> We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.
We don't. People engaging in piracy have their lives ruined, companies engaging in piracy pay a tiny fraction of their revenues out to authors who can't legally outgun them.
(Sorry, I just wanted to air the juxtaposition as clearly as possible, I sense we are actually in agreement)
Nuclear disarmament is governed by treaty, which is largely adhered to.
An AI treaty could quite easily be offered by the US because it has multiple frontier labs. Most countries would quite happily limit the activity of their larger companies in exchange for their companies not being eaten alive by AI generally. It is pretty great fodder for international cooperation, and governments can move fast when it is timely to do so.
They aren't following the same strategy. Apple does race for the frontier in their main field: beautiful, well-integrated hardware and software. Mistral does not race for the frontier in their main field: AI creation. They're grabbing bits and bobs from people that need (or feel they need) sovereign AI. It's like if you go into making phones for the military. You aren't going for the best phones; you're going for making sure you're the only company that has the right connections to keep that customer.
That's uncharitable. Defense companies do play the game (like anyone in the enterprise space), but they also do ship stuff that is uniquely set up to satisfy the use-case. I don't think an unmodified iPhone would do great in a warzone with no cell signal.
True - fair enough. Perhaps a little uncharitable. I would still currently say that the Mistral AI is more like a worse cellphone in every sense that has the right supplier agreements, but perhaps there are subtleties I'm missing.
If they get to "good enough is good enough" and are sovereign to the EU, that is a market fit/moat that's hard to crack since the distinguishing criteria is both parts.
It's hard for a US company to be sovereign to the EU and the same with China ;).
Given current geopolitics there are going to be a lot of quiet conversations in government offices across Europe about how much we want to rely on the Americans/Chinese for anything and how we reduce that exposure to either.
Yes we have and will have the entrenched problem to deal with but adding to that problem is the issue at this point.
When this comes up on HN quite frequently the comments are.. interesting - there seems to be a kneejerk "How dare the Europeans consider their alternatives/not using us (where us is the US)", they take it personally that lots of techies/governments in the EU are trying to find ways to avoid making the dependence we have any worse than it already is but that's frankly getting annoyed at the wrong people, maybe get annoyed at the people who are making us question if the current cosy (for the US) situation is what we want.
For some of us this has been expected for a long while and just defacto handing over/not competing with the US on the tech side never really sat right to start with, it was and is always a risk to hand that kind of power to another country/entity.
Is that actually true? A settlement only binds the relevant parties. If it had gone to court that's be different, but functionally this is a private agreement. My understanding of law is UK centric, though, so can anyone say why this would be the case? Is there something wildly different about the American system?
True but with this (lousy) deal Meta ensures no legal precedent will be set and it publicly establishes a baseline of terms and installment payments all the states have agreed to accept. That turns a serious existential threat into, essentially, a capped business tax. The negotations with TikTok and YouTube will start with these terms and end not far from them.
The clever thing Meta did was make 30% of the money they're giving the states ($5.3B) conditional on the states getting both TikTok and YouTube to agree to the same terms. They're basically incentivizing the enforcers to find a way to force the same terms on their biggest competitors.
A settlement only binds the relevant parties, but I don't think it's terribly conspiratorial to think the details of this settlement are an implicit threat to Meta's competitors. "Meta agrees to implement a one-hour limit, but only after Youtube and Tiktok do the same" sounds very much like Youtube and Tiktok had better fall in line if they don't want to get sued themselves.
Honestly at this point I think the way to go may be to stop using plastics where they're not absolutely required, and to subsequently burn what goes into landfill while producing electricity and reclaiming heat. Better that than this.
I'd argue that if we are burning plastics we get to dodge microplastics, and we get a second use of hydrocarbons. Burn enough plastic, maybe we can displace some gas. Optimistic, I realise.
One problem is that plastic generally contains all manner of additives which create a health hazard when burned. Incinerators supposedly filter out the dangerous pollutants, but it seems likely that quite a lot gets into the air. For some of these chemicals we know that tiny concentrations, much smaller than previously thought, are enough to be dangerous. The safest approach IMO is ground sequestration. And of course much better regulation of plastic additives.
I think the legitimate answer was groundwater contamination, but that should be solved for other things we bury. I'm on board for non-biodegradable plastic trash sequestration
Easy cases might be single use plastics outside of a medical environment and anything where there isn't a substitute with adequate properties (I'd ignore economics here and let the market solve)
Ultimately a tricky thing to define though, no argument.
This happened to me with Starling Bank's app years ago. I have since conceded defeat. What is pernicious is how some of these services are unusable without an app, while also bossing the user around about what operating system they can use. Starling left me without any access to any of my bank accounts at the time (2022 or so) so now I use very old school online banking now to avoid this situation ever occurring again.
It's because PayPal shipped an update with incorrect anti-tampering code incompatible with secure app spawning. It can be worked around with the per-app secure app spawning toggle until they fix it.
Starling Bank app still works on GrapheneOS too. See here:
I've got a .email domain which various UK based retailers insist isn't a real domain from which email can be sent. I've been trying to convince Argos that it is real for about seven years.
To their credit, my building society actually took it all on board and fixed their system within a few months. To my incredible surprise, so did a major insurer.
Somehow I suspect GDPR isn't engaged there as they forbid the creation of an account in the first place, so they don't store the data. Maybe I could create an account with a different email address and try it then.
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