I’ve been installing apps from the App Store for more than a decade and have never ever accidentally downloaded spam or malware. I’m sure it’s there but it’s really not “riddled” with it in my experience searching for apps. What it’s riddled with is subscription-based apps whose free tier is worthless
Another huge benefit is you can actually get high-bitrate streaming. Ripping a 4k Blu-ray & streaming it from home (for those who may not want to sail the seas) is sooooo much higher quality than typical streaming.
It is so sad how with the internet we have accepted terrible media quality. Instant messaging and social media reduces photos to 1MP and heavily compressed. It's fine for a photo or meme you are only looking at once and scrolling past. But if it's something you'd want to save, the quality is garbage.
I'd honestly rather apps stop providing hosted media and just do the delivery, let me worry about backing up history. iMessage seems to be the only one sending things in full quality.
iMessage doesn't require you to store history in icloud, it can just store everything locally if you want. But yes, I'd rather not have stored history, or the option to pay for storage than to have all media crushed beyond recognition.
A few times I've wanted to print something and found it was sent over an IM app and compressed to 100kb rendering it useless.
I don’t think it defeats the point at all. Uploading photos to Google is a massive privacy concern. Apple is maybe better in that way, but very limited cross-platform support, and when I’ve tried it, poor performance & pricing. Neither do well at higher end photography either.
I self host for privacy, which makes me feel uncomfortable about all my private data sitting unencrypted on a server I don't control. It's better in that you don't have fully automated google AI scanning your data, but it's still exposed. None of the self hosted apps are designed with e2e encryption in mind so you'd be better off using icloud.
Lets say you don't leave it unencrypted on disk, only in memory. Do you really think vps providers are slurping your personal data out of a VM's memory in the same way google do dragnet personal data gathering? If your adversary is the government, sure they probably can do that, but otherwise it seems unlikely.
For one, there is a limit to how much licenses absolve you from responsibility — like, you can’t say “eat my food, by doing so you accept responsibility” and turns out it’s poisoned. It’s still possible to go after the food producer.
I know that doesn’t apply 1:1 to software, but the point is less about individual OSS projects and more about the hosted service of package registries, which do have people & money behind them.
Npm, for example, is owned by Microsoft (through GitHub). MS has huge amounts of money. They could be scanning for malware on upload and adding so many more security mechanisms. But they don’t.
Well yeah, the LLM header image is basically a joke on his part.
I think the tldr is that Gary Marcus has been hating on LLMs since ChatGPT came out, mostly because of the hype around them. His core theory is that pushing LLM tech just with more training is not going to accomplish AGI. He does have some essays with good writing (not this one), and he typically talks about how we’ll need different techniques to solve things like hallucinations.
I’ve read articles of his which made genuinely good points, and which go against the grain of what the big LLM companies are saying.
The reason there’s a lot of drama is that the LLM hype train (which includes some prominent people) really hated on HIM for saying anything negative about LLM technology, and he responded to that by keeping the flame war going for the past 4 years (as you can see in this article.)
So when any companies do anything that looks like using these other techniques (neurosymbolic AI, world models), he basically tosses a quick article out about how vindicated he feels. Because the companies were all like “attention is all we need” and “we can just build 4x bigger data centers and that extra compute will solve all of our problems with more training,” and he was like “that’s BS”
So, I really don’t mind him showing up, because we get do get much BS on here from the AI companies too. So… Gary Marcus is at least a balancing kind of BS in a way. (For example, it’s hard to trust anything Anthropic says about Mythos, because they have so much money riding on it being insanely capable.)
But that situation isn’t ideal. What we actually need is more thoughtful, critical research which is NOT tied to impossible business goals. And that doesn’t describe Gary Marcus OR OpenAI/Anthropic.
Pollution is ultimately a violation of property rights, which is a pretty fucking fundamental concept in our legal system. If I own land, and someone dumps coal on it, that’s a violation of my rights. If someone dumps coal that seeps into water that seeps onto my land and then poisons me when I drink my water… it’s the same concept.
Generally, when individual humans violate other people’s rights, we’re extremely strict. When companies do it at a large, systemic scale, we for some reason let them off the hook. Even when they have exceptionally good income & financial outlook.
It follows that the system is fundamentally broken.
Agreed, but people were often forced into those conditions. Or were forced to make an impossible survival decision.
Were Magellan’s men volunteers? For example, in the incident with The Wager, 1,980 men left on 6 ships, and only 188 survived. Men of the original men were press-ganged (kidnapped to crew these ships), and a lot of them were even taken from an infirmary and not in great health. And, of course, conditions were pretty terrible.
So yeah, we’re more risk adverse… and also a lot better at keeping people alive. I think most people would not have signed up for some of these really risky endeavors if they knew the true risk.
Maybe we should be glad that afawct none of the people exposed to the risks of artemis ii mission were force on it against their will. I'd bet the even in The Wager you would have have some clear headed people who knew the risk and still chose it
You have a point, but it doesn’t matter: at the end of the day, 5GB is not nearly enough for most folk’s important backups (photos), and the fact it consumes your email storage and you can’t receive emails is the dark pattern.
Maybe this default makes sense… if MS was generously giving everyone a couple hundred GB. Otherwise it’s a cash-grab.
Everyone else does it too, which also sucks. They just don’t fill it all up as quickly. Though iMessage in iCloud is a good comparison bc pictures people send you fill up iCloud FAST. Thing is, you can still receive iMessages and use everything just fine — you just can’t backup your phone any more.
It wasn’t wrong every single time. In fact, many of the more successful social programs in the US happened as a response to extreme poverty and economic disruption (the Great Depression).
People need to get it into their fucking heads that things get really ugly and violent under systems of extreme income inequality.
So far, AI is not focusing on solving that problem, just making it easier for tech people to get richer.
No, my job is already highly LLM assisted and I just have more work to do. Because now I can tackle things on the backlog we thought could never be prioritized.
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