30 years away from it (reduced from the original 100 years they provided only 5 years ago)

More like estimates on this are completely unreliable. As in that 100 years could have as well been 1000 years. It was pretty much “until an unpredictable technological paradigm shift happens”. “100 years in future” is “when we have warp drives and star gates” of estimates. Pretty “when we have advanced to next level of advancement and technology, whenever it happens. 100 years should be good minimum of this not being taken as an actual year number estimate”.

30 years is “we see maybe a potential path to this via hypothetical developments of technology in horizon”. It’s the classical “Fusion is always 30 years away”. Until one time it isn’t, but that 30 year loop can go on indefinitely, if the hypothetical don’t turn to reality. Since you know we thought “maybe that will work, once we put out mind in to it”. Oh it didn’t, on to chasing next path.

I only know of one project, that has 100 year estimate, that is real. That is the Onkalo deep repository of spent fuel in Finland. It has estimate of spending 100 years being filled and is to be sealed in 2120’s and that is an actual date. Since all the tech is known, the sealing process is known, it just happens to take a century to fill the repository bit by bit. Finland is kinda stable country and radiation hazard such long term, that whatever government is to be there in 2120’s, they will most likely seal the repository.

Unless “we invent warp drives” happens before that and some new process of actually efficiently and very safely getting rid of the waste is found in some process. (and no that doesn’t include current recycling methods. Since those aren’t that good to get rid of this large amount and with small enough risk of side harms. Surprise, this was studied by Finland as alternative and it was simply decided “recycling is not good enough, simple enough, efficient enough and safe enough yet. Bury it in bedrock tomb”).

Main issue comes from GDPR. When one uses the consent basis for collecting and using information it has to be a free choice. Thus one can’t offer “Pay us and we collect less information about you”. Hence “pay or consent” is blatantly illegal. Showing ads in generic? You don’t need consent. That consent is “I vote with my browser address bar”. Thing just is nobody anymore wants to use non tracked ads…

So in this case DMA 5(2) is just basically re-enforcement and emphasis of previous GDPR principle. from verge

“exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data.”

from the regulation

2. The gatekeeper shall not do any of the following:
   (a) process, for the purpose of providing online advertising services, personal data of end users using services of third parties that make use of core platform services of the gatekeeper;
   (b) combine personal data from the relevant core platform service with personal data from any further core platform services or from any other services provided by the gatekeeper or with personal data from third-party services;
   © cross-use personal data from the relevant core platform service in other services provided separately by the gatekeeper, including other core platform services, and vice versa; and
   (d) sign in end users to other services of the gatekeeper in order to combine personal data,

unless the end user has been presented with the specific choice and has given consent within the meaning of Article 4, point (11), and Article 7 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679.

surprise 2016/679 is… GDPR. So yeah it’s new violation, but pretty much it is “Gatekeepers are under extra additional scrutiny for GDPR stuff. You violate, we can charge you for both GDPR and DMA violation, plus with some extra rules and explicity for DMA”.

I think technically already GDPR bans combining without permission, since GDPR demands permission for every use case for consent based processing. There must be consent for processing… combining is processing, needs consent. However this is interpretation of the general principle of GDPR. It’s just that DMA makes it explicit “oh these specific processing, yeah these are processing that need consent per GDPR”. Plus it also rules them out of trying to argue “justified interest” legal basis of processing case of the business. Explicitly ruling “these type of processing don’t fall under justified interest for these companies, these are only and explicitly per consent type actions”.

That is just its core function doing its thing transforming inputs to outputs based on learned pattern matching.

It may not have been trained on translation explicitly, but it very much has been trained on these are matching stuff via its training material. Since you know what its training set most likely contained… dictionaries. Which is as good as asking it to learn translation. Another stuff most likely in training data: language course books, with matching translated sentences in them. Again well you didnt explicitly tell it to learn to translate, but in practice the training data selection did it for you.

Well it could also be a lever or a switch.

Newer ever take Klarnas word for anything. They are the fine and Dandy company whose business model involved by routine fishing for customers bank authorization credentials.

Nah. 2k$ was a cheap PR face save for them. Pay 2k$ or deal for weeks and months with “remember how Tesla was a stingy bad corporate and cancelled a large order to a small business without compensation”.

Noh they can go “Well yeah the cancellation wasn’t exactly gracefully, but hey we compensated the business for it. Our bad.”

Mind you even just paying the while 15k$ would have been small change for them. So I guess they are not utterly (business relations wise) horrible company, but still a cheap conglomerate.

Well difference is you have to know coming to know did the AI produce what you actually wanted.

Anyone can read the letter and know did the AI hallucinate or actually produce what you wanted.

On code. It might produce code, that by first try does what you ask. However turns AI hallucinated a bug into the code for some edge or specialty case.

Hallucinating is not a minor hiccup or minor bug, it is fundamental feature of LLMs. Since it isn’t actually smart. It is a stochastic requrgitator. It doesn’t know what you asked or understand what it is actually doing. It is matching prompt patterns to output. With enough training patterns to match one statistically usually ends up about there. However this is not quaranteed. Thus the main weakness of the system. More good training data makes it more likely it more often produces good results. However for example for business critical stuff, you aren’t interested did it get it about right the 99 other times. It 100% has to get it right, this one time. Since this code goes to a production business deployment.

I guess one can code comprehensive enough verified testing pattern including all the edge cases and with thay verify the result. However now you have just shifted the job. Instead of programmer programming the programming, you have programmer programming the very very comprehensive testing routines. Which can’t be LLM done, since the whole point is the testing routines are there to check for the inherent unreliability of the LLM output.

It’s a nice toy for someone wanting to make a quick and dirty test code (maybe) to do thing X. Then try to find out does this actually do what I asked or does it have unforeseen behavior. Since I don’t know what the behavior of the code is designed to be. Since I didn’t write the code. good for toying around and maybe for quick and dirty brainstorming. Not good enough for anything critical, that has to be guaranteed to work with promise of service contract and so on.

So what the future real big job will be is not prompt engineers, but quality assurance and testing engineers who have to be around to guard against hallucinating LLM/ similar AIs. Prompts can be gotten from anyone, what is harder is finding out did the prompt actually produced what it was supposed to produce.

Since I is decentralized, it is upto the intances. There is no central authority to eject an instance. Rather other instances individually block the instances they find objectionable to their own criterion.

At basic its that. Inpractice moderation federations and coalitions etc. have formed among instances of “we maintain joint blocking list and any of us can suggest new additions to it”.

Due to this one can get ejected from rather sizeable swath, if one one the moderation federations puts one on block list and that is pretty much as far as an “you have 24 hours or we boot you”. You get booted from all the instances part of that federation/coalition.

Plus stuff like just sources/authors trusted by various instances. “If this guy puts an instance on their published black list, we block. So far that guy has done good job with his list”. Ofcourse instance can at any point decide to not trust that list author anymore.

So there is no one “how mastodon does it”. Infact this is the one area where “on what instance are you” matters. Since how your home instance decides to do moderation and blocking, that is how your blocking happens. Plus ones personal additions on top.

Mastodon has a moderation action feature, where one can see listing of what instances and user have been blocked or other moderation action taken. There is explanation field there also for moderator to say “why” but obviously that is upto instance on what their policy is on how exacting their moderation documentation policy is.

Not only they warned him. Reports are Tesla design department out of their own initiative and knowing how bad the proposed cyber truck was developed and alternate “sane” Tesla electric pickup truck proposal. When they tried to suggest it to Elon he reportedly didn’t want to here none about it and got mad.

He told the design boss just to make the existing design work. As we can see that didn’t end up going well.

He is successful enough, old enough and made enough money, that he can just retire. Threatening him is an empty threat. He is 60 and probably given his long career earned more than he can spend in rest of his life, unless he goes super yacht and private jet crazy.

The whole show was a come back from retirement essentially. A voluntary indulgence on his part. Surely lucrative indulgence, but indulgence still. Apple needed him, he didn’t need Apple.

Most of the crew probably will leave for other project with a letter of recommendation from John in their pocket.

Well many adblockers can be clever enough to load the asset, but then just drop it. As in yeah the ad image got downloaded to browser, but then the page content got edited to drop the display of the add or turn it to not shown asset in css.

This is age old battle. Site owners go you must do X or no media. However then ad blocker just goes “sure we do that, but then we just ghost the ad to the user”.

Some script needs to be loaded, that would display the ad? All the parts of the script get executed and… then CSS intervention just ghosts the ad that should be playing and so on.

Since the browser and extension are in ultimate control. As said the actual add video might be technically “playing” in the background going through motions, but it’s a no show, no audio player… ergo in practice the ad was blocked, while technically completely executed.

Hence why they want to scan for the software, since only way they can be sure ad will be shown is by verifying a known adhering to showing the ad software stack.

Well EU says that is not allowed, because privacy. Ergo the adblocker prevention is playing a losing battle. Whatever they do on the “make sure ad is shown” side, adblocker maker will just implement counter move.

Don’t threaten us with good time, Elon.

Also no way he is going through. He is way too much in financial hole to give up European market. Like Google or Meta, sure they have the financial standing to maybe pull such move and survive.

Xitter? They need every visitor and account they can have globally to even think about staying viable.

Empty bluster and pointless empty bluster, since EU would just go “fine. Our continental economy or prosperity doesn’t depend on your social media company. Social media isn’t a critical industry, so we are just fine with you leaving. Plus there is 10 others like you anyway”.

You can’t threaten people with something that doesn’t damage them and heck might be seen as benefit.

Lot of people don’t seem to understand how multiparty parliamentary coalition democracies work.

PiS was still biggest “oh dear”. Doesn’t matter, what matters is who can pass the confidence vote in Parliament and based on current estimates, PiS can’t.

Oh since you seem to be Polish, who is likely to be put up as PM candidate by the new coalition to the Parliament to vote. I would assume Donald Tusk? Then again I know pretty much nothing of Polish politics.

Forming coalition is what matters. Multiparty democracies don’t hand out medals for just being biggest. Usually all it gets you is first shot at forming government, which in this case by this moments estimate will fail.

It exactly matters who is and isn’t willing to work with you. In coalition democracies that is the most important thing. Depending on situation “we won’t work with you” stuff is decades lasting red lines or feuds.

Plus of course every government is only as good as their last terms governing. One is always at risk of losing the next election, if one messes up.

Government has to pass vote of confidence to form. PiS and its allies even combined don’t have the numbers per preliminary estimates. Where as estimate is the main opposition and their supporting coalition of parties will have the numbers.

There is no way opposition is going to do the incumbent government the favor of refraining from voting down the PiS attempt to form government. If PiS and their one likely partner party try to form government, estimate is, attempt will crash and burn by geting voted no confidence by Parliament.

This is how things go in multiparty democracies and coalition governments. It doesn’t matter who has plurality. What matters is “can you pass the government forming vote of confidence”. Prime minister could be from the smallest party in Parliament as long as he can gather Parliament’s confidence.

Edit: minority governments do happen in multiparty Parliaments, buy those happen at the leave of the Parliament. Meaning the minority is allowed to pass confidence. Either by directly getting support votes or depending voting system by parties voting empty. Some countries confidence votes is “there is confidence, unless majority actively votes yes on no confidence proposal”. Making voting empty a tacit not enthusiastic signal of confidence. “We won’t actively vote for you, but we won’t either vote you down”. Leaving government standing.

Minority government can not form against active resistance of majority of Parliament.

Threatening BBC in London seems like a really stupid idea. They will just call MI5 and the Metropolitan police. I would think British government takes dim view on a foreign government trying to pressure BBC in London.

P.S. You see that is the British government’s job, stay out of their turf. :)

Left hand not knowing what right does? Maybe even hands and head disagreeing. Military level (or diplomatic negotiating level, whom ever the actual people working are) people agreeing to cease fire (out of pragmatism) and then political leadership level denying anything was agreed, since that would look like being soft on enemy?

It will at minimum be a fight. It won’t just sail through. Also whole governments being against means one of them might challenge the law in to European Court of Justice. Since as nation-states also often have, EU itself has charter of rights part in the fundamental EU treaties. It also has normal limit and share of powers. EU Council and Parliament aren’t all powerfull. ECJ can rule a directive or regulation to be against the core treaties like Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Said charter does include in it right to privacy (which explicitly mentions right to privacy in ones communications) and protection of personal data. Obviously none of these are absolute, but it means such wide tampering as making encryption illegal might very well be deemed to wide a breach of right to private communications.

Oh and those who might worry they wouldn’t dare at ECJ… ECJ has twice struck down the data protection agreement negotiated by EU with USA over “USA privacy laws are simply incompatible, no good enough assurances can be given by USA as long as USA has as powerful spying power laws as it has”. Each time against great consternation and frankly humiliating black eye to the Commission at the time.

ECJ doesn’t mess around and doesn’t really care their ruling being mighty politically inconvenient and/or expensive to EU or it’s memberstates. They are also known for their stance that privacy is a corner stone civil right (as stated in the charter and human rights conventions also, their legal basis) and take it very seriously as key part of democracy and protection of democracy. Without free and private communications and expression there can be no free political discussion, without free political discussion there can be no democracy.

As I remember at the moment partly Von Der Leyen, the current Commission president. She is a German Christian democrat and apparently bit with capital C. Meaning she has bit of a moral panic streak on her of the “won’t you think of the children” variety. As I understand this current proposal is very much driven by her.

However her driving it doesn’t mean it sail through to pass as legislation. Some whole memberstate governments are against the encryption busting idea.

Also I would add, not like this is unanimously supported in EU among memberstates. So this isn’t a done deal, this is a legislative proposal. Ofcourse everyone should activate and campaign on this, but its not like this is “Privacy activists vs all of EU and all the member state governments” situation. Some official government positions on this one are “this should not pass like it is, breaking the encryption is bad idea”.

Wouldn’t be first time EU commission proposal falls. Plus as you said ECJ would most likely rule it as being against the Charter of Rights of European Union as too wide breach of right to privacy.