Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Hilarious (Score 4, Insightful) 69

You seem to be asserting sovereign nations other than the US are in the wrong to control what is bought and sold in their countries.

I assume you think the US should also tariff up against Israel for failing to import more pork?

As a practical matter, more tariffs will chase EU customers off faster while punishing American companies. That's just giving them more object lessons in why the US is a dangerously unreliable partner while making sure business owners get their noses rubbed in it - a sure-fire way to convince an influential block of otherwise fairly small-c conservative voters the EU is doing the right thing.

It amazes me how many people seem to not understand very basic things about how people work. Inch-deep mile-wide grievance is a hell of a drug.

(And let's not even get in to however the fuck you think "recoup[ing] the funds" via tariffs would work. After Americans are taxed more on EU products, you think Google is going to get that money? How? What's the legal mechanism? And what does any of that have to do with an EU fine?)

Comment Apple sold out, man (Score 4, Interesting) 91

That's the problem with winning. You become The Man.

That isn't just semantics. Your interests change - you become more (small-c) conservative, defensive measures become much more important, etc. because the next incremental customer is worth much less than keeping what you have. And the risk is real - everyone wants to be king.

In Apple's case, there's also that it is now a fully post-Jobs company, and Jobs was uniquely responsible for what Apple was. His remaining influence is in the heads of the graybeards who worked with him and is otherwise ceremonial. And Jobs was "counterculture", to some extent. It was more than PR - it was his personality. It is why for istance they yielded the enterprise market to Windows - he not only didn't give a shit about device management or directory service permissions or stuff like that, he considered that somewhere between distracting from and hostile to making "insanely great" devices. That was all tempered through business demands, but he really did refuse to do a lot of "normal" things that are considered table stakes today. Jobs was a strange CEO.

Cook is not. Cook is very good at his job, but he's not the type to "leave money on the table" by refusing to build something he doesn't personally care about. And at their size, it is harder for them to resist losing focus, especially without Job's unique mix of arrogance, talent, poker face, assholishness, focus and charisma.

I don't think it is possible to have a $trillion+ company that isn't exploitive. As they get bigger, they take the shape and characteristics of the system in which they're embedded.

You want non-shitty companies, grow them somewhere that doesn't reward them for doing shitty things.

Comment Similar to car repo devices (Score 2) 91

Sounds a lot like remote-disable devices for cars, so the repo man has an easier job.

When those first came out, some of them allowed the car to drive, but would honk the horn to shame the driver, but now I think they all just disable the engine. Imagining the Apple version of that is entertaining... it could chose your emoji for you, blast Nickelback when it detects you're in church, or start sending your photos to random contacts until you pay up.

Comment Always (Score 1) 62

Sell me something and leave me alone is my preferred model.

They only time I can imagine renting something like a phone or computer is for a specific purpose, and only if there's an early out clause that would result in lower costs than a purchase. Like renting a phone for an international vacation to avoid the risk of brownshirts imaging your actual phone at the border. Otherwise it makes more sense to buy it outright and sell it afterwards.

But basically, if there is an option that doesn't result in a monthly payment or emails that I have to pay attention to, I will take that option. I guess I'm not a relationship kinda guy, at least when it comes to legal fictions.

Comment Re:On premise (Score 4, Insightful) 104

Partly true.

Completely correct about court decisions coupled with legislation mean that the US asserts data sovereignty but will not honor it.

But Europe only grumbled about that until the US selected a geriatric grifter for executive and started providing object lessons in why that wasn't just a theoretic risk.

Honestly, so far this is going easier than Europe could have hoped. I'm sure Piggie will notice at some point and start running his yap and throwing around more tariffs, providing more demonstration as to exactly why Europe has to migrate data somewhere safe. But he's incompetent and impulsive enough that they have a window in which to migrate before he takes his last dump and some more competent fascist ends up in charge.

Comment Re:Results over tools (Score 1) 92

So far, experiments have shown that one cannot expect people to remain as diligent after extended periods of LLM use.

This is absolutely a problem if you work in a shitty sweatshop that forces you to be a sin eater for robot code.

The way we do it is, the tools are available, but you're not required to use them in any specific way or really, at all if you don't want to. You do, of course, have to get your work done and be responsible for your code. We have a spectrum of use, from all-in cascades of agents through folks who use it as little more than a search engine.

We had a few incidents where people were caught out and couldn't explain why their code did what it did, but that seemed to be enough to warn the rest; that hasn't happened in a while. I don't see our "velocity" stats, so I don't know if/to what extent the robots are speeding us up, but knowing our bean counters we wouldn't be maintaining our spend at this point if there weren't a visible bottom-line result. I do see our bug and incident metrics, which haven't seen any impact from LLM use.

If you work in a shithole, yeah, they're going to burn you out. But that's about sociopathic management, not the robot. They'd wear you down a different way if LLMs didn't exist.

Comment Re:Easy part's done (Score 1) 98

Humans screw up in very different ways. They don't enter intersections and then stop if the traffic signals are out.

Humans can also coordinate with each other when things aren't working. You can't communicate with a Waymo to coordinate, they don't pick up contextual cues from other drivers' behavior, and the way they 'fail safe' really depends on everything else around them working correctly for the 'safe' part .

Having both failure modes at the same time is very likely to be a much bigger shitshow than merely panicky drivers.

Comment Easy part's done (Score 5, Insightful) 98

They made them capable of easy-mode driving.

Now the engineers need to work on exception handling.

I mean that sincerely. These things only work when things are normal. Power failures, unmapped blockages, a roman candle in the street, even crowds turn them in to traffic blockages themselves.

Just wait until there's an actual mass casualty event - earthquake, terror, something like that, and these all things go comatose in intersections like they did in SF last year.

Comment Re:True (Score 1) 72

Oh, let's be very clear - this is completely unsuitable for "The Masses".

This is network nerd territory, overriding a well-functioning system with your personal policy preferences. Doing so is implicitly taking responsibility for any breakage, and The Masses are simply not competent to do that.

Joe Random doesn't know what an autonomous system is, and a tool tip isn't going to educate them sufficiently to make an informed choice. Non-nerds are likely to shoot themselves in the foot doing stuff like this, not realizing some transitive dependency on some random Facebook thing means they're blocking something they depend on.

Put it this way - if you have normal, nontechnical users on your network doing normal human stuff, banning Meta and Alphabet ASes will almost certainly break something they use. I'm a strange old nerd, going out of my way to break social media surveillance. That is... pretty much the opposite of most casual internet users' goals.

Slashdot Top Deals

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. -- Lazarus Long

Working...