And here I was thinking this was proved beyond any reasonable doubt when 4chan users spoofed the Time Magazine person of the year poll of 2009 to spell out "MARBLECAKE, ALSO THE GAME" by the initials of the top winners:
I wouldn't underestimate their familiarity with dark patterns, the testimony on how they thwarted third party payments suggests they are well aware of the mechanics.
> In one model, for example, Apple worked to determine how the “less seamless experience” of using a non-IAP method would lead customers to abandon their transactions. By modeling where this tipping point was, Apple was able to determine when the links would stop being an advantage to developers, which would push them back to using IAP.
> Apple also found that more restrictive rules around the placement and formatting of the links themselves could reduce the number of apps that decided to implement these outside links.
> Lawyers suggested Cook himself was involved with how the warning to App Store customers would appear, recommending an update to the text that appears when the external links were clicked. In one version, that link warned customers they were “no longer transacting with Apple.” Later, the link was updated to subtly suggest there could be privacy or security risks with purchases made on the web.
I am not sure if you replied in good faith, but here you go.
The reason is that they have been trying again and again to do this in various forms, slightly modifying tactics so any opposition to it has to start from scratch.
Plenty of people support Flock or at least its mission. They're just not vocal because the opposition is vociferous. Like most things the country is fairly divided. This poll has it 46% opposed and 38% support:
I'm not against AI data centers in principle. And I do believe that the water argument is incorrect in some areas. However, I do understand the argument that can reasonably be made for data centers in some places.
I'm personally more concerned about grid stability, power infrastructure upgrade costs being passed on to existing rate payers before the data center turns on a light bulb, and the impact that direct power consumption has on alternating current quality.
> A power line went down outside of Washington, DC, this week. Normally, the grid would only need a few seconds to recover from such an event. But this one took more than 10 minutes because data centers stopped drawing over 3 gigawatts’ worth of power nearly simultaneously.
> The event caused voltage across the PJM grid to spike from Northern Virginia to Chicago, according to data collected by Ting Labs, a startup that runs an IoT sensor network out of people’s electrical sockets.
> The event didn’t cause a blackout, but it did cause lights across the region to flicker. The incident demonstrated the effect that data centers can have on the grid — an outcome that experts believe will become more frequent.
they had a really cool optical approach that I kind of felt immediately was doomed in the consumer market but would likely find a cool, valuable niche. The unique distortion patterns and front element I felt probably ruled out cinema but beyond that I had no idea. looks like they pivoted at some point but their expertise in lens accommodation does seem like it could be helpful.
> But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control. “Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”
TechCrunch then goes on to blame Zuckerberg by insinuation. As someone who dislikes Facebook and Zuckerberg, I think Big Tech is a rather convenient boogeyman for fallout from the 2016 election & beyond.
> There are no negligent or stochastic hacking laws
I'm sure that Andrew Auernheimer would be pleased to hear that. [0] For accessing a publicly accessible endpoint, that was completely undefended and didn't actually require "hacking", he was convicted of "exceeding authorised access".
You _don't_ have to show intent under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for the first count.
> knowingly accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access [1]
"Knowingly", not "intentionally", as in the other counts.
You only have to show that:
a) They trained a system to access without authorization (hacking)
b) The system that was trained exceeded authorized access
As responsibility falls to the operator with automated systems, the company becomes liable.
It surprises me to no end that people continue working for this lunatic. When this company was offering an early severance, I am surprised only 159 took the offer [1]. Per cited article, this was 8.4% of the total workforce. Apparently there was even a second severance offer at around the same time of the CEO's legal fight with WP Engine [2].
> Another thing I'm always looking for is tails that could wag the dog. The history of startups is full of these. Paypal started out doing security for hand-held devices. They created Paypal as a demo of their security software. But then eBay sellers started using it to take payments, and after a couple months the founders acknowledged that this was the business they were now in, even though they hadn't meant to be. So whenever founders build something peripheral to the main product I always ask: could this be the real product?
I never understood why anybody would pay for Slack when its based on IRC and IRC is free, but whatever. I guess when you are spending other people's money and all your employees are super insecure these kinds of things pay for themselves... maybe?
I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.
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> If you’re a Firefox user, you may have noticed a weird new extension that suddenly showed up in your browser this week.
> The extension is called “Looking Glass 1.0.3” and this is its description: MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. Now that sounds ominous. It’s really not, though. It’s a promotional campaign between Firefox and the TV series Mr. Robot that brings an alternate reality game to your browser. This must have sounded like a great idea when somebody pitched it to Mozilla, but the backlash has been fierce.
He's pretty close to that particular police chief of staff or whatever he was. So this is probably just one of those things where if you have connections, then sometimes you take someone on vacation or fly them private and it turns out they give you some documents, rule in your favour in a case, pardon you.
TFA title is a little misleading, it is song _lyrics_ that are alleged stolen.
Huge settlement inbound. Lyrics reproduced on Google search, Musixmatch and elsewhere are licensed [1] so there's no "fair use" defense. (Would be interesting if Gemini ever gets caught up in this).
The more interesting question is if there will ever be a fair deal for creators with AI consuming their content. Anti-copyright AI maxis seem to anxiously await a future where nobody can make money off their original work, but for most people it's just a fairness issue that if somebody makes something people like, they should get paid for it at least for some period of time.
There's a price tag to be paid, the question is will the hyperscalers take on the problem and solve attribution and payment? Or will they just settle as the price of doing their dirty business of stealing human work?
Elon Musk openly admitted to distilling OpenAI's models [1], which I think explains the "based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts".
Last year, Anthropic cut off Windsurf the same way [2]. Fortunately, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI allows you to use your subscription with other harnesses, including Cursor.
Of course today, Anthropic is taking the "high road" and is OK with with SpaceX [3] including their models in Cursor, because they need SpaceX's compute.
I believe the folks cutting down Flock cameras and voting out reps who won't have them removed are well within their rights. Fundamentally, Flock Safety is incompatible with US constitutional rights, their enterprise value can drain slowly, or quickly. We're just arguing time horizon.
> If you want violence, you better be prepared for it. You just can't complain when someone doesn't like what you are doing and comes right to your door.
I don't condone violence in this context, and besides perhaps a few individuals (humans are tricky), I haven't seen anyone else loudly or overtly calling for it (provide sources if I am wrong). My assumption is his address is being shared to demonstrate the asymmetry and hypocrisy. "If you have nothing to hide" argument.
(but you know, its the usual authoritarian tech bro "I wanna get rich and have control while the plebs get stuck with the harm and externalities" story)
Interesting that Hugging Face turned down a $500M investment from Nvidia less than a year ago (at a $7B valuation) because they "didn't want a dominant investor that could sway its decisions"
Ten months later they're selling the entire company to Nvidia for $12.9B. So much for not wanting a dominant investor ...
I pull weights from HF most weeks (Ollama, ComfyUI etc) and I suspect Nvidia aren't paying 86x revenue for a file host. They're paying for the fact that every README, notebook and workflow on the planet has a hardcoded huggingface.co path in it. It's the npm/PyPI of AI, and now the company that sells the GPUs also owns the registry that decides which models are easy to find and download
I don't think Nvidia will start deleting models. They don't need to. They just need to make sure the models that run best on CUDA get promoted, and the ones that run well on a Mac or an AMD card (or the "abliterated" finetunes) quietly get less visibility. Nvidia have plenty of form for this kind of segmentation (e.g. removing NVLink from consumer cards after the 3090).
The only alternative registry with any real scale is ModelScope, which is owned by Alibaba. So the choice for anyone worried about this is an American GPU monopoly or the Chinese Communist Party. Anyone know of a serious third option?
Leadership, Management and being a Boss are not the same things. You need a solid mix of all three to be a successful executive. Cut throat, self aggrandizing, and a bit of a selfish asshole are all traits that lead to positive outcomes in these roles.
https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/time-magazine-throws-up-it...
Or when Kim Jong Un won in 2012, spelling out "KJUGASCHAMBER":
https://observer.com/2012/12/4chan-successfully-votes-kim-jo...