The fact that you're unwilling to pay the incredibly low price of attaching even a pseudonym to your statement speaks volumes. Not even by mentioning it in your AC post.

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?

You should read the actual words you quoted. I answered the question asked... then you responded saying "it's obvious they were asking a different questions". What a dipshit.

Where I live. (North Carolina), any one involved in a conversation is allowed to record the conversation from the moment they entered it until it ends, without any consent required. This is not uncommon as it allows people to protect themselves from others scams/threats/ect.

Anyone who think their conversation is secure and private is sadly mistaken. Its only private as long as all other parties respect you.

Get over this silly notion that you can say things to someone and it leave no evidence beyond a man's word. The time for low grade liars has passed.

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.

Because it's almost always better to spend someone else's money than your own. Failing that, it's almost always better to spend future money rather than current money. The "almosts" are there because the terms have to be scrutinized, but if the terms are good... you hang onto the cash and revenues you have. Having cash gives you flexibility and enables you to take better advantage of opportunities. And if you end up not needing the cash for anything, you can always invest it. This may not be the first rule of business, but it's got to be in the top ten.

It's honestly a good rule for personal finances, as well. If someone offers you a million dollar loan at 2% interest, your immediate answer should be "Can I get more"? And for more quotidian stuff, it's better to front-load income and defer expenses whenever and wherever possible. Pay bills when they're due, not when they arrive. Use a credit card and pay the balance off every month, letting you keep your money in your account for longer, interest-free. These strategies allow you to make some money by investing it, of course, but mostly it gives you flexibility if you need it. Which if you have decent savings you never should... but it's still better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

There is an increasing body of evidence that this is also how human reasoning normally works. Usually, we make decisions first and only afterwards (if necessary) engage our reasoning ability to generate an explanation of our decision. Experiments show that we're actually just as good at explaining decisions that were the opposite of the ones we made, assuming we can first be tricked into believing that they were our decisions.

Of course there are cases where we engage in lengthy, logic-based sequences of reasoning to derive a conclusion, especially if we've spent many years in higher education that trains us to think that way. This is particularly true when we reason in groups, exchanging ideas and critiquing others' reasoning and conclusions. It appears that for most of human history this is probably the primary way we employed reason, though in such social reasoning the goal is less to ensure accurate results than it is for the most skilled and smartest debaters to get their way (thereby improving their genes' probability of survival)... though it's still the case that making better arguments is the best way to "win" and that better arguments are more likely to be at least directionally correct. I'm sure you've noticed that your own reasoning gets better when you attempt to order your thoughts to potentially present them to a critical listener. This even works quite well when the "listener" isn't able to be critical; hence the utility of "rubber duck debugging". Of course, discussing with an intelligent and listener who is engaged in trying to critique your reasoning and offers their own counterpoints for your critique works even better.

It shouldn't surprise us that AI exhibits similar characteristics. Their core structure is at least notionally modeled on the neural networks of our own brains, and they're trained on large bodies of our text. Their evolution over the last few years also models our thought processes. The first hugely-successful LLMs just produced output without any sort of "thought process". That quickly ran into limitations, then someone came up with the idea of feeding their output back in and enabling them to engage in "self-talk" during which they could evaluate, criticize and improve their conclusions. This "reasoning overlay" looks at least superficially similar to the stream-of-thought self-talk that we engage in when thinking our way logically through a problem. And again, much like us, when LLMs do engage in a longer chain of thought, they actually can explain their conclusions by looking at the sequence of steps they went through.

There are also ways in which human and AI cognition differs substantially, of course, and in many ways AI thinking is far inferior to human cognition. Some of this is based on their different approach to context. An AI with a 1M token context window can keep at its "fingertips" far more precise context then we can -- we struggle to remember more than about 7 numbers for more than a few seconds -- but we're much better at maintaining a "big picture", which we achieve not by remembering everything but by being better at selectively extracting the most salient bits (I expect that improving AI ability to do this will be one of the next large steps forward in capability).

Any way, the point is that AI "thinking" is far more similar to ours than you credit it to be.

No one can really define what "real AI" is. As for whether it will try to kill us... it is utterly impossible for us to say what AI might or might not do as it continues to improve. Your point about its reward system is potentially valid, but with a little thought it's pretty easy to come up with ways in which a superintelligence might destroy us while trying to serve us. Even more to the point, we don't know what the "derived" motivation system inside the systems is. We can't look inside. Observing the self-talk stream-of-consciousness gives us some insight, insight that we actually can't have into humans' thought processes, but it's not definitive.

Do some reading about "instrumental" vs "final" goals. I highly recommend Nick Bostrom's book, "Superintelligence". It's pretty old and quite dated in a lot of ways, but it gives you the tools to think usefully about these questions.

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