> Assuming a full-time worker dedicates approximately 2,000 hours annually, 575,000,000 hours ÷ 2,000 hours/FTE = 287,500 FTEs. This means the overall cost of clicking on cookie banners is equivalent to a company of 287,500 employees spending an 8-hour workday clicking on cookie banners.
For comparison, there are apparently around 200M employees in the EU (part time plus full time) [1]. So if this is true, around 0.1% of the bloc's productive capacity is dedicated to clicking on cookie banners.
Sure, but most of that is while doing a lot of casual surfing where any kind of cost may be beneficial. I.e. by just clicking through to the save default button, I find it much easier to realize I want to drop off low quality sites such as comparison sites that have clearly gone into affiliation. The time I would have spent wasn't going to magically help the economy (of a non-US country anyway), it was going to transfer some wealth around and add to social problems.
"On average, a user visits about 100 websites per month, totaling 1,200 websites per year."
First, that is not in the cited link. The word "month" isn't even present.
There is the line 'In the US, the average internet user browses over 100 different web pages on a daily basis.", but that cites a blog post from 2007 ... which include numbers for dialup users(!)
Second, if users visit 100 new and distinct websites in one month that does not mean they visit 100 new and distinct web sites every single month. You've got DuckDuckGo and HN and Codeberg and your Mastodon instance, which you visit every day.
And once you've said to allow or disallow tracking, the web site can, you know, remember the answer for next time. Using a cookie.
However, unless you agree to the banners, you'll see the banner each and every time you visit the site. Assuming you're not using some extension that gets around that of course.
First, do you think most people mentioned in this analysis select "I Agree" or "Decline Cookies". I'm pretty sure most people select the former, in part to avoid being asked again.
Second, asking each and every time is a deliberate dark UI pattern, and if not already illegal - which I suspect it is - should be. The blame for the user time wasted selecting "Decline" every day should not be attributed to the law, but to the web site owner who want that extra bit of surveillance capitalism cash, and to the web developers who enable this practice.
The author does address this possibility in a reply:
> it's very unlikely to be someone else because pricing is astronomical. you also have to "contact sales" to get access to anything outside of a free trial. no one would pay that much for a block of ips with terrible reputation
> pricing is astronomical. you also have to "contact sales" to get access to anything outside of a free trial
You don't have to contact sales if you are a Chinese-speaking customer. And pricing is fine. ByteDance has a different brand for their cloud services in China: https://www.volcengine.com/ [1]. But of course the underlying infrastructure are all the same.
This is very likely done by a Chinese customer using ByteDance's cloud service.
[1] Well, Alibaba Cloud did this too, and ByteDance is copying Alibaba 1:1 (who in turn is copying AWS) so I'm not surprised. But at least Alibaba named their international brand "Alibaba Cloud" and their CN one "AliCloud", similar enough.
I've read the application. In fact I've filled it out three times, once successfully and twice not. It is indeed an excellent exercise. Among many other things: if you're a first-time founder then it teaches you what's important, and if you're a second-time founder then it reminds you. (Many second-timers do sometimes need to be reminded, myself included.)
There's no Kia-specific crime wave in Canada as far as I know (I live there). But there's absolutely a general crime wave of car thefts in Canada, and it's quite plausibly tied to recent policy choices. Of course the effect of policy is going to be additive to the effect of blunders like Kia's. But there's good reason to think it has enough impact on its own to be worth discussing.
In what way was their usage incorrect? They simply said that the brain just predicts next-actions, in response to a statement that an LLM predicts next-tokens. You can believe or disbelieve either of those statements individually, but the claims are isomorphic in the sense that they have the same structure.
Its not that it was used incorrectly: Its that it isn't a word actual humans use, and its one of a handful of dog whistles for "I'm a tech grifter who has at best a tenuous grasp on what I'm talking about but would love more venture capital". The last time I've personally heard it spoken was from Beff Jezos/Guillaume Verdon.
> Results are "strong" but can't be felt by the user? What does that even mean?
Not every conversation you have with a PhD will make it obvious that that person is a PhD. Someone can be really smart, but if you don't see them in a setting where they can express it, then you'll have no way of fully assessing their intelligence. Similarly, if you only use OAI models with low-demand prompts, you may not be able to tell the difference between a good model and a great one.
All of that is true. Some more useful context: 9 out of those 11 cofounders are now gone. Three have either founded or are working for direct competitors (Elon, Ilya, John), five have quit (Trevor, Vicki, Andrej, Durk, Pam), and one has gone on extended leave but may return (Greg). Right now, Sam and Wojciech are the only ones left.
Speaking as a software engineer, I feel seen.