Dropped a folder with a small HTML project, and after 20 seconds got "Something went wrong. An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support.".
Note how the error has zero information.
Looking in the network tab, a POST request to /upload returned 403 and an HTML page starting with "Sorry, you have been blocked", and to "email the site owner to let them know you were blocked".
I'm very tired of this adversarial approach to software coupled with vague errors.
EDIT: it was the file './git/hooks/fsmonitor-watchman.sample' created by default on git init. Maybe because it's Perl. Worse-than-useless "please try again" and "you've been blocked" for committing the sin of uploading a folder that's a git repository. Sigh...
Be careful with new image formats because they also have to be supported by the rest of the user's workflow. The browser might display it, but if it cannot be added to the photos app, or it's not understood by their image editor, or cannot be shared on their preferred chat app, then that's a fail.
This is actually useful for smartphones. Sometimes smartphone malware is capable of infecting a device but not persisting, so reboots clean it back up.
> The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us.
My understanding is that "fixed" costs like rent and groceries have gone up and taken more of people's budgets, while wages failed to catch up with this inflation.
If that's the case, it's markedly different from "situation on the ground is unchanged". I don't know how the overall pie is doing, but it has not grown enough to compensate for the labor share drops shown in the article. The slice on my plate is certainly lighter.
So when Google bans someone, that person also loses access to all services that require digital ID, forever?
I remember when a Youtuber asked live viewers to "vote" by typing emojis, and a whole bunch of viewers got their Google accounts banned for spamming[1]. Google is also famously averse to user support (understandable given the scale of their free services), so individual remedy is unlikely.
I can already see the new ransomware: "pay us or we'll send spam from your gmail and you'll lose your digital ID".
Rockets famously take exponential amounts of fuel to reach higher speeds. I'm a layman, but my guess is that this comes from the exhaust speed being fixed. Orbital speed is higher than exhaust speed, so from a frame at rest the rocket leaves behind a bunch of propellant moving in the same direction as it went. That's wasted energy.
Back-of-napkin calculation says that if you managed to perfectly match exhaust speed with current speed, leaving all the expelled propellant stationary, it would only take quadratic amounts of fuels to reach higher speeds. Like the kinetic energy equation predicts.
I also found it surprisingly easy, starting from my triple "olden, party, music" (calculated years ago for state space coverage and memorability). Followed by "fight", then either "shark, brash" or "brash, shark".
Maybe it's harder if you're a careful player that doesn't waste the first three words.
Videos are inherently large. There are better compression algorithms than what phone cameras generate by default, but video reencoding is slow, and the results still too large for "covert data channels".
Normal players would have noticed the bandwidth and CPU usage, and volunteers have already agreed to data sharing, so there's no point in keeping secrets. Same as claims that the Facebook app listens to people talk: someone would have caught it by now.
Also, AR capture was never very popular, mostly a gimmick for new players. The game was already a battery and power hog even without it.
> it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage
But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to activate a special "volunteer" account flag to even see these tasks.
From TFA:
> Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.
I'm sure they used GPS data from the players too, but I still hold that it's unlikely the AR pokemon capture yielded any data to them.
Oh, that's clever. It's not just hiding the payload in the Exif, it's hiding the fact that the payload came from the network at all, by reading it from the browser cache (presumably after embedding the image into a page the user visited).
So you have a package that doesn't include (directly) malicious code or make network calls, yet it can still run malicious code from the network. This is much better than simple obfuscation because you can vary the payload, like a command-and-control server.
You're right that shareholder mindset cannot fix this problem, but that's what policy and agreements are for. And leaders can be convinced that AI is a direct risk to their own citizens too. If everyone else agrees to stop, you have less reason to continue when this action is putting yourself at risk.
And note how your argument can also be used against any non-prolifreration agreements, which are demonstrably possible.
In 2023 there was an open letter titled "Pause Giant AI Experiments", signed by almost all the big names on the West. I'd say the public opinion only got worse since then.
Implied in my answer was "and not creating ever stronger AIs", which unfortunately the big 3 labs are failing at. And they might be hampering their own revenue by doing the rest, but they also know that rocking the boat too hard is even more dangerous for their revenue. I wouldn't call it selfless.
Not the direct person you asked, but my answer would be alignment, interpretability, and policymaking. Perhaps improving existing usage? Helping grandma create reminders doesn't require advancing the AI state-of-the-art.