responsible too, and compliance is taken far more seriously than with other regulations as a result.
The incentives are to price risk correctly so that they can price their policies cheap enough to beat the competition while not going out of business from paying more in claims than they receive in premiums.
There is a cap to how much and insurance company can make (health insurance for instance are capped at 20% of premiums). To make more money next year they can sign up more policy holders or make sure costs go up. Companies also often have a large stake in the fix it shops/clinics/hospitals so they recoup much of their cost that way. Market capture, if it cost more to buy insurance than to fix it/absorb the cost without insurance why would you buy insurance. It is useful for the insurance companies to see costs increase.
Sure there can be good arguments for having insurance. Insurance companies are part of the financial sector and will be working to make more money. That is a fine incentive for the insurance industry but for the insurance consumer it is a reason to be skeptical and careful.
Are we talking hypothetical utopia or something that could actually happen? Insurance probably isn’t the most perfect solution but it’s the most feasible. These exact policies and insurers already exist.
And why the hell would anyone want a job where a mistake results in personal ruin? Sure, there are a lot of shitty companies and people running them, but mistakes also happen when people are trying to do a good job. It’s not possible to completely prevent a data breach even with an unlimited budget.
I think the best solution is to weed out the people who behave irresponsibly and have an environment where we learn from the ones who are responsible and fail anyway.
Very true. If you don't want to be exposed to such rich, you're free to work elsewhere. No one is forcing you to take on these jobs that immiserate society.
The most reckless will, of course; but most people won't -- they just won't do it.
Corporations evolved the liability structure they have today so that large undertakings, where many people have to work together and where the bad deeds of a small number of those people could sink the undertaking, were something that regular -- people who can't self insure -- could be a part of, as investors, managers, staff, &c, &c.
Limited liability may make accountability too narrow; but blanket personal liability makes it far too broad. It's not a solution for running a large, complex economy in a more accountable way.
And 70 years ago I would agree with you, but now we have a handful of individuals who are the economy with wealth that's rivaling nations. Something has gone awry.
Yes, there are some people who thrive on risk and will do things like jump off a mountain in a wing suit just for the thrill of it. That doesn't mean making that sort of personal recklessness legally mandatory for employment is a good idea.
This sort of personal liability OP is proposing would just ensure the security industry is dominated by highly compensated compulsive gamblers because nobody else is insane enough to take the risk. It's an absolutely ridiculous idea.
This is data that will be relevant for every single victim for decades to come and they will pay for this regularly, and it cannot be undone.
What amount per person is acceptable for a thing that simply should never happen?
I don't think "this will ruin my and my bosses life"-levels are over the top at all. Don't wanna risk it, then don't store the data. Usually for most purposes it would be e ough to store that yes, someone has a legit drivers license, which types of vehicles it is for and how long it is valid (if there is a limit).
We don't get to this kind of data reduction if people don't see data as the liability it sometimes is for their customers.
Could we not keep the same "harsh" plan, and then let others provide and purchase such insurance on their own? Why does the insurance have to be mandated?
Because the company will file bankruptcy and nobody will get anything. Requiring insurance up front at least provides some coverage for liabilities.
It's why you can't legally drive without insurance. It's not for you or your car, nobody cares about that. It's for the other people and their property.
Nobody is talking about criminal wreckless driving.
We're talking about assurances that you're going to be able to cover damages if you rear-end a sedan and cause $8,000 in repairs. That's why you're required to drive with insurance coverage.
The company typically receives the payout to cover losses from whatever incident precipitated the claim. This isn’t hypothetical. Companies already do this. For example, a company could get hacked and extorted for ransom. They can file a claim and use the payout to pay the ransom. Or a manager makes a mistake that results in a lawsuit, settlement, defense costs, etc. The company can file a claim against a management liability policy.
What’s new that I’m proposing is to require companies to carry insurance and list accountable people on the policies so that claim history is associated with their decisions. Many companies already have management liability and/or cybersecurity policies, but it’s typically optional and individual decision makers aren’t listed on the policy. The claim history is associated only with the company and never the people who made the decision. That’s why they can just leave and do the same thing somewhere else.
And when the hacked information is used to cause a national-level disaster, the costs of which are greater than the assets of the insurer, and their re-insurance funds, bankrupting them, what then?
Insurance is not a solution for everything.
More critically, just because a company buys insurance, it should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card for the executives and management to feel free to manage data irresponsibly.
It is really simple:
If they can not handle properly the risks of their business, they should be in another business.
Any data stored anywhere can be exfiltrated through either social engineering, or computer hacking.
Make it illegal to have this data, and if they really want it, then you hit them with jail when it leaks, not fines that can be paid by the board in the form of a golden parachute.
Only those that absolutely need data like this should store it. Like, I dunno, the government? Everyone else can rely on zero knowledge proofs or literally anything else than forever storing a scan of someone's entire fucking identity.
We need people to stop internalizing that the government and the rich somehow deserve access to private data just because they want to use it. Seeing a way to make money using enough to make you entitled to it.
Force businesses to add value if they want to exist instead of extraction or rent seeking.
Reality and certainty of consequences, not evasion and insuring of liability
I specified it in the last sentence:
>>If they can not handle properly the risks of their business, they should be in another business.
The same way it is handled in any other business or trade with risk.
Make sure the risks are also PERSONALLY CONSEQUENTIAL TO THEM.
If they fail to handle the business with state-of-the-art advanced knowledge, intelligence, diligence, and resources, then they will face serious personal consequences. If they do not want to take that risk, they are free to go work in any other business.
Some people are fine taking the risks of subsea welding or windmill maintenance. Others are not, and are free to pursue other work. The risks for fuking-up there include sudden death and life-changing injury.
It should be the same for people risking the livelihoods of every person who's data they handle — if they fuk-up badly enough, their risk should be financial bankruptcy and prison.
Instead, white-collar work is typically organized so those who fckup get a promotion or just find a new higher-paying job, while the people they screwed over are left to deal with the consequences.
They are, by deciding if they are able to handle having their lives certainly ruined if they screw up. The trick to punishment as deterrence to planned actions is 100% identification and enforcement, so that people will avoid the behavior to avoid the punishment. Anything less and some people will decide the potential payoff of success is worth it.
I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?
You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.
I am also doing something, by hosting one of the public instances of Nitter.
Nitter is useful for sporadic random access to tweets, but for public feeds like municipal authorities etc. it would be useful if someone scraped the feed and re-hosted the feed from their own server, without being hobbled by rate limits. Is that what you're doing?
Yes, exactly. I limit the scraping to popular enough accounts. The wikimedia community is already organized to decide who deserves a Wikipedia page so I use that.
We put up with it mostly because it enables a lot of communication to happen at all.
You want to hold the corporations legally liable for the content their host, you can say goodbye to basically reddit as a whole, any twitter clone, youtube comment sections and a whole more stuff.
Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
mtr xcancel.com
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?
No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.
Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.
It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.
Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.
If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.
And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.
You don't want fully-specified rules because a rule with strict boundaries has loopholes. You actually want a clearly allowed area, a clearly disallowed area, and a gradually increasing gradient of punishment in between, so that a small change in behaviour produces only a small change in punishment, and avoiding punishment requires a large change in behaviour.
Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.
I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.
It looks like that was MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., which relied on MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. for the relevant part of the ruling.
The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.
Oh yeah, I understood your point, but given MDY Industries, LLC v .Blizzard who knows what the "right" judge would rule? With IP laws these days we're really getting into weird places.
> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?
Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).
So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.
It's not about "how things actually work", the law is there to regulate human activity. The law tends to call these copies on the wire, in RAM, in caches, etc. "transient copies", which is fine until a human starts using them as non-transient copies, e.g. saves them for later.
You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)
> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.
Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.
Sure, but that seems different from what I was addressing. The person I was responding to was saying that the law as a whole usually doesn’t make sense. They were saying that in the context of arguing that if the law didn’t consider viewing a page of copyrighted copying as involving copying due to the technical basis of it having to transfer bits to your computer then the law didn’t make sense. My point was that laws don’t have to encompass or fully specify all edge cases, and that the ways laws are written can be open to interpretation. I think I removed a sentence before posting about the purpose of finders of facts in the US system like juries or judges in bench trials.
> Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence.
I deliberately ignored it, because it was all irrelevant.
> I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
I have no idea at all how anything should matter as far as the law is concerned. Not my problem, unless I somehow get caught. But not getting caught is a problem grounded in reality, unlike legal ones. I think I can manage that.
That said, if laws about computers don't comport with how computers actually work, I'll take extra amounts of glee in violating them.
And, even more gleefully, nobody will be able to detect my violations. My internet traffic will look identically the same as someone "innocently copying" or whatever.
> If you serve as a mere conduit for automatic transmission of user communications, there are no other qualifications or obligations you need to meet. If you serve a caching function, in addition to the two requirements above, you must maintain comply with the notice-and-takedown process.
Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.
RTS is pretty much a dead genre these days. There have been indie releases but nothing did well enough for a big studio to take notice. They tested the water with a Command and Conquer remaster a few years ago too.
I think RTS could continue to work if someone made a massive leap of faith and put all the modern infra around it that a AAA extraction shooter would receive in 2026. The biggest problem with RTS is the matchmaking and onboarding experience.
The game itself doesn't have to be dumbed down (i.e., removing base building, etc.). Making the RTS simpler is NOT the solution to player adoption. Starcraft II has some extremely complex mechanics (Zerg production) which have survived for 16 years without significant changes.
The reality is that RTS is very much alive if you are willing to get your ass beat constantly. What I think many people are actually asking for is that nostalgic experience where everyone kind of sucked at these games and they could cheese their way to easy wins. RTS felt better when everyone was kind of bad. In a shooter you can still get lucky shots and catch people off guard. In an RTS, if someone is 1000 ELO better than you, the chances you defeat them are essentially zero.
Have you tried playing the Command and Conquer remaster? They barely upgraded the UI and it just doesn't feel like you're in command. Games move like your wading through molasses and you just win basically everything (except the online mode, where you have no chance whatsoever)
And there isn't much variation.
The cutscenes were almost the best part of the original game. Now they're really the only reason to even look.
The most ive done with RTS the last decade is watch some mass Beyond All Reason videos (I dont have the hardware for mass battles myself.) LoL and other moba dota-likes I think took the a bulk of the rts competative crowd. Now I feel like the traditional rts community has to butt heads with other strategy genres to take players if they want to approach old school rts levels of success. Trying to pull moba players back seems like it would have massive diminishing returns.
Not to mention, they have 1 GB of headroom in their back pocket if/when they need to make Windows more efficient. Quick rewrite of that app or just scrap it and they've saved months of optimization.
Love Kobo. I switched from Kindle to the Libra Colour a while back. It's a superior device and I don't have to give money to Amazon. It's more responsive, it has physical buttons for turning pages and the screen looks great. The built in book store is ok. I haven't had trouble finding anything, but there aren't many reviews if you're into that sort of thing. I was able to sideload my Kindle library easily too.
Does it have Goodreads integration?
Not that it'd be a dealbreaker for me to switch, but I do enjoy that it syncs my reading progress / library with Goodreads. Which is how me and my friends tend to share what we're reading and then discuss the books at times.
Because The implied answer is no, it doesn’t support goodreads; that functionality is supported by Overdrive
I thought that was obvious but here you are, since you need that spelled out. Goodreads is owned by Amazon. Overdrive is for public libraries everywhere, so the choice of which is better should be pretty clear as well
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