With high resolution cameras, indefinite data retention and third party data leaks being a matter of when, not if, this seems like a perfect way to get your fingerprints stolen by organized crime syndicates worldwide. If not next year, then in 5-10 years. And when they get used for “something”, what happens when you go on vacation somewhere and you’re detained at that country’s border for a crime that happened N years before your very first entry into that country ever happened?
With as many Ph.D.s as there are at Google, you’d think they’d be smarter than to come up with this. Which is how you know the PMs are in charge, not the smart people.
I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from the folks willfully engaging in human rights violating surveillance to overwhelm you with obscure useless nonsense that is literally an assault on your time, attention and mental health all for the 0.00001% chance of a vague hope you’ll click or tap their lie of an ad for snake oil that doesn’t work and is designed to steal your credit card number anyway, all just to make them rich so they won’t have to get a real job in the first place.
There’s a common phrase in English: “what’s the ask?” As in, “what is the other party requesting?” “What does this person want?”
I can see how that would sound/read a bit strange to one coming from another culture. It’s just another way of stating the concept of the purpose behind the reason for a person’s request, actions, statement, or in this case, why they requested a meeting.
Getting to “the ask” here meant, for the author, “what the hell does this fool REALLY want out of me?”
I prefer Walt’s approach. When I was 19, I worked for a small business up in Colorado. They had this contractor named Walt that did all their email, website, all that stuff (very early 2000s). Every time he answered the phone, it wasn’t a polite “Hello?”, no! Walt got straight to the point with one loud, gruff word that immediately set the tone for all his conversations:
Wait a minute - clearly I missed something here. Last I read, Mythos was only available to a handpicked list of megacorps under project glasswing. Did the hourly changing AI soap opera air yet another plot twist that I missed amidst my quest better known as “trying to find a job”?
If not, how’d a small time outfit get access to something the rest of us can’t have because we’re (apparently) not trustworthy enough?
No shade on these guys - I’m thinking it’s just another plot twist in “Hours of AI’s Lives”.
I was not aware of this loophole. Thank you. I’ve got some strong opinions but I’m just going to keep those to myself right now. And my dog. She’ll hear me as I scream profanities into the void…
What I’m not clear on - how many of these H1B hires are subject to the EO that jacked up the fee to $100k per person? Assuming even just 100 of them were, that’s still ten million USD (assuming I didn’t visualize the zeroes in my head wrong…), and a really large fee to justify to the board if you’re otherwise paying “roughly the same” in salary. Productivity is going to basically break even anyway after a few years.
This is why I’m wondering: did the EO get blocked, paused for judicial review or something? Is it even in effect?
No intention to make this political, I’m legitimately curious about the status of the law and its actual applicability here. Supposed to be such a steep fine they literally couldn’t afford to do this - not with them already going cash flow negative to build out AI datacenters. So either it’s not applying (why?) or somehow they’re justifying one HUGE fee and somebody is floating them one astronomical loan - which again, why? Where’s the profit in taking that big a risk? Seems absolutely unhinged!
I can’t answer this directly, but it may be helpful to others if they have an example (be it real or fabricated based on what you’re working with) to work from.
I’ll remind us all that the subject of human flatulence has been one of interest for some of history’s greatest minds - and humorists - for several centuries at the very least:
This. The more locked down, the less in control we are, the higher margins they command. This is why app stores exist - it has nothing to do with safety or security, and everything to do with monopolizing the distribution supply chain from soup to nuts. Don’t like it? Too bad, it’s fully locked down and cracking it is a (potentially) criminal offense, so whaddayagonnadoaboutit?!
Zero. Email & calendars replaced with totally separate paid provider that doesn’t run ads at all. Search through Kagi. No domains or hosting. No docs/presentations, and only use meet when forced to.
Something I never quite understood: differentiate between BEAM process and operating system process. The OS has launched one (in theory) BEAM Erlang VM runtime process with N threads; are we saying “process” here to try to emulate the OS process model internally within the BEAM OS process, when really we’re talking about threads? Or a mix of threads and other processes? I’m imagining the latter even cross network, but am I at least on the right track here?
> One of the problems with things like this is how do you know which site has copied from another, especially if you don't want a list of hard-coded exceptions.
The core function of that is actually pretty simple:
1. Strip all X/HTML tags
2. Run `diff`
Sure, it's not perfect, but an organization that pursues academic quantum computing research can sure as hell afford to run the results of the above against an AI to check for similarities.
Consider it from a management/budgetary point of view. Super smart people? Oh hell yeah, and I don't fault them for this one bit. But bean counters? Why the hell invest in hiring those people, or budgeting for search quality improvements, when you have essentially no competition to speak of? Makes more sense to put those same smart people on projects that correlate people's activities outside of Google with activities they can observe either directly or indirectly to create a more wholistic picture of the consumer for advertisers. Those are much harder problems to solve, especially now that the public is finally becoming slowly more aware of the massive abuses of privacy the bean counters like I described above have been pushing for years.
At the end of the day Google doesn't exist for the good of the public, they exist to return the highest possible investment for shareholders. It's literally the opposite of their job to improve search quality when competition doesn't force them to (because investors see that as a waste of money that could have been spent on further eroding people's privacy to enable higher and higher ad revenues.)
Well I think you already nailed it with “not even trying”. You don’t need to try or optimize when you’re a monopoly. Competition forces that function, but a lack thereof enables mediocrity and complacency.
With as many Ph.D.s as there are at Google, you’d think they’d be smarter than to come up with this. Which is how you know the PMs are in charge, not the smart people.