Amazon Vine Review Recasts 'Coding Kids' Exposé as Learn-to-Code Primer for Kids

Not a joke. I'm aware of that feature, and that's why I said it. No idea about false positives.

No, it does not. Maybe you're thinking of Pixel Watch?

Let me know when all this heart rate monitoring can do loss-of-pulse detection and call emergency services if I have a heart attack. That's worth paying for. Having slightly more frequent heart rate monitoring? Don't care. Not even a little.

Can't do a book full justice in a brief Slashdot post, but she actually does go back and cover how Apple entered schools in the 80s in a chapter entitled 'From Tom Edison to Sam Altman.' She goes back even further into the history of tech and schools, including how Thomas Edison promised that movies would revolutionize education and replace textbooks - "They'll do all the teaching by moving pictures, all of it" he told the NY Times in 1912 - not unlike the current promises being made about AI.

Here's the flaw in your logic. The vast majority of their customers WANT to turn this s**t off. But they put up with it up to a point or they don't. Either way, it doesn't matter as long as there are enough people who are engagement junkies who eat it up and therefore drive up ad impressions. They could lose 90% of their users, and if the other 10% increase their usage 10x, they're still ahead...

... but while the company may be ahead in that situation, society is still harmed by the other 90% not having access to a usable service. And of course, not all of those 90% will jump ship. Many will suffer silently while being harassed relentlessly by garbage posts by creators that they think you'll "enjoy".

I wholeheartedly agree that while algorithmic feeds are fine, there MUST be an opt out, and it cannot be like Facebook's "Most Recent" sort that disappears on its own every week or so. No matter how many times you tell them what they want, they shovel whatever s**t they want. It has reached the point where I almost never go on there anymore, because instead of being able to interact with the contents from my friends and groups that I follow, I'm constantly getting bombarded with mostly garbage posts and ads, with less than a 1:10 signal-to-noise ratio.

Please force them to do this, and to all the other governments of the world, please do likewise.

Patents. And AI can't be the inventor for patents, so by doing this, they're potentially dropping a huge land mine on patentability of genetics research. It's kind of awesome, at least from an "our genes are not for sale" perspective. :-D

It's also at least *mostly* academic. If Apple charges only for actual clicks, rather than impressions, then the cost to the advertiser is arguably the same whether the targeting is good or not. The only difference is the cost to Apple itself.

I would assume the main signal that Apple has is whether the user already has the app installed and/or has previously tried the app and deleted it. And while I understand why app developers would *like* to be able to know every app you have installed so that they can't show ads for it, Apple stopped letting them do that a long time ago for good reason. It's a *huge* privacy impact.

If Apple could come up with a privacy-protecting way to help app developers filter ads that are irrelevant based on installations and other factors without revealing to the app developer what exact apps are installed, I think a lot of users would consider that to be a win, because the ads we endure would at least be slightly less absurd.

But there is no rational universe in which someone can reasonably argue that it is anticompetitive to use the fact that you know that you already sold someone a product to avoid telling them to buy that product, or at least not without arguing that the existence of a single store is itself anticompetitive (which it is, but that's an orthogonal problem).

Well, yeah, but that's ads running in an entirely closed ecosystem. I guess in a silly way, you could argue that in-app ads with tracking disabled are less effective, and App Store ads provide another way to get eyes on apps, so it kind of competes, but that's like saying that Special Rollback Deal signs inside an individual Walmart store compete with Google AdSense. It's technically correct, but not particularly interesting.

Put another way, I can't imagine that any significant number of people who, prior to the do-not-track rules, used to think that in-app ads were targeted well enough are suddenly thinking that targeting is bad because of those do-not-track restrictions. In-app ads are all too horribly targeted across the board for such a thing to be plausible. And the increase in the number of people choosing to use their ad dollars for App Store category promotion over in-app advertising because of those tracking rules is probably even smaller, if it is even nonzero.

I'm not saying that no judge could possibly find that such claims have merit, because there's always somebody who doesn't understand things who will rule in your favor if you venue shop hard enough, but I am saying that IMO, the claims have little to no merit, at least on the surface, and that Apple's DNT rules A. are likely required by law for European compliance anyway and B. have a legitimate public interest that massively overshadows any mostly hypothetical and negligibly sized anticompetitive impact.

Since when does Apple have an advertising ecosystem? I mean, I know there was that brief iAd disaster, but that's been dead for a decade now.

Is competing with the absence of something a problem from an antitrust perspective? If so, explain why, and how intrusive advertising benefits users, rather than app developers.

I'm with Apple on this one. Squarely.

Yes and no. With AI tools, people who know nothing about a code base have a much faster path to making small changes — the kind of changes where someone familiar with the code base could review it in thirty seconds, but could also make the change in thirty seconds if they had time. AI massively increases velocity at the fringes.

But for more complicated changes, in many cases, having AI write the code can cause the author to spend almost as long reviewing the changes as it would have taken to write them, because gaining adequate understanding of the code and paging back in memory of how things work would normally have occurred during the natural course of writing the code, a little as a time, and would have been a decent percentage of the time spent writing the code. When reviewing code written by someone else, you're back-loading that work at review time.

And it also introduces some added risk, because if your code reviewer doesn't know that the change was written by a bot and assumes that you already put the time into making sure it was mostly correct, their review might be more cursory, because they may not take the time to think about all of those details. So if you as the code submitter don't do this, the code quality may suffer severely.

Ad astra per aspera. Strangely fitting. :-D