These posts from him are so tiring. If ChatGPT-5 was a high fidelity 100% accurate simulation of a team of top tier grad students, he'd be writing that we will soon run out of grad student brains to scan and results will taper off.
It would an powerful tool, changing the world but the post would be the same 'nothing to see here folks' post as this.
> It would an amazing tool, changing the world but the post would be the same 'nothing to see here folks' post as this.
It will change the world for the worse. We don't need more progress and more technology. What's the point of living if we're going to give all the funnest work to AI? Idiocy.
Maybe amazing was the wrong word. I just meant regardless of whether AI tools are getting better or worse - regardless of whether things are looking to go on improving forever or tapering off - he will write the same post.
That makes the posts devoid of meaning. It's gist is unaffected by the things happening in the real world. Will always be "I told you this wouldn't work".
Why would you think research is fun if we don’t need more progress? If one were to take your comment seriously they would conclude we must fire all those people working on fun problems.
Yeah it's fear of GDPR, which is kind of like a retroactive set of standards: "we'll know an infringement when we see it", type vibe. Which of course is kryptonite to innovation, and ultimatly will lead to a more fragmented internet.
As a European I to try see it from both sides, consumer protections are generally a good thing, but it right now being restricted by EU vagueness sucks ass because I just want to play with the cool new toys.
But how can you explain OpenAI works in EU but latest google AI is not yet here.
What is OpenAI GPT4 and Google bard/Gemini EU version not doing so they work in EU but the latest Google AI is doing so google is incapable of putting it in EU ?
Maybe latest one is more invasive with ypur personal account? Scanning your personal data without consent ?
Because seems to be a super simple business, user sends you a prompt, you run the prompt and send the result back, you keep nothing unless necessary for the service to work and give the user the ability to purge their history/data .
Open AI is all about LLMs, that's their entire product and core competency, so withholding access in such a big market isn't worth it to them. Sure, there's a risk, but there are far bigger risks facing Open AI now than GDPR noncompliance.
Google is in a completely different situation. Gemini is, so far, a niche product, making little to no money for Google. However, due to how the GDPR works, a mistake with Gemini could cost the entire company dearly, impacting the profits they make from any other products.
This is a more general principle. If you're a small startup that manufactures foos, and there's a risk that manufacturing Foos infringes on Apple's patents, well, that's just one of the risks you have to bear as a startup. If you get wiped out by a lawsuit, you're established as a limited-liability corporation for a reason, if the fine is larger than the worth of your company, you can just declare bankruptcy and go away. You can't decide to stop manufacturing Foos, as that's your entire business.
If you're the size of Google, getting into the Foo-manufacturing business is not worth it. If Apple sues you, that won't just impact the Foo-manufacturing side of your business, the fine can be significantly larger than any profits you ever hoped to make from the venture, not to mention the brand damage, strain on resources etc. If Foo manufacturing is ultimately going to be a side business for you, it's probably not worth it to be the hill you die on.
This is why it makes sense for startups to "move fast and break things™", and for big corporations to require countless legal reviews on the smallest of decisions.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a long and arduous procedure to clear a new product for GDPR compliance, and the PM had a choice between launching now and excluding the EU or launching later for everybody. This is also what originally happened with Bard.
this would suggest that the new AI is different. I still get Bard/Gemini new feature updates in EU but not the new model yet.
So the lawyers have time for this new features but not for the new model, so the new modl must bring bigger privacy concerns.
I can't explain it. It feels like a pre-emptive fuck you from a few different companies towards the EU.
I'm glad that Microsoft / OpenAI is confident enough to put out a global consumer facing gen AI offering. Maybe they received EU assurances, or maybe they have enough legal muscle to tank any possible hit, and eating Google's lunch is a prize worth the risk.
GDPR is all about being clear about the data you are collecting, what you are planning to do with it, and is what you are doing with it legitimate.
Lots of companies come unstuck because they fall into the trap of “let’s just collect everything and see what we can do with it”.
Or, I’ve got all this data I’ve collected legitimately. Who knew that you could sell it on to some data broken and make loads of money - let’s do that!
Or, I’ve collected all this data, I’m just going to keep it hanging around, oops I just put it on a public bucket and leaked it all. Hmm, I’m not even sure what data we had, have we just compromised a bunch of people? Who knows…
Also, GDPR compliance is forcing companies to collect and store data they wouldn't have been collecting otherwise, such as to be compliant in regards to child safety you must find out which users are children. Data itself can be seen as a somewhat radioactive commodity, requiring exquisite handling, and creating new reputational and security risks.
It's not supprising that many smaller companies are saying fuck this noise.
If by design you can do whatever pleases you, then yes you have a lot of innovation. But sometimes it leads to normalisation of troubles (e.g. data leaks in the US), and incredulity of the general public ("how did we even get there")?
There are good reasons to ponder ethics in the original balance too, it hasn't got to be completely paralysing either. But this comes with a cost (e.g. typically, for any data-sensitive work these days complying with GDPR, a significant part of the design & implementation time is "are we compliant").
This comment always gets downvoted, but I have seen this happen in my previous company. They hired an expensive lawyer from Europe for GDPR compliance and even his suggestions didn't made sense and in the end we decided to geoblock Europe. e.g. EU didn't clearly banned consent rejection requiring more effort and just skirted around it and that's why every company have two step rejection and one step acceptance.
They could have easily made law requiring sites accept DNT header but they didn't likely because of lobbying.
The first part of your comment lacks understanding of how and why the consent rejection has been worded as it has. If you want to comply it is easy. But if a company wants to skirt the regulation it is written such that the regulatory body can still get you for making it harder.
DNT is not relevant as GDPR is not directly a regulation against tracking, and it certainly isn't because of lobbying.
Not only I don't understand it, the top tier European law firm the company hired also didn't understood it. The law ALLOWS companies to skirt around it. I don't know if that's intentional or not.
> If you want to comply it is easy.
That's the entire antithesis of modern law as opposed to monarchy. Law should be codified in as clear rules as possible.
She may not be aware that there is a problem. My understanding is that game / social media addiction is an attempt to not think about real life things, including acknowledging that so much time has been wasted staring into the black mirror.
My advice is to let her know that you think she has a media addiction, then at least she has some level of awareness.
I don't think that's true with mental illness. He's referring to emotions being the source of a person's beliefs rather than reason.
People can learn coping skills to deal with things they can't control. Reasoning can override emotion.
For myself, learning I was bipolar allowed me to understand what was happening and be able to put things in context. I still need medication but I don't need as much of it.
Not being able to customise my environment is a dealbreaker for me. I will be converting my day to day machine to Linux rather than being nagged into a user hostile OS upgrade.
Clearly Microsoft has given up on powerusers, the people who notice and sometimes fix flaws in their monolith. Seems shortsighted.
I am not sure if the apps mentioned here really target power users. It seems that they are actually blocking apps by name (!) that reached some popularity in bringing back the old windows style interface. Those apps are bypassing Microsofts efforts to place ads all over the place and monetize the start menu. Those new featured content and AI stuff seems all very hacked into the interface and breaks easily. My taskbar even gets stuck from time to time (missed meetings because of the stuck clock). So this seems all just collateral damage in using windows to sell cloud stuff.
Annoying how previous abilities are also being removed e.g. docking the windows start bar vertically on the side of the screen is no longer allowed in Windows 11, but is possible on Windows Server and Windows 10
Indeed. I moved to Linux back in the WinXP/Win7 days, and KDE's been my pretty much "go-to" desktop environment of choice since pretty much day one. I've tried and used many others for various purposes over the years, but always end up back on KDE for the most overall "familiar" (most like the Windows I had spent many years on), "integrated" (KDE apps tend to "play nice" together), and customizable interface.
The Steam Deck is actually what's pushed me closer to adopting Linux on my desktop. I usually run Windows just because it's the easiest OS to run games on, but the Steam Deck has really shown that with Proton you can run... basically anything!
Every tool that I use is cross-platform these days, anyway. VS Code, Blender, Inkscape, Godot, etc.
How good is running Windows in a VM with a Linux host nowadays? Does it work well for office users who want to run Office? How about people who want to run Adobe or Autodesk software? These use cases seem to be causing the most friction for the transition in my circles (apart from gaming, which is a different story).
Steam/Valve made a point of running Windows games under Linux as good or better as under.Windows. that is, Wine and Proton are really good these days.
Running genuine MS Windows® in a VM is very possible but much less necessary than, say, 10 years ago, if you want to run some non-esoteric Windows software. It also technically requires a license.
They asked about Office, Adobe, and Autodesk. I’d say the situation is still the opposite there. In the early 00s, you could run Microsoft Office etc. pretty well with CrossOver Office and the likes. But these applications barely work anymore if at all, most likely because their complexity increased a lot over the years.
Using a Windows VM is a pretty good solution. Though last time I tried only commercial solutions like VMWare work very well, because KVM-based solutions didn’t have great graphics support. Maybe VirtualBox is better, but Oracle.
If you have the hardware for it, VFIO setups can be amazing. I've been running graphics accelerated Windows inside a VM for a few months now, and apart for some random crashes, it's perfect.
I've been using Capture One (lightroom alternative) and Affinity Photo 2 inside the VM and it's been great.
Haven't really tried video editing, but it might not be as great.
How exactly does graphic acceleration work when you run a VM? Do you need two graphic cards (one for the host, another for the guest)?
Edit: to contribute a little to the grandparent question - I have Windows on QEMU for the Office suite and it works pretty smoothly. I had to make some config changes, most of them outlined in these reddit threads:
As a 20 year full-time Linux desktop user doing Enterprise IT consulting, running a windoze VM has never NOT been an entirely functional experience for me.
I've used both QEMU and Virtualbox to run them, mostly Virtuabox (yes, oracle sucks, it was still sun when I started), and probably the most demanding things I do on it is Visio, which I use for some very complex design docs in windows it general struggles with already. I used windoze xp in vm for ages even past its date of expiration, basically until newer Visio's no longer supported it, and all windows versions tried (7 and 10) have worked fine outside their own UI quirks.
I don't even enable 3d drivers, or try to make it do graphics-heavy things. Everything else I can do fully in Linux (including gaming), and this has been in supporting most any and every sort of enterprise across those years in technology.
Anyone that tells you Linux can't/doesn't work is being obstinate, ignorant, or lazy.
Not OP, but in my case it's Visual Studio. It's just the best IDE for me, and I have literally decades of muscle memory using it.
I first tried Linux sometime in the late 90s, and this might finally be the year I switch over. I do everything else in a Linux VM now, may as well run Linux as host and Windows as a VM.
In my case not just visual studio but the work it would require to figure out all I figured out on windows. Creating VMs, websites, interacting with system features, lots of trivial and not so trivial things to learn. I have tons of home scripts in C#, would probably need to rewrite most of them, likely using different libraries, I am still stuck on .net 4.8 because of that. I would love to switch though. I just don't have the bandwidth.
Isn't that just vscode, that ugly abomination that I've given up trying to configure in a reasonable fashion after like 5 minutes every time I tried it out again?
Anyways, I'm on jetbrains these days and never looked back.
Yes, you're right, it's VS Code they're referring to and it's not the same thing.
I tried JetBrains Rider and stopped using it after the console window didn't auto scroll as I logged stuff into it - I don't know how something so basic doesn't work properly.
I should probably try again, as so many people recommend it that I can only assume I did something wrong to mess up the console.
> I tried JetBrains Rider and stopped using it after the console window didn't auto scroll as I logged stuff into it - I don't know how something so basic doesn't work properly.
I use JetBrains IDEs as my daily drivers, nowadays they're pretty good and feel more responsive than the previous versions (you can even choose between the older type of UI and something more minimalist).
As for the console, is it possible that you weren't scrolled all the way to the bottom? For example, if you scoll up a bit and want to look at specific lines, the console will append the text to the bottom but won't move your viewport, whereas if you scroll back down to the bottom (or use the button for that), it'll start scrolling automatically again.
For me it's the hardware support in windows. I've been using Linux on and off for 15 years, but every time I've tried to switch my home desktop I've always run in to issues. I used mint Linux for quite a while and it makes a very good stab at competing with windows.
Recently I got a steam deck and I'm surprised how good it is in desktop mode, and also at running windows games in proton. I'm actually considering getting a dock and ditching my desktop atx tower. The tracking and telemetry in windows has really put me off it.
It's been fine for me over the last decade, but I took the easy route and ran it on thinkpad T series mostly.
I've cobbled together a random ryzen system with an A380 half a year ago and didn't even check for Linux compat before buying, and steam with proton works pretty well on debian 13.
Deal breakers are usually those games that bundle the EA or Epic launcher, those two are fucking dumpster fires when it comes to proton. Like, you fiddle for an hour to get a stupid fucking launcher going that wants an additional account signup and then the whole AAA Windows game runs perfectly fine.
Makes you appreciate Steam/Proton/Valve even more every time.
Judging by replies here should really be a "why are you still on windows" askHN.
Besides other reasons here, when you have decades of experience on how things work, hundreds of little utils and tools... and you want to finally concentrate more on productive work in your life and not start the whole hurdle anew.
Maybe if a perfect, seamless VM environment would exist, but that still leaves the HW problems.
I think I would miss how seamless is RDP too. I have a lots of VMs at home (simplifies backups, or allows to have a machine behind a VPN without affecting connectivity of the main machines).
Given the hard time I am having installing Linux on a Gigabyte NUC that was given to me, due to UEFI issues, I am quite close to either get rid of it, or install Windows 11, make use of WSL if needed, and call it a day.
Scanning groceries is a non-problem, so the actual problem Amazon is trying to solve is: employing people.
It's absolutely wild, yet unsurprising, that they tried to solve it by employing less well paid people. The Amazon future is mechanical turks all the way down.
Soon it will be fake AI law firms sending DMCA threats to fake AI posters to take fake AI content down before tgf fake AI end users see it. Then we can just pull the plug and go back to doing human stuff.
This finding keeps coming up in social science research: being connected to people seems to increase longevity. Which begs the follow up question: what is the underlying mechanism(s) that causes this effect?
Does social comparison promote self maintenance? Does the sharing of ideas lead to better cognitive hygiene? Does sharing power tools lead to less household accidents? Do we need to sniff other people's pheramones?
On a sceptical note, do extraverts, the sort of people who consent to be studied, continually arrive at conclusions that justify extraversion, missing the huge cohort of introverts who are quite content with minimal social contact?
> This finding keeps coming up in social science research: being connected to people seems to increase longevity.
Has a causal relationship in that direction actually been shown in research, or just correlation?
Because it seems very likely (well, certain for at least some people based on anecdotal experience) it goes in the other direction as well, i.e. someone who has serious health issues which cause them pain or low energy levels or whatever, would likely have less of a social life than if they were completely healthy even if they were the most social person imaginable before their health issues.
If for example I were diagnosed with cancer tomorrow and died of it in ten years time, I suspect it would significantly reduce the energy I have for social activity in the next ten years, but a study done just before I die finding correlation between my not having a good social life and my impending death wouldn't change the cause of death from cancer to lack of social contact.
(FYI I'm not arguing that social activity doesn't have any positive impact on physical health / length of life, in fact I'm sure that it can - I just don't know to what extent research has or hasn't shown how much it's one way or the other.)
Having seen elderly people decline, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it’s simply that that have a help network in place when they need it. I actually have a widowed neighbor approaching 90 with limited mobility but she’s been able to stay in her home comfortably enough because we have a rotation on our block that brings her meals (eg. We feed her on Wednesday, etc). She doesn’t really need the economic support but having someone cook and prepare and clean for her at each meal is a reason many people her age would move into an assisted living facility. Despite a high degree of social contact, duration of life once entering a facility like that is pretty low. She’s across the street from me so I even go take out her trash weekly to the curb and make sure her lawn guys are keeping things up to her standards (simple stuff like “hey, can you fix that sprinkler head”)
Alcohol consumption could be something as simple as being a net positive for health in moderation after accounting for the impact of various stresses the average person encounters in life. These things are often encountered as a couple for married folks.
I think there’s been research regarding the supposed “J-curve” for alcohol consumption — essentially, the original research that led to the idea of moderate consumption being better than none failed to differentiate between people who have never had alcohol, and those who stopped drinking due to health conditions. I wouldn’t be surprised if this “couples drinking together” also has a similar bias.
"AI" in this case is probably mostly Oct 6 cell phone locations.
It is obvious that Israel has loosened their targeting requirements, this story points to their internal justifications. The first step in ending this conflict must be to reimpose these standards of self restraint.
You don't like OpenAI Gary, we get it.