If we're on the topic of hardware, let's remember that a few years before ARPANET, Olivetti was a powerhouse rivaling IBM. The ELEA mainframe came out with a competitive design in 1957.
One of the reasons why things did not pan out is that, three years later, 58 years old Adriano Olivetti died of a heart attack on the train to Switzerland. Even discounting the theory of a CIA assassination (which has, nevertheless, been floated around), that was a butterfly-flapping-its-wings moment; without pressure from the US government wanting to maintain technological supremacy, he might have been under less stress and survived.
In that scenario, maybe the same international visitors who currently visit Milan for luxury fashion would also haul back high tech from the so-called Valle del Silicio stretching towards Turin along the Fondo river.
Or, of course, another one between a million different outcomes could have happened. Human creativity and inventiveness finds a way to flourish everywhere.
Completely agreed, it is rational to de-escalate by several steps (e.g. to have cloud providers "spontaneously" decide to split into different, actually autonomous but still privately owned, corps, which in turn is a threat to returns of the home corp so they would put pressure on the US government not to escalate this far politically, and so on).
It's just that the possibility of the "nuclear option" works as a deterrent.
> In the cases provided for by the law and with provisions for compensation,
private property may be expropriated for reasons of general interest.
Excerpt from article 42 of the Italian constitution. This would cover, for instance, the entire eu-south-1 availability zone in AWS. I'm sure that other member states have their own provisions and you need to keep in mind that Google/Amazon/Microsoft employees in the relevant countries would predictably comply with local authorities, not obey a foreign power trying to collapse their governments.
If your power comes from saying "I own that", it's crucial not to enter complete hostility with nations, the only entities who can reply, "Says who?".
> It's why the US entered WW1 and WW2 even if it didn't have to. Because if it didn't and just decided to sit it out chilling away from the conflit, it would have missed out on all the major industrial and technical progress the war effort has led to and the USSR would have swallowed everything.
The USSR was formed in 1922. Up until September 1917 (a consequence of the February revolution), Russia was ruled by the tsars. The US declared war on Germany on April 2, 1917.
> a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.
GDPR also applies to companies that provide services to EU citizens, no matter where the company is based.
This makes a lot of sense, because otherwise you'd get situations where Multi Corp X could claim, "Oh, but our Berlin office is actually offering this service hosted in Kiribati. We just happen to have German users" and not offer access to personal data.
Seen as enforcement is through fines, companies that do not have an EU presence are completely unaffected. So even if technically true, in practice claiming that there's global reach is false. Concretely, no one is going after a hypothetical Baton Rouge Herald for not providing an opt-out of data harvesting on their news website.
Disclaimers and user acceptance does not remove liability for slander, particularly against third parties.
In fact, in most EU countries "the user acknowledged" works only for a very small subset of stuff, precisely because our lawmakers know that the strong party in a contract would use that to get away from every legal obligation.
Thank you. I was missing that info because I do not get that banner, currently surfing that site from the EU without any login.
Visiting the same URL on the .co.uk version gives me a multi-article scroller with different layout and links (including a "What is BBC Future?"), but no trace of that banner. Guessing that you're in the UK from your comment history, my best guess is that they decide whether to serve that banner via geofencing.
I notice a different, amazing angle that doesn't really stand out in current comments.
This is a BBC article. UK public broadcasting, paid with taxpayer money and aggressively collected - one of the first things I got when moving to a new home in the UK was letters from tv licensing.
Yet it's all "In the United States". "Federal Law and state law". The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that, this Maryland researcher for Mozilla there. There are two references to the UK and Europe (lumped together) that vaguely say, "It's a little better for certain classes of data" and "you can request your data". Which effectively means, "GDPR exists and the UK has its version".
"personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person" - GDPR article 4
Data often pertains to multiple people (trivial case: direct messages between two users); the rights of GDPR apply to your data, regardless of whether it also pertains to multiple others, subject to some restrictions to safeguard the rights of others. Those legal restrictions clearly don't apply because you could pay to obtain that access.
LinkedIn would need to prove in court that the list of users who visited your profile is not your data.
Additionally, your profile is undisputably your data. Per article 15 of the GDPR, you have a right to access "the recipients or categories of recipient to whom the personal data have been or will be disclosed, in particular recipients in third countries or international organisations".
> assuming the bottleneck in this process has so far been coding is pure BS.
This is the core insight for most businesses.
When evaluating the impact of AI on velocity, the first thing to consider is how long it takes for a one-line code change to get into production, including initial analysis and specs.
One should not overlook the human/emotional aspect. Decision-makers are not immune from it.
Hegemony comes with a certain degree of humiliation. Socially, it means accepting that a foreign language being taught in elementary schools becomes synonym with intelligence and eloquence, or protecting a copyright/taxation regime that go against your interest, or accepting that manslaughters perpetuated by troops stationed in foreign military installation on your soil will go unpunished, and so on. There's always been creeping resentment towards the US in any given European nation.
However, resentment is not a concern when "adults are in the room", even if not explicitly in charge. Economic prosperity is great, no one wants to break a good deal. But now those safeguards are failing on the US side. There's suddenly room to rationalize any hostility.
Sure, the extent to which this is a factor vs rational analysis is arguable... but I don't find it mere coincidence that France is the nation spearheading this.
Threats only works if the threatened entity thinks they can avoid them via compliance.
Tariffs come anyway, both Canada and Denmark are under threat of annexation, and ICC suspensions of Microsoft emails show that governments cannot rely on US tech.
I do not think that this is likely to be a successful model.
When (not if) software breaks in production, you need to be able to debug it effectively. Knowing that external libraries do their base job is really helpful in reducing the search space and in reducing the blast radius of patches.
Note that this is not AI-specific. More generally, in-house implementations of software that is not your core business brings costs that are not limited to that of writing said implementation.
Exponential curves happen when a quantity's growth rate is a linear function of its own value. In practice they're all going to be logistic, but you can ignore that as long as you're far away from the cap of whatever factor limits growth.
So what are the things that could cause "AI growth" (for some suitable definition of it) to be correlated with AI?
The plausible ones I see are:
- growing AI capabilities spur additional AI capex
- AI could be used to develop better AIs
The first one rings true, but is most definitely hitting the limit since US capex into the sector definitely cannot grow 100-fold (and probably cannot grow 4-fold either).
The second one is, to my knowledge, not really a thing.
So unless AI can start improving itself or there is a self-feeding mechanism that I have missed, we're near the logistic fun phase.
Regarding [1], the study itself mentions that stopping watching porn reverses the effect. In layman's terms: watch enough of it and the novelty wears off, but the sexual drive returns. Hardly a harm, it's what happens with every human activity.
[2] makes the big logic jump of assuming that someone who watches kinky porn fails to separate between fantasy and reality. It is the same line of reasoning as the disproven "videogames cause violence" paradigm and it is pushed by the same sort of people (personal hypothesis: they might be projecting). This could ironically point to a problem limited to at least some individuals failing to differentiate the two, but studies find that at the population level, a higher availability of porn correlates with lower rates of sexual assault. My personal reading is that it provides a safe outlet for sexual frustration and moderate desensitization reduces the chance that someone will, so to speak, get aroused over an exposed ankle.
On [3]... you're linking to a single data point, not a series nor a correlation; additionally, even if the correlation actually existed held, people's propension to form stable relationships is a preference, not a harm. It is also not related to minors, and it is not something that the state has any business sanctioning, much less with incarceration.
One of the reasons why things did not pan out is that, three years later, 58 years old Adriano Olivetti died of a heart attack on the train to Switzerland. Even discounting the theory of a CIA assassination (which has, nevertheless, been floated around), that was a butterfly-flapping-its-wings moment; without pressure from the US government wanting to maintain technological supremacy, he might have been under less stress and survived.
In that scenario, maybe the same international visitors who currently visit Milan for luxury fashion would also haul back high tech from the so-called Valle del Silicio stretching towards Turin along the Fondo river.
Or, of course, another one between a million different outcomes could have happened. Human creativity and inventiveness finds a way to flourish everywhere.