> The adtech industry’s leading trade groups also expressed concern — partly out of fear that a public backlash could lead to regulations that threaten their business. They’re proposing rules that would allow companies to continue sharing data for business and marketing purposes, but restrict that information from being sold to law enforcement.
Cue "gifts" to law-enforcement which, ever so strangely will occur close to positive "consideration" for regulatory changes or mergers or dropped lawsuits.
If the information is too usefully-dangerous to sell to a government that has lost basic ethics, then it's too dangerous to have because the same government will find unethical ways to pressure you.
I think what gives me anxiety about the whole situation is:
1. If X% of the population gets wrongly branded with the scarlet letter B[ot], how do they appeal and get it fixed?
2. How will sites notice and know if their choice of "bot protection" is losing them X% of users/customers/job-seekers etc.? If it's a really robust system, they'll never even see the complaints either...
3. If everyone does detect that something is awry, will it be such a monopoly that there's no choice but to let it happen?
Correct, perhaps was being too subtle and ran into Poe's Law. [0]
I'm saying that their attempt to reduce a human-categorization question to just-gametes is the same kind of stupid and incomplete as trying to reduce another vehicle-purpose question to gas-vs-diesel.
> “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
Are humans as simple as cars though? And why does sexuality get represented by the energy source n your analogy? Why doesn’t sexuality get represented by other characteristics? Perhaps because “there’s only two kinds - sedans and pickups” sounds a little silly?
A better example would be how many axles a road vehicle can have to be considered a road vehicle.
You might reasonably conclude that the number starts at one and essentially goes to infinity and you’d be right.
But somewhere, deep in academia, some critical theorists are going to get upset that you’ve excluded zero and excluded the all the real numbers. They are going to call this oppression, and they’re going to invent a theory that says “actually vehicle axle identities exist on a spectrum that includes zero and all the real numbers, irrational numbers, etc.” if you give them long enough, they will also tell you if you don’t consider a vehicle whose axle count is an imaginary number, then you are imaginary axle-phobic.
Out here in the real world it’s very obvious that vehicles can’t have half an axle or 4.29 axles.
And the point is not because you want to exclude or oppress any road vehicles, it’s simply that being able to count the number of axles is a useful categorization for humans who work with road vehicles, so it has to be possible to say how many there are in an objective sense, in the real world.
Similarly, knowing which of the two sexes an individual belongs to does not tell you everything about that individual, but it definitely tells you a few things that are very useful in policy, law and custom.
It’s one thing for a man to put an a dress, it’s quite another for us to allow the law to consider that by putting on the dress he is now the weaker sex.
> Out here in the real world it’s very obvious that vehicles can’t have half an axle or 4.29 axles.
Yeah, I'm thinking you don't have much exposure to real world trucking and lift axles at all.
It's not uncommon for heavy load truck trailers to have axles that are only dropped to the road to take up a heavy load and are retracted for lighter and no loads to extend the lifetime of tyres and bearings.
Operationally, over their road time, the number of axles in contact with tarmac becomes fractional.
If you're going to make sweeping claims about "the real world" it's best to be across all those pesky actual edge cases.
Some people think that as long as they "don't make waves", they'll be safe from creeping fascism.
It's not true, because The people who want power will just make a typo—or do a stupid keyword match—and now Harry Buttle is gone. They have no incentive to be consistent or accurate.
Perhaps the good news is that even the best spreadsheet-slinging accountant in the west would still going to need some programming experience to do their verification.
I mean, they could ask an LLM "what does this code do, and will it always X when Y", but that's just nesting the verification problem inside another verification problem.
I cynically predict that some of the new practices being hyped could easily end up worse...
Before: "I learned very little this year, because I was placed in charge of the same stuff, and I've already learned most of what I could from tinkering with that code, stepping through its architecture, and dealing with those recurring problems."
Soon: "I learned very little this year, because I don't deeply interact with anything, I just pull the lever on the babbling slot-machine until I get lucky and things seems to quiet down."
> Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about.
Perhaps, but we already had that in the form of search-engines and primers and how-to guides and Wikipedia. The actionable questions already had answers.
Adding an obsequious device that dynamically hallucinate half of a conversation with not-necessarily-true dialog is (if not a detriment) only a marginal improvement.
Occam's razor: They wanted an short debt-scenario that reads as somehow unexpected and unusual so that visitors keep reading, versus a true but depressingly-common one.
I mean, I just have to say something like "single-parent slipping further behind each month"... and I bet most of y'all are already familiar enough with the concept that you're imagining it without prompting.
There is certainly room to add developers to a "simple" project if one is ensuring everything works with screen readers for the blind, that it had worldwide I18N support, meets every law around privacy and data jurisdiction, has systems for requesting personal copies/deletion, etc...
But instead it was probably for Messenger's portion of telemetry and marketing and ads and hacking out of your phones security model to spy on you. [0]
Cue "gifts" to law-enforcement which, ever so strangely will occur close to positive "consideration" for regulatory changes or mergers or dropped lawsuits.
If the information is too usefully-dangerous to sell to a government that has lost basic ethics, then it's too dangerous to have because the same government will find unethical ways to pressure you.
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