This is authoritarian regime bread and butter. Create barriers that only right people can surmount, ban platforms where prominent opponents publish their media, block sources of income or just outright ban websites and newspapers and TG channels.
We at ASML have a lot of cash. We think investing in Mistral will give us a ROI and investing in the EU right now is safer than the hellscape in the US. Politicians will like it as well. We'll let the PR firm worry about synergy.
Neither did Musk but he bought Twitter and the US government. You don't need cash, you need value, and ASML has a value (market cap) of over $300 billion.
As the Dutch say, "money must roll"; having cash (or value) but not doing anything with it means you're losing money.
Context will need to go in layers. Like when you tell someone what you do for a living, your first version will be very broad. But when they ask the right questions, you can dive into details pretty quick.
I recently tried building something with Meta’s APIs again for the first time in a while.
What a mess. The UI is confusing, the structure makes little sense, and the documentation is often outdated or even contradictory. To top it off, paying for WhatsApp’s Cloud API only works with Visa or Mastercard, while ad payments support many more methods.
I’ve had the same frustrating experience with Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
In the end, whichever tech giant offers the best AI APIs will likely still lose ground if their developer experience continues to be this poor.
As a platform owner I’m dreading the future. People only talk about agriculture on mine, but I’m afraid I’ll run into these silly, expensive requirements just as well.
I recently saw a good example of how LLM's can be really useful.
A friend of mine, who always found learning difficult, now works as a plumber and installer with his own one-person company.
One of his clients is the local community pool. He took over the job from an older man who showed him how everything worked. My friend noticed a lot of inefficient (manual) use of energy and resources, but the previous installer told him it would cost too much to automate, so nothing was done.
The other day we talked about AI, and he said he had never tried it. I asked him to think of some questions from his daily work. He came up with questions about the pool system and how to automate it.
ChatGPT answered his questions correctly, and after a few follow-ups, it even provided a list of the parts he would need and a plan to make it work. Last weekend he told me that, together with the previous installer, he made improvements that should save the pool thousands of euros over the next few years.
Of course, an experienced pool expert might have come up with the same solution, but it is often difficult to convince a committee to hire someone when nothing is broken, the budget is already set, and the inefficiencies are not obvious.
My friend now uses ChatGPT several times a day to solve practical problems. It helps him learn new things and explore possibilities he might not have considered otherwise.
I do not mind if ChatGPT makes the occasional mistake or gives an answer based on outdated information. As long as it is used as a tool to improve your own abilities, the subscription is worth the cost.
When I worked with colleagues, I sometimes relied on advice that turned out to be wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, even when working to the best of their abilities, and I find that my AI 'colleagues' make fewer of them.
Lots of people, many amongst us here at HN, are critical of AI and LLMs in general. A lot of it has to do with two things, in my opinion - first, with the amount of money being thrown at it, and second, with the hype around it.
Many technical people, myself included, resent money being thrown at a problem rather than finding a proper solution. And we're especially skeptical of the hype cycle, because we've been through multiple hypes which didn't really live up to their claims.
But despite all that, I find regular people, using ChatGPT and other tools, just like any other online tool. Just like all of us rely on some software to find the time on the other side of the world when we have to schedule meetings, similarly, all these people are using these as tools to increase their capabilities and knowledge without the extra cruft that used to be involved in searching the web.
Additionally, AI is literally approachable by anybody who has an internet connection, and that means anyone with a smartphone. This didn't happen with devices, this didn't happen with Napster, this didn't happen with Bittorrent, and certainly not with Bitcoin. Each of these had some hurdle associated with it - cost of device, connectivity, technical knowhow.
But over the years, all those helped lay the foundation of what AI is being seen as now - as a tool that anybody can use. The more savvy among us are also using it to build their own tools as well.
This is an interesting example but it can't be scaled up to have meaningful impact on the level of the economy or society.
The effect right now of LLMs is reducing friction for some people with certain problems, but big important problems are already optimised to much higher levels.
You seem to believe the venture capital money machine that tells you technology and innovation must always be a major disruptive force and solve big, important problems.
Most problems we encounter in daily life are small. If a technology helps solve them faster, at a lower cost, or in a way that was not possible before, I believe it can scale very well. People just have to get accustomed to it.
For example, I fixed my lawnmower recently with the help of ChatGPT. I could have gone to the dealer or asked my brother for help, but instead it was a quick five minute fix that saved me from bothering anyone or spending time searching through manuals and videos for the answer. It literally couldn't have been fixed faster.
I prefer that over augmented reality goggles and other "Big Ideas".
It sounds like we agree? LLMs are great for finding fixes for lawnmowers and other things. Before, easier fixes for those problems weren't valuable enough to warrant any investment.
Therefore, current LLMs won't be a complete upheaval like some are fearing.
Things like AlphaFold might create upheavals in their respective fields but they are very specialised. I'm more enthusiastic about that than chatbots.
Decades of research, innovation, crash tests and rule changes have been put into improving safety in head on collisions. It’s not like you’re the first who wonders what will happen with engine block. It’s designed to go down.
Although I don’t know about American trucks. I think they are meant to wreak havoc on every single person involved.
My neighbour designs the crumble zone on Volvo's heavy duty trucks. They at least spend a shit ton of effort (continuous, multi-decade) on making anything hit by the truck having as little effect as possible (at least).
Quite a challenge with heavy duty trucks shipping tens of tons of stuff, but anyway.
Nah, just send them code 451 and ignore them. UK is still democracy adjacent, uk citicens voted for this nonesense, let them deal with the consequences.
Most of the UK didn't even vote for a Labour representative at the last general election. The Labour party's current control of our government is the result of one of the most disproportionate parliamentary majorities ever relative to its actual popular vote at the election. It's a consequence of our broken "first past the post" voting system.
There's a certain irony in our politics right now that FPTP has been maintained by two dominant political parties because it has served their purposes to have little real challenge from smaller parties despite those parties collectively having quite a lot of popular support. That same system has now all but ended one of those two dominant parties as a force in British politics and at the next election it might well do the same for the other. The scariest question is who we might then get instead if Labour don't force through a radical change to our voting system while they still have the (possibly last) chance.
But don't worry, Labour have already ruled that sort of thing out, they aren't interested. They think they can keep riding the FPTP thing indefinitely and changing would voluntarily hand power to smaller parties, which is unthinkable.
Towards the end of the last Labour government in the UK, in the lead up to the election that ended it, I heard a Labour MP on the radio being asked about bringing in PR and transferrable vote systems (like we have here in Aus). His attitude was that PR is for losers. FPTP puts the winner in place. Anyone disputing this, or trying to bring up ideas about systems which give power to candidates representing a wider slice of the electorate - they're just losers who couldn't get the votes they needed to win. It was sickening to listen to.
The problem, of course, is that any party that gets into power gets in via the existing system, and asking them to change it is like asking someone to train their replacement and fire themselves.
The problem, of course, is that any party that gets into power gets in via the existing system, and asking them to change it is like asking someone to train their replacement and fire themselves.
Indeed. But Labour might be facing an electoral wipe out next time anyway like the Tories last year. Even if they do a decent job they're starting from such a bad position that it will be tough to rebuild enough public support for another election victory. Unfortunately that becomes tougher if they actually try to fix some of our long-term problems by doing sensible things that won't pay off in time for the next election.
If they realise that their current strategy of giving the vote to 16 and 17 year olds isn't going to be enough to stay in power and Reform (populist right-wingers) look like they're going to win big instead then there will be a lot of soul searching going on at Labour HQ. Making a change that will at least see them avoiding the fate of the Tories last time might be a bit more palatable for them even if it would still be a bitter pill to swallow for the many Labour MPs who were going to lose their positions either way.
They have a huge majority of MPs of their own, the likely support of almost every MP from the smaller parties, and the Parliament Acts. If they wanted to force through some form of PR in a few years then the only things that could stop them would be a government-ending rebellion by Labour MPs (which seems unlikely - if they're still in trouble then many of those MPs might have a better chance of keeping their positions under the new system) and time (the Lords could delay the change until after another election if the process wasn't started soon enough).
It's not a manifesto policy but then they're probably going to implement a lot of things that aren't manifesto policies between now and then. At least this one would have cross-party support in Parliament and probably broad public support as well.
i opened the ofcom link and it has this really easy to follow guide with 17 illegal contents the users my encounter on your website like terrorism/pdf content etc like extremely bad stuff and all you have to do is asses how likely the user is to run into one of these on your site if its over 0% how do you plan on mitigating that.
Keep in mind UK terrorism legislation has been abused and is continuing to be, from prosecuting the failed Icesave bank to proscribing the non-violent Palestine Action activist group. If the Terrorism Act 2000 had been in effect in the 1980s, you could have risked 14 years in prison for advocating for the ANC against Apartheid (Thatcher's government's official policy was that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist who had been convicted in a fair trial).
The UK doesn't have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights other than the European Convention on Human Rights, that leading parties campaign of abolishing (if a bill of rights can be abolished by the legislature, it's not worth the paper it's printed on). Heck it doesn't even have a proper written constitution, it doesn't have separation of powers or an independent judiciary (the previous Parliament considered passing a law saying "Rwanda is a safe country to deport inconvenient asylum seekers to" in response to a court ruling (correctly) saying it manifestly isn't.
The UK and Australia are in a race to the bottom to see which one is going to be the worst enemy of the Internet. The only check against these authoritarian powers is popular juries, and they are trying to get rid of these as well.
Damage to property is a form of violence. If someone broke into your home and destroyed medical equipment needed to care for your dying relative, I'm sure you would 100% call it an act of violence.
Also, the group has directly harmed people too:
> A police officer was taken to hospital after being hit with a sledgehammer while responding to reports of criminal damage.
It smells like a jumped up "assaulted a police officer" charge because you shield your face from their punches. Hitting someone with a sledge hammer is a suitably scary tabloid headline but physically unlikely and entirely out of character for the accused group.
Note that Avon Police have form as lying pieces of shit.
They attacked protestors and claimed 21 injured officers specifically: "officers got broken bones, had punctured lungs, were very seriously injured" in the national media.
Journalists contacted local hospitals and found no police were treated that night. They had to retract those claims and their list of the claimed injuries included staff who never attended the scene, a bee sting and a twisted ankle getting out of a car.
I expect similar will happen here but only after this claim has been used for years to demonise protestors.
Also there is a huge gulf between being hit with the business end of a sledgehammer and poked with the shaft. I would expect a serious assault with a sledgehammer to result in serious injury or death.
Yeah just interpret 3000+ pages of policy documents and if you screw it up, OFCOM can fine you 18 million pounds and hold you criminally liable. Their "simple guide" is 70 pages long and has numerous links to additional policy documents that have more details on how to interpret the law. Any sane company is going to hire UK legal counsel to deal with this, which is easily going to cost five or six figures. And that doesn't include the cost of adding additional technical mitigations to justify a lower risk assessment, or the ongoing compliance cost for services that aren't low-risk. So the rational move for any company that has minimal UK revenue is to just IP ban the country, like Iran or North Korea.
do people really blanket ban iranians? i run a large wiki platform for kpop and they're some of our best users-- i would much sooner ban ip addresses from the yookay.
I have also blocked yookayers from my site because I would rather spend my time on GTM for my more valuable markets or have free time than waste it on the tiny chunk of my users who are yookay based.
Also I don't know what sort of weight "guidance" from a reg agency vs statute carries there, how much of a defense it is, etc.
people have literally been jailed for "hate speech" here because they clicked like on a tweet. labour is currently debating an official definition of "islamophobia" which would criminalize stating historical facts like "islam was spread by the sword" and "the grooming gangs are mostly pakistani". the govt put out a superinjunction forbidding anyone (including MPs) from mentioning they spent £7B bringing over afghans allegedly at risk from the taliban, and also criminalizing mention of the gag order itself, and so on recursively. nobody (other than judges and senior ministers) knows how many other such superinjunctions there are.
all this and more is covered by those 17 categories.
on top of this, britain claims global jurisdiction here. think a minute how absurd that is -- any website anywhere that any briton might access is in scope, according to ofcom. and they claim the power to prosecute foreigners for these "crimes" ...
> put out a superinjunction forbidding anyone (including MPs) from mentioning they spent £7B bringing over afghans allegedly at risk from the taliban
This has to be the most uncharitable reading of that situation I've ever seen. Have you been watching GBNews?
The Ministry of Defence messed up under the last government, a junior operative leaked a list of names of Afghan people who had helped the UK armed forces during the years of British and American presence. Not only that, but the list also contained the names of UK special forces and a few secret agents. This is bad and at that point they had a duty to protect the people they'd exposed.
So yeah, they got a "super injunction" to prevent reporting of the list to do further damage, and that does prevent prevent reporting of the injunction. I personally think such things are dodgy as fuck and shouldn't be available in law, but compared to using them to block discussion of (for example) a rich footballer or a journalist being caught having an affair, it seems like this was comparatively reasonable.
To paint this as purely an exercise hiding the spending of money on bringing afghans into the UK 'allegedly at risk' seems... well, uncharitable.
> on top of this, britain claims global jurisdiction here...
As do the EU (and UK) for the GDPR, and lots of other countries for lots of other things. If you're offering services to people in the UK you have to abide by UK laws.
We can talk about the laws being bad (and it seems this one is) but it's hard to see that principle as wrong, unless you're still in love with the old wild-west, no-rules-followed internet. I think those days are behind us.
>people have literally been jailed for "hate speech" here because they clicked like on a tweet
I am aware that someone was jailed for encouraging people via social media to burn down a hotel with refugees in ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3wkzgpjxvo ). But not because they clicked like on a Tweet.
Reference please.
