Notable that when it couldn't count the "r"s in strawberry the LLMs were already solving problems most of the people laughing at it for not being able to count "r"s wouldn't be able to come close to figuring out with weeks of research. People have had a myopic view of this technology for a long time. Many still do.
I always try to parse this "Mozilla is doing bad" as I've been using Firefox for years and other than features I want (vertical tabs, firefox relay, and a few other minor things) I couldn't tell you the difference of Firefox now vs 5 years ago vs 10 years ago. And the "shooting yourself in the foot" things talked about are always something that pretty much all other browser companies do but 10 times worse.
I think the last major scandal was AI additions (cuz who is using AI these days? What an awful idea!) that you can now turn off with one click? Personally never saw the AI features presented to me once. Then the one before that I can remember was the Mr. Robot thing that was so long ago it's hard to remember what even happened. I think they installed a add-on that wasn't enabled and did absolutely nothing unless you went looking for it and specifically wanted it to do something? And then they removed it very soon after when nerds overreacted so hard that we're still talking about it 10+ years later?
Chrome: inability to block ads, new "cookie free" (nope they didn't get rid of cookies) ad tracking, monitoring people in incognito mode, the list would goes on for a long while. Brave: Crypto nonsense, all kinds of advertising for their crap everywhere unless you go through many hoops to turn it off. Firefox is one of the few pieces of software I can say hasn't enshitified itself to the point of using something else.
I feel like if the doomers are correct and AGI happens research can't say anything about it. We won't be able to predict the outcome of something more intelligent than us or that can disrupt society so thoroughly. It's already causing major problems.
I follow AI quite closely and I have yet to see any hostility towards artists or mathematicians from anybody worth talking about (maybe some forum dwellers?). Nor have I ever seen any marketing or implications from big AI companies that says creative work or math is in any way useless or obsolete. The fact that AI can solve long unsolved math problems isn't hostility towards mathematicians.
I just wonder how many people smugly cry 'slop' and then immediately go ask chatgpt about something they want to know about. I suspect it's a surprisinly large amount.
There’s a difference between using and sharing. I don’t want to see your notebook. I want to see the finished document. To some of us, the difference is intuitively obvious, so we’re offended by what we’re getting at work these days.
I'm very envious of your workplace if the stuff before AI was somehow well written. If I had AI 10 years ago I would've been mostly using it to interpret most of the corporate speak e-mails and poorly written technical briefs.
Those are different though. One is just reading your own slop, the other is trying to make others read your slop. I don't love either one, but it's clear that one is a lot worse.
Surely you see how installing unvetted software on a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc. probably shouldn't be part of the "happy path" for most people. You shouldn't even install software you haven't fully vetted from the google play store. This should be drilled into non-technical people.
Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.
> a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
I'd see it the other way around and say that a device running an operating system controlled by some company shouldn't hold your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
How do you get around this? Literally every bank, brokerage, etc... is hell bent on you using your phone for everything from 2FA to passkeys, etc... They dont even imagine people have computers anymore or want two+ physical devices/controls on what can be done with which factors
It requires collective action. Ideally with laws to force interoperability, so folks can move among platforms with ease. Then standards will arise to keep that feasible for app makers.
Without regulation markets coalesce as the winners eat each other like a game of snake. It's a miracle Apple hasn't yet eliminated Android. Although I suppose for some institutions there is only iPhone.
Certainly you can use those, but they're not mandatory (here in Canada at least). Can easily get a card and use physical bank and ATM to do everything, and website logins use email as 2fa.
Today people get in debt to have the latest orange iPhone, for a long time before that most people in, ok, developed countries somehow got hold of a computer.
It was true then and it is true now. Outside businesspeople and students and the middle class of OECD countries (all amounting to a low single-digit percentage of the world population), ordinary people never bought desktop or laptop computers. By contrast, everyone has a mobile one in their pocket today.
More likely you're living in a bubble unrepresentative of the rest of the world. I just did some research, inconclusive because nobody is tracking this data. Personal-computer ownership in rich countries (i.e. "OECD") is indeed high. But only 12% of the world's population lives in Europe and North America combined. The figure is much much lower elsewhere in the world, where everyone lives. For example, 16 computers per 100 people in Brazil in the 2010s. [1] Most people in the world have never touched a laptop or desktop. Now that computing has gone mobile-first, the figure is only going to keep dropping.
> And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............
The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use. This makes me sad, but it does have merit.
FWIW I still use the website to do all my payments. I find banking apps to be madness - you're entrusting all your money to what is essentially a toy.
> The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use.
There are unconnected photoTAN devices that support this. They have a camera that reads a QR code. Some European banks use this. E.g. Vasco digipass 770
Yeah, compared to separate hardware HSMs mobile banking is a massive downgrade in both security as well as user being in control of the hardware they own (by forcing locked down closer source OS & forcing hardware updates).
If mobile banking really wanted to be secure, they would support something like a NFC yubikey for transaction verification. The fact they fully ignore separate secure HSMs tells you what you need to know about their security.
The world may not of ended but to of people have been hurt by malware ruining their computer, cryptolocking all of their company's files for ransom, stealing all of your login credentials, stealing cryptocurrency, taking secret photos with your webcam, screen recording what you are doing on your computer, etc.
The "personal computer" has a terrible track record.
For many decades, people have been mistakenly putting diesel fuel into their gasoline cars, yet we never outlawed diesel vehicles. You can only do so much to protect people without destroying their rights to their property.
It is much rarer since it needs 0 day to do these at the same level as possible on a pc. The play store scanning apps for malware is an important safety mechanism against this. Further more imposter apps like YouTube but with no ads that are Trojans that steal people's accounts.
Or the accessibility permission, or to some degree the access all files ones; but it's also enough for the app to pilfer the data you trust it with.
The Play Store's scanning is very far from perfect, and the amount of crap that's on it, combined with the trust that people have towards it, and apps' unfettered access to internet, makes malicious software easily more common than on PCs.
Even without considering as malicious the enormous data collection that almost everything on the Play Store does, encouraged by Google
Have you ever tried to educate a 70+ year old person on this kind of stuff? Their eyes gloss over and they don't care. I've told my mother not to install random apps on her phone several times yet she still does it. I could probably send her a phishing e-mail right now that 'looks like' it's from me (so long as my name is in the from: field that's enough) and she'd follow the instructions to install a malicious apk too.
"Everyone should just be smarter/more educated" is what I used to think as well. I now fully understand some people have no desire to be educated in any way and it's a net good for society to not have a large % of devices compromised.
The answer to people refusing to care about important things in life is not to put restrictions upon everyone's freedom. Ultimately, being an adult means you have to take responsibility for your actions (or lack thereof). It isn't hard to learn how to use a computer responsibly, and I've known plenty of older people who did so just fine. There's no excuse here.
You do understand we've broadly come to the conclusion that this isn't how society should work though, correct? It's why there's warning labels on everything, liability for not warning people for even the dumbest of things they might do with your product or in your establishment, extremely strict laws for things like driving a car, flying an airplane, or using any kind of heavy machinery, responsibility of servers to cut people off if they've had too much alcohol, the list goes on. I find intelligent people often have this mindset that all "real adults" are just as responsible as they are. It's just not the case.
And I generally wouldn't care "have at it" if their phone/computer being compromised only harmed them. But a bulk amount of compromised devices harms us all.
"Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize half of them are stupider than that!" -George Carlin
yes, got my father on linux a decade (or more) ago. He's 84. No problem. Most recently we discussed being vigilant against vishing.
Now my in-laws (similar age) one very demented, the other thinks he knows best because he was a chemical engineer...they could use some built in protections
so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
>so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
Which is really exactly what google is implementing here and why I'm so perplexed so many people are upset. You or I or smart parents (my mother has never used a computer in her life and wouldn't want to) will have absolutely no issue sideloading apps after the proposed changes.
Given Google's track record, I don't think it's just "being upset" to have serious doubts about the probability of this escape hatch staying indefinitely.
But that's just a completely different discussion that we could've had a long time ago when they introduced it as a on/off security setting ~15-20 years ago too (and I bet people did). IMO nothing has changed except I bet more people will take going into developer options, being sternly warned, then having to wait 24 hours as a sign this is something maybe they shouldn't be doing. And I'd argue if you come to that conclusion and don't look into it further you're probably right,
Given that google is now forced to have competing app stores due to Epic v. Google and the ninth circuit courts went into long and arduous detail in that anti-trust case about sideloading restrictions I don't think they have a leg to stand on if they get rid of sideloading completely. Oddly Apple continues to get away with it no problem.
This description is downplaying what's changing by a lot. The way you present it, they're merely adding a 24h wait time to the existing local "unknown sources" toggle.
They've been chipping away at AOSP for years, pulling more and more parts of the Android experience into their proprietary Google Play Services. In this case, they're doubling down in the same direction. Sure, it may be more or less transparent from a user-facing perspective, but it's a fundamental change to the model.
Previously, it was ultimately a local decision: Android warned you, you enabled the permission, and you installed the APK. It now becomes dependent on a Google-controlled verification/authorization mechanism. That's fundamentally different from making the existing "unknown sources" toggle more annoying.
Google is the one peddling the malware. Any changes to 'security' that don't start with them removing the oodles of malware from their store are not security but profit driven.
It is like saying that you should not have free speech because someone might influence 70+ to say stupid stuff (well, that is already happening...).
Family should be responsible on education or making phone of people that are not educated enough (minors, elderly, etc.) limited - I do that using Family Link. I have there my child and also my in-laws - both of them can't install new apps without my permission.
So the tech is already there, one just needs to use it.
What about an entire family of people who have no interest in learning technology they just want the shady ad-free youtube on their phone? I find it perplexing you've never met people like this. I'd wager it's more common than not in our world.
There is no way to have no "shady ad-free" on Google play. Have you tried installing anything that is free? Games for example? There are ads every few minutes that you either wait or accidentally click on them and you install another approved google play app, that has similar ads.
Look at apps on fdroid, no such thing.
So the solution is simple - ban google play and allow only fdroid if one wants good apps.
You can't protect everyone. Just like there are people oblivious to bad eating habits - it is a tax on ignorance.
That would be like requiring people taking driving lessons before driving cars - what nonsense! Just let them behind the wheel & they will figure it out just fine!
I'm not sure the situations are comparable when Windows doesn't have this permission system where the apps are still very limited in what they can access unless you grant specific directory access or access to the contact list or such
It does, but approximately nobody uses it, because Microsoft also tried to apply loads of constraints on what kinds of program could exist when they rolled it out, as part of their "all Windows software should also work on Windows Phone and Xbox" campaign.
I'm not sure I understand this argument. If I go to the library every day for 10 years and learn everything there is to know about subject x I shouldn't be able to sell my skills to the world about it later because I didn't give the creators of the books I read any money?
Arguably LLM companies could have made large-scale deals with libraries and got the exact same knowledge (much, much more slowly). I wonder if people would have the same issues then? My guess is probably. Goes back to the meme that if libraries were proposed today there's no way they would ever be allowed.
This is something I've thought about as people complain about things like restaurant photos being AI and such. You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that complain about minor details that don't really matter. Might be a net good for many businesses.
To the people who are saying these little details aren't an indicator of what matters:
As a chef of close to a decade I will tell you right now:
If people in the restaurant aren't getting small details right...
They DEFINITELY aren't getting the rest right either
Someone who isn't paying attention to the food they're serving and the conditions they're serving it in just doesn't care and isn't paying attention to how they wash their hands or that piece of meat they dropped behind the fridge a few days ago that's bringing in roaches and rodents or the sour smell coming from the bag they just opened or the open wound that just dripped blood into your sauce
Most likely, they probably don't even know what allergens are present in their menu, posing a genuine risk to people
I promise you
Who are you people sticking up for?
I don't understand the "I mean they clearly didn't put any effort in here, but I believe 100% that they're doing their absolute best everywhere else!" sentiment
It's great to be optimistic about life and people in general but that's entirely unreasonable and you're only gonna be let down (or in the case of a restaurant probably get sick)
Would you trust a pilot that advertises his services with some half assed ai generated ad with spelling mistakes?
There's a great episode from the Search Engine podcast about this. The gist is that it takes a lot of concerted effort to make something great, otherwise it will probably suck. The host got interested in a restaurant that seemed obsessive about doing things well and talked to the owner about it. The episode title is "How to pursue excellence ... in noodles".
Alternatively: if you're wasting a bunch of your time on the minor details how do you have enough time for the major ones? I'd much rather my restaurant owner worry about sourcing ingredients, keeping the kitchen clean, improving the taste of the food than anything else.
If you don't have the time or money to have actual menu photos taken, what are the odds you have the time and money to source high quality ingredients, keep the kitchen clean, or improve the taste of the food?
The minor details are precisely the ones that require the least time and money to handle, so if those are being skimped on, it's likely that the major details are too, in my experience.
It depends, probably. If we are talking about high end, off the beaten path places, marketing is important. For the $1.50 slice pizza at the hole in the wall in Times Square? I doubt those places are cleaned and no one is checking the reviews, people just line up because others are, and because the smell and taste is right.
Hell yeah I will ship you a box of ‘food’ for two hundred dollars. You know it’s going to be great because I don’t spend my time on stuff like describing or photographing it
Major companies are using these LLMs on their already hardened software and finding countless thousands of security flaws. Is that all theater too? If not then it's very easy to see how these things are dangerous.
I made an AI video of a picture of me when I was about 2. Had a huge smile on my face in the photo so as a lark I made a 5 second video of me laughing. The look in my mom's eyes when I showed her and the way she grabbed the phone from me to look closer was such a good moment.
It's not an alternate reality. I was laughing at the time almost certainly. New ways of seeing old memories really needn't be depressing at all. It's so strange how so many people seem to only see the bad in a technology that can be used in countless different ways.
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