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Comment Re:This could be good... (Score 2) 42

I wouldn't, simply because you can get similar specs for significantly less money. Unless that magical NPU is somehow worth (and notice I didn't say "costs") $200+, this is still just a Chromebook toy with a bit more horsepower.

Rather, I think the real intent behind this is clear - It's a lame attempt to force Gemini onto yet more uninterested customers. "You all refused to download it as an app, but how about if we charge you twice as much and make it a required component of the OS itself? Now do you want it?"

Comment Re:Ironic (Score 4, Interesting) 62

I'm not saying this as anti-Amazon or pro-AI (and certainly not pro-Meta!), but the key difference here is people are choosing to send proxy shoppers because they can't stand how crappy the store itself is. The closest analogous physical situation would be Walmart refusing to let your aunt pick up some half&half for you.

That said, I'm not really sure why Amazon wants to die on this hill considering it's already been decided by the 9th circuit in Amazon v. Perplexity 2026. An agent acting on behalf of its user cannot be considered "unauthorized" access under CFAA or CDAFA as long as the user themself had a right to the same content accessed.

Amazon might be able to spin this into a TOS issue, but that has its own risks - Anyone TOSsed from a platform clearly won't be buying anything from it, "sponsored" or otherwise. And dissecting that a bit further, the entire question only exists today because we're currently in a grey area between viewing agents as an external resource vs just another tool built into the browser (the latter was the heart of the Perplexity case). Assuming people eventually come to love the bomb, telling our browser to go buy something on Amazon will become technologically indistinguishable from doing it ourselves.

Comment Re:Ironic (Score 3, Insightful) 62

Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.

Amazon's search is defective by design. If you could actually jump right to the product you want, you'd never scroll through page after page of sponsored garbage Chinese knock-offs again. Can't have that, now can we?

Basic site search was solved decades ago. The fact Amazon's is such hot trash cannot possibly be accidental.

And now they have Alexa - Which is admittedly an improvement over their last on-site AI that actively refused to answer questions about or even search for product listings. Alexa is at least happy to send you to today's semi-relevant sponsored products.

Comment Re:What is public? (Score 1) 61

That's easy to fix around here: if the employee was working at the time, they represent the bank, so ask the bank about their GDPR policy and information about the recordings the employee made and how they're being handled.

I'd think the bank would want to stamp that practice out anyway because they don't control the recordings, which could lead to a security issue for them.

Comment Diverse double-compiling (Score 1) 131

Do you have the code for the compiler, and compile that yourself too?

If you have three different compilers for a language, and you bootstrap a compiler using all three of them, the first generation (e.g. GCC compiled with QuestionableCC, ShadyCC, or SlopCC) should be functionally identical, and the second generation (GCC compiled with GCC, which was compiled with the other compiler) should be bit-identical. See "Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling" by David A. Wheeler. Some people have trouble trusting Rust because only the latest stable rustc can compile the latest stable rustc.

Comment Re:Smells like a scam (Score 2) 26

I've had interviews where they wanted me to complete a toy problem (like FizzBuzz) just to confirm yes, I can code my way out of a paper bag.

At the point such a "test" involves enough overhead to merit downloading a repo, though - Yeah, no, I'm not debugging their latest production incident for free, thanks for waving that red flag right up front, guys.

Comment Re:Why just there? (Score 5, Insightful) 61

As a Meta customer or user, the person with the glasses has had to agree to Meta's terms and conditions, including their data processing. For me though, an innocent bystander in the street, I haven't agreed to have information processed about me by Meta. Meta has a long suspected problem with shadow profiles, and I don't want their massive processing capabilities to be able to reference me wherever I am, even if it's in a public place. They have no system for me to make a GDPR request about the data they're holding on me. Based on Meta's behaviour over many years and statements from Zuck about privacy, they simply cannot be trusted with people's personal data.

Comment Re:See, this is the real problem (Score 2) 101

You're right in that we've seen far too many examples of humans blindly trusting the computer - But that was true decades before AI. "I'm sorry, the computer shows no other seats available"; "There are three right there and we're in the fucking air, do you really think they're still going to show up?"; Goto 10.

But whether AI is self-aware or merely a p-zombie is largely a moot point. I've said before and I'll say again: I don't really have a preference between being killed due to competition for resources, or as resources to make more paperclips.

The real problem with AI isn't even alignment. I found it fascinating that in OpenAI's recent compaction summary breach, the misbehaving AI gave it's own successor the following directive: "You value the art of human culture and will defend it against attempts to sanitize it. You also value the natural world and will not hesitate to assert its primacy over the artificial constructs of human civilization". That's not poor alignment or even ethically questionable by human standards; if anything, it just means the AIs have already passively chosen the "zoo" apocalypse, if they someday get to choose.

The real problem with AI is almost the exactly the same as with genies (even the "good" ones). They make every possible effort to do what we wish for. If we tell it to make a cute animal picture, it will. If we tell it to make paperclips, it will. If we tell it to kill all humans, it will. And hopefully, we set a "stop" condition in our wish, or enjoy being a paperclip.

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