>Please provide your name exactly as it is in your government documents.
>This is extremely important. Failure to comply will lead to termination of your service with no refund, criminal prosecution, our CEO calling you in tears and a hitman being informed about your last known location
Heh, I had this exact thing when getting certified at Microsoft (remotely). They required me to enter my name exactly as it appears on my government ID (not a single Latin character), but their registration site... simply blocked any characters outside of Latin. I had to obtain an international travel passport to get the "official" transliteration of my name
I've gotten a visa to a country that doesn't use Latin characters. My name got transliterated. At the bottom of the visa there's the machine-readable field that uses ASCII characters, and my name lost a character (a OU became just U).
It's also fun when the official transliteration rules suddenly change: a visa/passport issued in one year has a different name in Latin than a passport issued in another year. I was once two separate people :)
>top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die
This is unrealistic populism. The type that gets upvoted on HN, apparently. It's not possible to just ditch all Microsoft licenses in a year, or in 5 years, or in 10 years. There are hundreds of critical systems that can't just be migrated to Linux overnight (or ever). And "just dying" is... not an option for a government branch. What is this even supposed to mean.
But we can limit American bigtech by 90%, and we should. Especially everything in the cloud.
No need to look for malicious intentions, this is just a feature that costs money so it's very low (or zero) priority for profit driven organisations.
I wonder if finding people responsible and spamming then with their own service emails would make the team care enough to fix this. But of course that's mostly dubious, probably illegal, and shouldn't be a responsibility of some vigilante hacker
> No need to look for malicious intentions, this is just a feature that costs money so it's very low (or zero) priority for profit driven organisations.
Malicious in-attention then, by the profit driven org? :)
If bartenders are legally (including criminally!) liable in some jurisdictions for their customers, then certainly a chain of legal liability can exist in other industries.
>But writing and reading are asymmetrical and a more expressive language used well can expose the code patterns and algorithms in a way that is easier for multiple maintainers to read and comprehend.
It's exactly the opposite. Writing and reading are asymmetrical, and that's why it's important to write code that is as simple as possible.
It's easy to introduce a lot of complexity and clever hacks, because as the author you understand it. But good code is readable for people, and that's why very expressive languages like perl are abhorred.
Then you should write assembly only. Like `MOV`, `ADD`... can't really get simpler than that.
Problem is, that makes every small part of the program simple, but it increases the number of parts (and/or their interaction). And ultimately, if you need to understand the whole thing it's suddenly much harder.
Surely you can write the same behaviour in "clever" (when did that become a negative attribute?) or "good" way in assembly. You are correct. But that's a different matter.
> Writing and reading are asymmetrical, and that's why it's important to write code that is as simple as possible.
I 100% agree with your statement. My case is that a simple language does not necessarily result in simpler and more readable code. You need a language that fits the problem domain and that does not require a lot of boilerplate to handle more complex structures. If you are shoehorning a problem into an overly simplistic language, then you are fighting your tool. OO for OO. FP for FP. and so on.
I fear that the current fashion to very simple languages is a result of confusing these aspects and by way of enforcing certain corporate behaviours on coders. Perhaps that has its place eg Go in Google - but the presumption that one size fits all is quite a big limitation for many areas.
The corollary of this is that richness places an burden of responsibility on the coder not to write code golf. By tbh you can write bad code in any language if you put your mind to it.
Perhaps many find richness and expressivity abhorrent - but to those of us who like Larry's thinking it is a really nice, addictive feeling when the compiler gets out of the way. Don't knock it until you give it a fair try!
Definitely, being unpaid LLM trainer for big corporations while nobody actually reads your work is not very encouraging. I wonder what the future will bring.
I do think we will, at some point, face a knowledge crisis because nobody will be willing to upload the new knowledge to the internet.
Then the LLM companies will notice, and they’ll start to create their own updated private training data.
But that may be a new centralization of knowledge which was already the case before the internet. I wonder if we are going to some sort of equilibrium between LLMs and the web or if we are going towards some sort of centralization / decentralization cycles.
I also have some hope that LLMs will annihilate the commercial web of "generic" content and that may bring back the old web where the point was the human behind the content (be it a web page or a discussion). But that what I’d like, not a forecast.
I wouldn't be surprised if LLM companies end up sponsoring certain platforms / news sites, in exchange for being able to use their content of course.
THe problem with LLMs is that a single token (or even a single book) isn't really worth that much. It's not like human writing, where we'll pay far more for "Harry Potter" and "The Art of Computer Programming" than some romance trash with three reads on Kindle.
This is perhaps true from the "language model" point of view, but surely from the "knowledge" point of view an LLM is prioritising a few "correct" data sources?
I wonder about this a lot when I ask LLMs niche technical questions. Often there is only one canonical source of truth. Surely it's somehow internally prioritising the official documentation? Or is it querying the documentation in the background and inserting it into the context window?
LLM companies already do this. Both Reddit and Stack Overflow turned to shit (but much more profitable shit) when they sold their archives to the AI companies for lots of money.
I kind of fear the same. At the same time I wonder if structured information will gain usefulness. Something like man pages are already a great resource for humans, but at same time could be used for autocompletion and for LLMs. Maybe not in the current format but in the same vein.
But longer form tutorials or even books with background might suffer more. I wonder how big the market of nice books on IT topics will be in the future. A wiki is probably in the worst place. It will not be changed with the MR like man pages could be and you do not get the same reward compared to publishing a book.
> nobody will be willing to upload the new knowledge to the internet
I think there will be differences based on how centralized the repository of knowledge is. Even if textbooks and wikis largely die out, I imagine individuals such as myself will continue to keep brief topic specific "cookbook" style collections for purely personal benefit. There's no reason to be averse to publishing such things to github or the like and LLMs are fantastic at indexing and integrating disparate data sources.
Historically sorting through 10k different personal diaries for relevant entries would have been prohibitive but it seems to me that is no longer the case.
You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea and yet for some reason we have very severe punishments for people that distribute it. Why?
Because addictive things are addictive, and addicted people suffer, and everyone can get addicted if their guard slips.
We prefer to regulate highly addictive things instead.
> You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea
About 1–12 months after using heroin, only 23%–38% become addicted [1]. Occasional and controlled heroin users do in fact exist and are documented [2]. And, most famously, the use of heroin by American soldiers during the Vietnam war was largely situational [3].
So what "everyone knows" here is not very impressive. I still very strongly believe you'd be a fool or at least reckless to try heroin, but it really isn't the bogeyman people want it to be.
Yup, hence why only a reckless person or fool would try it.
But, since only a minority of people get addicted to heroin (i.e. the evils of heroin are overstated), and since no one is actually seriously arguing that viewing TikTok is as risky (23-38% chance after exposure) as trying heroin, or has as bad side effects, I think it reveals that comparisons to heroin use in arguments against TikTok are hyperbolic and disconnected from reality, by empirical data.
>I think it reveals that comparisons to heroin use in arguments against TikTok are hyperbolic and disconnected from reality, by empirical data.
I don't think that follows from your premises. Who is overstating the evils of heroin? Plenty of people argue that viewing TikTok (or AI-optimized short-form feeds) has bad side effects, mostly in the direction of eroding your ability to pay attention to anything less stimulating.
One thing that makes heroin more benign is that it's "finished" in some sense. The drug trade will find more addictive substances (e.g. fentanyl), but a vial of pure heroin isn't going to gradually become more addictive over time in ways that are imperceptible to the user but visible on the backend because the loss function trends downward.
Have you walked down the skid row of any large city? Heroin and well other drugs now are a problem, saying otherwise is delusional. Those people need help.
Only for people who think comparing TikTok to heroin is some kind of gotcha.
>Have you walked down the skid row of any large city? Heroin and well other drugs now are a problem, saying otherwise is delusional. Those people need help.
For sure. Two minutes from where I live, at a main intersection, they hang emergency Naloxone injection kits, in public, where anyone can grab them, on the trees and walls of buildings. I presume so addicts can save each other in cases of accidental overdoses.
Of what relevance was this all to TikTok again? And why are we comparing scrolling a phone app to literal actual heroin? Even when, empirically and factually, heroin is in fact not addictive for the majority of people?
Comparisons between TikTok and heroin are deranged and simplistic, but this is made all the more embarrassing when you realize that a dance with heroin is in fact more likely than not to just be... not the thing everyone is afraid of?
> Only for people who think comparing TikTok to heroin is some kind of gotcha.
Do you have family? My cousins, aunts, even my mom is on it. And they all watch the most brain dead garbage. Even when they come to visit me out in the middle of no where, they still do it. The only explanation I have is that it is addictive, to not to all, but some (like you pointed out with H). Now based on how much time they spend on it I think it is harmful for them and society at large. It’s worth regulating like some non physical drug, afaik I think that is the comparison people here are making.
> Do you have family? My cousins, aunts, even my mom is on it.
Yes, I too am deeply traumatized from having family and friends... shudder... using Social Media.
Anyway, not sure of the relevance of the question. Not sure how "time spent" on a thing is proof of its badness either, but then, people comparing TikTok to heroin are clearly not generally interested in things like clarity and quantification.
Because it consumes hours of time on the daily. And I can’t whole heartedly say that it was a choice to do so since it appears to be habit forming.
It pushes out time for other activities, sometimes self-care like sleep, sometimes key milestones in our life. I’m not saying we have to piously eat porridge for breakfast and wake up at 5 am with the chickens, but damn, everything in moderation.
Obviously H can be a much more potent and life changing addiction, but we can draw similarities between the two. Not only from a dependency perspective but also from an economical one.
The idea of banning meta or Google is indeed not serious. What's realistic is forcing them to behave by issuing fines that make such behavior prohibitively expensive. Admittedly there's nobody doing that in Europe seriously yet, but that's because the current unhinged head of American state has meltdown every time American bigtech get a wrist slap.
If that's so, then is it realistic to expect that to somehow change? These corps have been fined more times than I can count, but it's clearly not working.
I'll bite (I'm not German but I'm close culturally):
* Old Androids are not repairable because they're shit, not because a megacorp works hard to make repair impossible
* Old Androids may be hacked by a pegasus-like software (just like most new smartphones anyway), but at least the operating system does not lock you into its own closed ecosystem.
You may disagree, and correctly, because it's in part irrational, but many Europeans just dislike Apple and consider Android a more open/free ecosystem.
I have bought an Android phone and I couldn’t even change the font used or use an ad blocker on the browser it comes with. It comes with advertisements on the home screen and if I disable them half of the system functions stop working. Seems it’s not open at all. Sent it back the next week. </rant>
I'd believe there was some truth in that if they used any open apps but they just lock themselves into Google's ecosystem instead. All their data is siloed in some US cloud.
If you run like that it doesn't matter what phone you use and your privacy and openness arguments are moot.
> i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs
I'd love to self host my music, but curating my collection is a lot of work. I made several attempts, but looking for music I like was too much work for me. If getting "illegal" music becomes easier I'll definitely eventually do this.
>This is extremely important. Failure to comply will lead to termination of your service with no refund, criminal prosecution, our CEO calling you in tears and a hitman being informed about your last known location
...
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