I've not used Copilot but I've experimented with two other AI driven autocompletion engines in Java and Kotlin. In both cases I uninstalled the plugins due to a combination of two problems:
1. The AI suggestions were often less helpful than the type driven IDE autocompletions (using IntelliJ).
2. The AI plugins were very aggressive in pushing their completions to the top of the suggestions list, even when they were strictly less helpful than the defaults.
The result was it actually slowed me down.
Looking at the marketing materials for these services, they're often focused on dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript where there's far less information available for the IDE to help you with. If you've picked your language partly due to the excellent IDE support, it's probably harder for the AI to compete with hand-written logic and type system information.
It appears that at the moment all this means is there will be an investigation and a report. Presumably, any action taken to block the sale will have to wait until after that.
Brexit only fully happened a few months ago, so it is hardly related to this. Any considerations w.r.t. looking 'open for business' would certainly still apply. But sure, make everything about Brexit, why not.
These days half of Linux is exported via filesystems, IOCTLs and other random pseudo-syscalls. Ignoring drivers, of course. The kernel isn't really that stable.
Japan seems to have evolved a work culture very similar to strongly unionised societies but without unions. Japanese salaryman culture is famously a culture of employment for life with unusually strong loyalty between employee and employer, hence weird things like "banishment rooms" that you don't find elsewhere. If it's the end results that matter and not the means, Japan might not be a good counter example.
I think French strike law sounds tighter than Italian strike law? The French are famous for striking but strikes must still be a collective decision and related to a specific set of issues, whereas Italian strike law really does sound incredibly broad and vague.
With respect to Pakistan, that's doesn't mean anything, poor countries always have very high GDP growth. It's easy to grow something small and backwards by a lot because you can get a lot of relative growth just by copying what other countries do, and less absolute improvement is needed to get a percentage point of growth to begin with. You can only compare GDP growth rates between countries of a similar level of wealth.
Just to clarify, in many parts of Europe you cannot do that, you would need to be a recognised union and in many cases at least hold a vote of some sort, there would probably also be requirements around negotiations. You would also be restricted in what you do to people who refuse to join your strike.
The UK is an example of a European country with relatively tough union laws. The list of issues that it's legitimate to strike over is restricted, votes are required, the general secretary of the union must authorise the strike and so on. Strikes do happen of course but not because some random middle manager threw a hissy fit about feedback on a paper she wrote.
In many countries you do need a vote for a strike to be organised. You can't just spam people with a request to stop working. Strikes are a powerful tactic that have evolved a lot of formality around them to try and ensure the outcomes aren't totally destructive. Italy is a rather unusual exception to this. Perhaps it's a contributing factor to the long stagnation of the Italian economy.
It's really sad watching people bend over backwards trying to give this person a break.
You admit she's a bully, super aggressive, constantly makes spurious accusations of racism, attempts to destroy her enemies totally and is in general a nightmare employee in every way. Then you say you take her side because Dean could have given her "transparency"? Are you aware she was demanding the identities of people who had criticised her work, presumably so she could then go and bully them too?
This person is a 100% A+ straightforward case of someone who should be fired and in fact should have been fired long ago. All those attributes are the sort of thing that absolutely qualify someone for dismissal. If you were feeling trollish, you might even say it's black and white.
Electron is Chrome and Chrome itself is pretty tightly optimised for what it does. The issue isn't actually Electron so much as using a platform designed for typesetting for making complex GUI apps, a task for which it was never designed and isn't particularly good at.
But. That said. Whilst I'm no big fan of web apps, there are good reasons they're so prevalent. It's not merely about developer convenience. Native GUI toolkits can appear artificially performant because they're required by the OS and thus almost always resident, vs cross platform toolkits that may be used by only one app at a time. When you open the lid though the gap between an engine like Blink and something like Qt, JavaFX or Cocoa isn't that big. They're mostly doing similar things in similar ways. The big cost on the web is the DOM+CSS but CSS has proven popular with devs, so native toolkits increasingly implement it or something like it.
Yes, communications overhead. SIMD instructions in the CPU have direct access to all the same registers and data as regular instructions. Moving data to a GPU and back is a very expensive operation relative to that. The chips are just physically further away and have to communicate mostly via memory.
Consider a typical use case for SIMD instructions - you just decrypted an image or bit of audio downloaded over SSL and want to process it for rendering. The data is in the CPU caches already. SIMD will munch it.
What I mean is that offline businesses have been running experiments to see what works forever. They run a billboard campaign in city X and run a slightly different one in city T to compare the results. They count customers as they come through the door. They issue loyalty cards that people sign up for in their millions, making a special effort to share data with giant supermarkets because they're (effectively) given a share of the resulting revenue increase.
Nobody cares or talks about any of these things. But when Google does the online equivalents, it's suddenly the next coming of Hitler (literally, look at the comment I replied to above!).
This isn't really proportionate, it doesn't make sense, and it's quite offensive to people who work or used to work at these firms.
"everyone would hate it" assumes people know about these things
It's based on direct experience of these tradeoffs.
Firstly, yes, people accept the defaults most of the time. They expect those defaults to be convenient and secure. But even when forced to click through screens that literally won't let them proceed until they consider their privacy settings, they don't care and routinely opt in to data sharing because it's more convenient.
Believe me, Google has tried everything in this space. Every combination of popup, click through, interstitial, notification, endless usability studies. Everything. New products that use user data in clever ways get instant uptake on the order of hundreds of millions of users with virtually no promotion at all. Privacy-oriented features get nearly none despite heavier promotion. To the extent people don't know about privacy settings it's because they do not care.
I know this goes against the tech industry zeitgeist or groupthink. It's unpopular to spell this out, but that's why it's important to do so. Way too many companies and engineers are working on dead-end privacy projects that address an imaginary market demand.
you make it sound as if it was one xor the other. This is sometimes the case to some degree (like checking urls for phishing sites), but far from always.
It's not 100% always, but it's hard to come up with cases where privacy and security aren't in tension.
For instance, one of the reasons you can't build truly end to end encrypted consumer services is people don't want to swap public keys. It's more hassle and nobody has it, so every end-to-end encrypted service has a big central key directory ... which makes the encryption pointless, as the service can still decrypt conversations on demand. That's not the only problem but it's a big one.
Another problem is people expect password reset. You can't build a service without password reset or else you'll have an angry mob at your door demanding their accounts back. If you say, sorry, there's no password reset because the data is all encrypted and we can't get it back then you'll lose your market position. Hence why iPhone backups are unencrypted.
It's not hopeless. Google get the most pressure on these topics so they've been coming up with some of the best solutions. Their Titan architecture is quite innovative in this space, although we'll see what happens when people realise "I forgot my PIN, please verify my identity some other way" doesn't work anymore.
And if others do this to gain an advantage over your business, don't whine, sue them.
I'm afraid this is extremely naive. There is nothing illegal about running user tests, server logging and gathering metrics. And don't talk about GDPR to me. It's a meaningless law that is so badly drafted it affects nothing. You can do basically anything if it's justified by a genuine business need, and understanding customers is an absolute need of any business.
But if the EU under German direction decides to interpret the GDPR such that it bans making convenient and secure software, then so what? America crushes the EU in the software business already. It will simply extend its lead. American startups will learn "don't open offices in Europe and you're OK" and so the EU will continue to degrade its own economy, continue to have no tech startups of note and the USA's more sensible approach to privacy will continue to be the only one that matters.
"boring statistics about religion" led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
At the risk of going full Godwin on this thread, that's a severe mis-understanding of your own history. No wonder Germans have such strange approaches to internet privacy if that's what you're being taught. Americans haven't "forgotten" the reasons for wanting privacy, they just don't think spreadsheets were relevant to what happened. And BTW I'm not American.
So: Nazi-ism wasn't enabled by the collection of statistics. They would have hunted down and eradicated groups of people all the same. We know this because communists hunted down threw huge numbers of anti-communists into concentration camps, although being anti-communist isn't a birth trait and that fact existed in no statistical databases. They didn't need Big Data because they had a large network of ideologically motivated informers and collaborators instead: just like Hitler did.
Finally, I'll say that going from "Google runs A/B tests to learn if a new feature is popular" straight to "sue anyone who does this because they're directly leading to Jew murder" is really quite offensive and shows no sense of proportion. Google is not enabling the Third Reich. It's just doing what any boring old city shop does when they experiment with putting different items on sale, or experiment with different layouts of the stores. The fact that it's online changes nothing.
Well, I'm an ex employee. Actually nothing has changed inside the company. "Tracking" as you put it isn't perceived as evil, it never has been, and for good reasons. The only thing that's changed is people's perception of the company and - very recent post 2016 political issues aside - that was mostly driven by a sustained campaign by an angry media industry that wanted money (see: link taxes).
Firstly, if tracking usage statistics or activity was actually evil then everyone would hate it, desperately try to stop it and have tons of stories about the horrors of it.
In fact what Google sees is:
1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep server side logs that reveal every button click, every message you type, every email you send, every search you do. Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that give great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever without batting an eye.
Hacker News readers in particular should understand this. It's overrun with Silicon Valley types who build their entire livelihoods around "let me run this program for you as a service". There's nothing special about Google in this regard. The entire software industry has moved away from privacy in the last 20 years because ...
2. Users rarely if ever use privacy features when they're provided, even when they're heavily promoted. In fact, despite all the noise, hardly anyone cares. For the vast majority convenience wins over privacy every time. But not just convenience, also ...
3. Security trumps privacy. People say they like privacy, but they hate getting hacked and tend to blame the service provider if it happens. They have very little patience for explanations of the form "yes this attacker was obviously not you and yes we had enough data to know that, but we didn't use any of it ... for your own good!"
4. Users can't and won't give accurate feedback about what they value or what their actual experience of using an app is like. This means A/B testing is critical to avoid making bad business decisions. The heavy reliance on experiments and data driven decision making is one reason tech firms tend to steamroller their legacy competitors.
Google hasn't become evil over time. It's been doing A/B tests, keeping server logs and writing unused privacy features since the company first began. All that's changed is it got big and rich, so people - rightly - started to think about its power more. But the hypocrisy is strong. The world is full of companies collecting and using data for the benefit of their customers. It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.
Google employees are not a random sample of their user base, so such experiments would be meaningless.
See the fiasco where they broke Terminal Services last year as an example of what can go wrong even when doing experiments on the whole user base.
Also consider how to measure the usage of web features Google's own websites don't use, but are popular on e.g. intranets in Korea.
A/B testing isn't bad, it's a good thing. People are notoriously not very good at giving feedback. Experiments and usage statistics let you get the ground truth about what they really value, and what's really working.
1. The AI suggestions were often less helpful than the type driven IDE autocompletions (using IntelliJ).
2. The AI plugins were very aggressive in pushing their completions to the top of the suggestions list, even when they were strictly less helpful than the defaults.
The result was it actually slowed me down.
Looking at the marketing materials for these services, they're often focused on dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript where there's far less information available for the IDE to help you with. If you've picked your language partly due to the excellent IDE support, it's probably harder for the AI to compete with hand-written logic and type system information.