> "Müller-Lyer illusion, the two lines that look like they’re different lengths but aren't"
I hate that the author gave a picture in which the two lines actually are of different lengths, as you can see from trying to pick a rectangular screenshot.
I'd quantify the exact feature in the line that I'm using for reference (which would be by itself ironic considering the discussion on well-defined relations between entities attached to that picture), but it's unnecessary - none of them match!
If you save the image as png, the tip of the leftmost arrow is at 68 pixels and the one of the rightmost one is at 393, while the crooks are 73 and 388.
Concrete high-profile example: in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Feynman told of a ball which, in a Brazilian college-level physics book, was described as having a 40% higher acceleration that it would actually have in practice.
Turns out that the author had done a thought experiment but neglected to factor in the rotational inertia.
> Recognise it is simply a zero-intelligence search engine
I think that this highlights the problem: it's not even a proper search engine. If it were, it would find existing material and link to it. The chatbot instead re-elaborates the message. This is different enough to have legal consequences (see the recent German ruling).
By squashing everything together, one loses the ability to evaluate sources, including their credibility and ulterior motives. With a search engine, I can tell if I am getting climate information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, from an oil trading consortium, or from a random blog.
The parent poster's suggestion is trying to work around the selection of sources, but such an attempt is fighting against the questionable design of the whole thing.
I don't think it's currently solvable, as selling those models as oracles is an essential component of their business plan.
Plus this rot has extended to true search engines too. A recent Google blurb on new "AI" features of Google web search kicks of with the following misrep:
"The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind"
And they are also perverting search results, if this is to be believed:
"The Google AI Mode recognizes search intent by understanding the meaning of a query made rather than relying entirely on keywords. The platform uses sophisticated AI models to determine what users are looking to accomplish and whether they need any information, comparisons, or final decisions. This way, Google provides more accurate search results."
Well, Sundar Pichai just left. In some "Why Google search got worse" threads, people who worked on search mentioned him championing predictable results without too much magic. Seems like it's mostly magic now.
If we're on the topic of hardware, let's remember that a few years before ARPANET, Olivetti was a powerhouse rivaling IBM. The ELEA mainframe came out with a competitive design in 1957.
One of the reasons why things did not pan out is that, three years later, 58 years old Adriano Olivetti died of a heart attack on the train to Switzerland. Even discounting the theory of a CIA assassination (which has, nevertheless, been floated around), that was a butterfly-flapping-its-wings moment; without pressure from the US government wanting to maintain technological supremacy, he might have been under less stress and survived.
In that scenario, maybe the same international visitors who currently visit Milan for luxury fashion would also haul back high tech from the so-called Valle del Silicio stretching towards Turin along the Fondo river.
Or, of course, another one between a million different outcomes could have happened. Human creativity and inventiveness finds a way to flourish everywhere.
At one point in the 1980s, Olivetti was the world's third largest personal computer manufacturer[8] and remained the largest such European manufacturer during the 1990s
Wow, I'm genuinely surprised. I don't think I've even heard of them before now, despite growing up in the 80s and 90s in the UK. ZX Spectrum, BBC Micros, Acorns, but not Olivetti.
Funny you mention that. For me (Dutch), growing up in same time, Wimbledon and Roland Garros are the two main tennis tournaments. When these were on TV, Olivetti brand was prominently mentioned at the scoreboards. I always imagined they were a brand who made the computers used for the scoreboards, but otherwise had no idea what that brand meant. You wouldn't 'Google' or 'Wikipedia' it. You saw it, you asked your parents (or other peers), and they'd either know or not.
> In the cases provided for by the law and with provisions for compensation,
private property may be expropriated for reasons of general interest.
Excerpt from article 42 of the Italian constitution. This would cover, for instance, the entire eu-south-1 availability zone in AWS. I'm sure that other member states have their own provisions and you need to keep in mind that Google/Amazon/Microsoft employees in the relevant countries would predictably comply with local authorities, not obey a foreign power trying to collapse their governments.
If your power comes from saying "I own that", it's crucial not to enter complete hostility with nations, the only entities who can reply, "Says who?".
That kind of thing is very much a nuclear option, though. Firstly because the state that does it needs to be very confident it can operate the asset it seizes without overseas support, and secondly because doing so tends to be bad for business in your country in general, as people understandibly get nervous about having stuff in places that have shown a willingness to just take it.
Completely agreed, it is rational to de-escalate by several steps (e.g. to have cloud providers "spontaneously" decide to split into different, actually autonomous but still privately owned, corps, which in turn is a threat to returns of the home corp so they would put pressure on the US government not to escalate this far politically, and so on).
It's just that the possibility of the "nuclear option" works as a deterrent.
> It's why the US entered WW1 and WW2 even if it didn't have to. Because if it didn't and just decided to sit it out chilling away from the conflit, it would have missed out on all the major industrial and technical progress the war effort has led to and the USSR would have swallowed everything.
The USSR was formed in 1922. Up until September 1917 (a consequence of the February revolution), Russia was ruled by the tsars. The US declared war on Germany on April 2, 1917.
> a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.
I’m not a lawyer, much less a German lawyer, but it does seem to my lay eyes that this is true of “malicious gossip.” But what is “insult”?
> Section 192
> Insult despite proof of the truth
> Proof of the truth of the asserted or disseminated fact does not preclude punishment in accordance with section 185 if the insult results from the form of the assertion or dissemination or the circumstances under which it was made.
GDPR also applies to companies that provide services to EU citizens, no matter where the company is based.
This makes a lot of sense, because otherwise you'd get situations where Multi Corp X could claim, "Oh, but our Berlin office is actually offering this service hosted in Kiribati. We just happen to have German users" and not offer access to personal data.
Seen as enforcement is through fines, companies that do not have an EU presence are completely unaffected. So even if technically true, in practice claiming that there's global reach is false. Concretely, no one is going after a hypothetical Baton Rouge Herald for not providing an opt-out of data harvesting on their news website.
I know about that. These situations are logical, if you'd ask me. The OP suggested EU law works where all parties involved are outside EU. Like EU playing world police, or something.
Disclaimers and user acceptance does not remove liability for slander, particularly against third parties.
In fact, in most EU countries "the user acknowledged" works only for a very small subset of stuff, precisely because our lawmakers know that the strong party in a contract would use that to get away from every legal obligation.
I hate that the author gave a picture in which the two lines actually are of different lengths, as you can see from trying to pick a rectangular screenshot.
I'd quantify the exact feature in the line that I'm using for reference (which would be by itself ironic considering the discussion on well-defined relations between entities attached to that picture), but it's unnecessary - none of them match!