I am curious about your view on accessibility tooling. Often screen readers or speech to text tools would effectively be external pieces of software instrumenting for instance browsers through their APIs. And surely using local AI going forward could enhance the tooling while also making the users less dependent on a small market charging exorbitant prices for poor user experience. What viable paths do you see for users perfecting user agents for themselves when the big browsers further lose their plot and focus on what's fun to maintain or profitable to ship instead of optimising for every user individually?
It's just an unfortunate reality that people with disabilities live with.
Some of them are already prevented from operating heavy machinery because doing so would put everyone at risk, so there is precedent here. I'm in favor of making concessions to the very unfortunate, though at some point you have to look at percentages, expected impact and decide what is reasonable and what isn't.
To your other question, in the last week there have been entire CPUs embedded within weights. Clearly it's possible to publish "open models" with an agenda so then what assurances you have that the enhancements provided by local ai would be more focused on the plot than what the big browsers do?
Specifically how would a person with disabilities be able to tell the difference between improved instrumentation and conditional access to information, as we have in other media? Consider this in the context of "compared to superintelligence, we all have an intelectual disability"
A browser is not heavy machinery. That is not precedent that applies to this situation.
I had a disabled relative (who passed this year), and am quite amazed and offended to hear the viewpoint that those in their situation must suffer an "unfortunate reality" for the sake of everyone else. That's taking the "non-disabled people must accommodate them" (which has problems and is worth a lengthy discussion elsewhere) pendulum and swinging it like a wrecking ball.
I avoided directly touching this subject in order to let you process, but while a browser is not heavy machinery, an LLM is by virtue of heat output alone.
Sure, but at what cost? How quickly improvements are delivered is one thing, but the materials and chosen process also come at a premium. And while it probably is worth it in aviation due to life and health being highly irreplaceable, the value of for instance my chat history or photos is certainly finite and quite low. Should they be corrupted, leaked, or worst case gone, it would somewhat suck. But at the same time I've effectively concluded that safeguards are worth about 0.4% of my monthly take home after tax, and when the yearly bill comes due I'm each time increasingly questioning whether I actually do value them even that highly.
A less costly new engine design or less costly engine swap procedure that fails is worse than no airplane at all. If it's cheaper and fails, we don't want it. It wasn't cheaper, it was even worse than expensive.
It's not hyperbolic all or nothing. Sure infinite cost is just as useless as infinite failure, but there is no reason to talk about infinite.
This doesn't address how the cost of safety related procedures versus the cost of risks mitigated is calculated (which is way harder than saying "some") so that the buyer can actually know what "some" cost is.
It's also not addressing the parent comment's point: the bad outcomes in aviation tend to be very impactful (both in human safety and financially), so the tolerance for mistakes is way lower.
Compared to cybersecurity for a brochureware website, where it takes a far larger stretch to go from "security incident" to "someone's dead". (Also, people in cybersecurity aren't going to accept "it has some cost, and you might buy it if it's not too expensive".)
For the commercial flight industry this is very easy to calculate: zero deaths are acceptable. This is not like car manufacturer recall calculations (famously, referenced in Fight Club: if the lawsuit costs the manufacturer less than the recall, they don't recall). The airline industry is built different thanks to heavy regulation.
You could ask: is it _worth_ making it that safe? But we don't ask that. We just make it that safe.
I think there is a good point to be made that this level of safety (it costs what it costs) is probably not worth it for cybersecurity, in general, even if it's largely considered worth it for commercial aviation.
Zero acceptable deaths is equivalent to zero acceptable breaches -- the only solution is to offline the system entirely. You simply can not get rid of all risk or even know if you've gotten rid of all risk.
https://assets.performance.gov/APG/files/2023/june/FY2023_Ju... states on page 5 that they're aiming to cut fatalities in half from 8.9 per 100M passengers in FY 2009 to 4.4 fatalities per 100M passengers in FY 2025. (It looks like they were doing way better than that goal.) "As low as reasonably practical" (ALARP) seems to be the term for aviation, which is very clearly not a zero fatalities goal.
> You could ask: is it _worth_ making it that safe? But we don't ask that. We just make it that safe.
They... Don't? Aviation accidents continue to happen and they will continue to happen. They've decided that a positive number of fatalities is worth it not because they want anyone to die, but because they know that perfection is impossible. You can't achieve it, and you can't know that you've achieved it.
As software intermediates more and more of the physical world, we're gonna end up at least as regulated as finance, and potentially as much as aviation.
The only real question is how much damage will be caused before that happens.
I think it's highly doubtful we're going to see software generally regulated as finance, which like aviation can facilitate damage to individuals on a scale they'll never be able to recover from by themselves (in terms of lifetime needed to (re)acquire the resources). Most of the world is quite insignificant and unimpactful, and already regulated as tightly as it is based on that. Software being a larger part of the services provided or goods transacted is not suddenly going to inspire tighter regulation of the quality of services and goods offered beyond what they already are, like for instance some minimums around certain things not catching fire and killing people, or some services being rendered in a mostly food safe way. If humanity desired to go beyond lazy minimums we'd see universal effective elimination of planned obsolescence, not just best cases of minimum warranty periods measured in a handful of years, and then being fine with products mysteriously failing within days of the sellers support obligations ending.
> I think it's highly doubtful we're going to see software generally regulated as finance,
Probably not all of software, but basically all of our financial infrastructure, operational infrastructure and communications infrastructure is either already critically dependent on software, or heading that way.
I think that the EU's DORA act is probably the way things will head. We'll regulate the outcomes and ensure that these services can be maintained.
Honestly, the only reason that this hasn't already happened is that the US government is wildly against basically all regulation of software. I figure that if we end up in some kind of cybersecurity crash (likely, given the current trajectory) that we'll get lots and lots of regulation.
And to be honest, this will be for the better in the long term, but it'll probably suck for all of us in the short term (but at least there'll be jobs).
School is where we show people that society will sacrifice them for others without consideration. So it would be on brand and efficient to let it be up to the parents convenience. And now that it's said that large swathes of employment will be displaced by language models, surely there will be enough manpower going around to have two or three shifts of teachers?
I feel that the faster and more ephemeral flow of irc always skewed older than the (mostly game related) forums I frequented though. Perhaps the age clustering around different media across niches is mostly just dependent on what was the most conveniently accessible when the niche gained broader popularity within an age group?
Newer platforms will tend to skew younger for sure. I was too young to get into irc really but even when I was young instant messaging services like MSN Messenger were vastly more mainstream than forums. So maybe it's not really based on age.
But I do see, generally young, people join niche discords that don't necessarily see 24/7 activity say something like "Hey anyone here?" then a few minutes later "lol dead server". I think it's because for a lot of younger people they mostly want the socialization aspect over just a place to share about a hobby. They go on discord when they want to talk to people.
Wouldn't it be the same as what the tax authorities expect of street buskers, where something was done publicly (just here on the internet) and as a result randoms gave you money/cash (here again the digital equivalent) after the fact with no strings attached?
People who want their games to look prettier and run smoother than what you can get out of the thermal and power budgets of laptops would be the ones still buying the desktops. If you additionally value a not too noisy environment home, then water cooling is way better and more accessible in the desktop form factor (though this is still niche at least for the gpus where all-in-one units are basically non-existent). Laptops are by all means nice toys as well, but on the go phones are better entertainment while in transit, and once you're somewhere you left the comfort of your home to experience it's rarely for your gaming hobby (however it might be a setting where you're reminded that computers are still relatively cheap compared to certain music instruments or sports equipment).
Not really, the time I set aside for shows, podcast, movies and games is all different. I am not going to give up watching slow horses to watch a podcast,
Sure, but for people without abundant time to spend alone then watching a show this evening kind of precludes also ingesting a podcast before tomorrow. It's not like the labour movements around the world have negotiated significantly more free time for the big mass of working humans since Netflix said that sleep is their biggest competitor back in 2017.
Yeah but podcast is low quality time; shows,movies are high quality, games are high quality high focus, music and podcast are lower on the rung. Its something you can have playing in the background and not pay attention.
Like the time I have for high quality stuff and low stuff are different and therefore different audiences. For Low quality stuff podcasts are fighting against tiktok
By law not in Norway, salary has to be deposited to a banking account by the employer, unless it 's impossible or highly inconvenient [0]. And to combat fraud it is basically impossible for the banks to deny you a basic account (how else could the tax authorities reasonably audit who gets paid what), so be ready for the employer taking you to court to make you open one (accounts are free to you as a consumer after all) so that they don't have to deal with salary amounts of cash, and the courts siding with them.
Norway is not a EUR country, so their situation hasn't anything to do with my original comment that this thread spawned from. Norwegian salaries and taxes are paid in NOK.
Depends on where in the world you are, Norway for instance has not been using card chips for 2fa consumer auth for banking. Instead the 2fa has been a separate code generating gadget, and now also alternatively an app (which I do get the feeling the company that the banks set up handle auth for all of them are kinda pushing everyone into, but for now there thankfully is an option where you only need 1 online device with nothing more than a functioning browser).
If all you do is complain you'll find yourself left out, for good reason. The internet is really not all that different when it comes to this, if you consume other people's emotional energy without ever giving anything back it would be unhealthy to interact with you, regardless of where or why.
The bigger issue is perhaps whether one views someone else politely pointing out something they would like to see improved/changed as a complaint. I suspect a not insignificant portion of users of English unfortunately would interpret it that way. However, the ubiquity of the LLMs might give us some hope that the sending side over time ceases contributing to the problem by saddling the people they wish to freely sacrifice their lifetime for them with their frustration.
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