How dare people converse?

Can I send you to a few colleagues that could use a good slapping?

but still wanted him to keep it secret because of the rules of the bounty program

The rules that were changed after the rejection

Well, apparently it is, if they’re complaining.

Yes, force the behaviour of closing the door while they’re away from the truck

…while relaxing the inhuman quota expectations to actually afford them that time

They’d be entering a hot car every time. That’s what they’re complaining about: The AC is supposed to keep it at a liveable temperature so they can get back, hop in and keep driving without being face fisted by the heated up cabin.

as a result they aren’t really liable or in any way responsible for what you find

One could make an argument that their ranking of results does make them partially responsible for the attention you give to particular sources, but there’s no applicable legislation on that topic.

Good luck getting the fossils in our parliament to do something about that: By the time you’ve explained what it is, why it matters and start talking about the things that could or should be done, someone tells them that it’s about maximising ad revenue and they’ll immediately go “ah, so the free market will take care of it” and move on to more profitable matters.

This explicitly exposes them to legal risk in a way that they never were before.

I think the assumption was that the AI would be producing the words and thus implicitly bear the legal risk (but can’t actually be held liable, which should tarpit the courts trying to figure out how to sue a non-person) and the “check the results” footnote should help shift the burden on the users, “caveat emptor” style.

This judge, at least, wasn’t having any of it. If that legal risk wasn’t explicit before, it is now.

Let’s hope it sticks and spreads.

In this case, it probably is “Domain Specific Language”. If you’re unfamiliar, that means it’s created for a very specific context, unlike other, more general languages. That means you can keep the set of features small and save a lot of time making complex stuff work that isn’t relevant to that context.

Loops are complex stuff. If you don’t really need them, you’re better off just keeping your language linear.

On the other hand, they’re neat. Can’t be that bad, can it?

A German publisher’s article on the case: https://www.heise.de/en/news/LG-Munich-I-Google-ordered-to-pay-for-false-statements-in-AI-summaries-11327217.html

Because while conventional search results merely present indexed third-party content with title, snippet, and link, the AI function generates a coherent, flowing text that evaluates multiple sources and summarizes them into an independent answer. From the perspective of average users, this appears as direct information from Google, not as a mere forwarding of third-party content.

The previous, rather limited liability of search engines for third-party content is therefore not transferable to this generative format, the chamber ruled. Instead, the usual standards for defamation law apply: untrue factual claims can be prohibited without Google being able to hide behind the automated AI process. The note “created with AI” does not change the attribution to Google.

ax+c

I didn’t see any stables, just horses chilling wherever.

Stable owners hate this one trick to save 100% on your rent!

Honestly, I think they just self-selected for the ones not eating poisonous shit. I’m pretty sure the same applies on Iceland: The horses know what they can and can’t eat, because the ones who don’t know either learn or stop eating entirely.

We coddle our darlings way too much for their natural instincts. On the other hand, that makes us responsible for compensating.

Tons of vietnamese have horses in rural areas, I should ask them their secret to affording vet bills.

Well, I assume their horses will be less of a luxury pet. They probably pay less rent for the stables, treatment will be more DIY and the attachment to a working animal will be less emotional. I also don’t know how expensive their vets will be relative to the general cost of living and the utility the horse provides. I imagine they’ll have less overhead than our specialised clinics maintaining expensive equipment, dozens of specialised drugs and all the insurance and shit that goes with it in our system.

At the point we’re at, a new horse with less health issues would be cheaper than all the money we’ve blown on ours, and she doesn’t bring any utility. But we love her, and she’s not suffering so badly that it would justify putting her down. As long as I can afford it, I will sooner invest in trying to heal what can be healed, manage what can’t, provide the best life I can for her, own up to the responsibility I accepted when buying her, and enjoy our shared time.

But again: she’s a luxury, maybe a step below actual sports horses with fancy lineages and tournament quality. I suppose if horses became more ubiquitous for transport, the affordability dynamic might shift, but for now, my remark should be taken as tongue-in-cheek and definitely won’t hold up to comparison with working animals.

Who is going to stop the 1500 lb animal?

Ours is closer to 600, but voracious, headstrong and has shown a poor intuition for what’s poisonous and what isn’t. If she decides that a plant looks tasty, strength alone won’t help you save her from herself. If you react in time, you can gently pull her head to the side, enough to turn her away but not so strongly as to hurt her.

Son of a birch

Horses are economically viable and sound

Ours sure is causing way more in vet bills than our car’s lease, insurance and gas combined, while also unable to carry either of us anywhere. She’d also not go home, but to the next patch of greenery, whether or not she can eat it…

That was ambiguous phrasing, sorry. I meant that it’ll never work for filling their pockets, because the pockets will never be full.

Stop selling our future in a vain attempt to sate your craving for bigger and bigger numbers. It’s not gonna work.

They’re like the worst kind of dragon: cruel, destructive, greedy and in urgent need of a slaying.

*Edit: changed “stuff your bottomless pockets” to “sate your craving for bigger and bigger numbers” to better convey that they’ll never be happy and content.

Their pockets won’t ever fill up, their craving won’t ever be sated. “Number Go Up” may give them a brief fix, but it will never be enough.

I should probably spell it out, yeah.

It’s my favourite counterbalance to certain managers at my company regurgitating a half-understood “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (which is also almost entirely bullshit, but MBAs need a one-size-fits-all solution in order for the whole premise of their degree to work, so they attempt to make businesses conform to their methods instead of adapting their methods to the business). You can’t use a single measure (or only directly dependent measures), then tell people to improve that measure without figuring out just why it’s lagging and working on that instead.

I mean, yeah, the tech itself is fascinating. It’s an amazing application of complicated math to a complicated type of problem. I took some classes on AI in university and I’m in awe of the advances made in the field.

But the way it is being packaged and sold is toxic. Pewdiepie isn’t trying to get kids into studying Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing and the works. He’s not teaching them about the philosophical problem of attaching meaning to words and mapping words to semantics, nor its real implications for machine “intelligence”.

It can be useful for generating texts, but in the process, your skill to write those texts yourself will deteriorate. Particularly with structured language like code, you have validation for whether the output is syntactically correct, but using it to code has been proven harmful for devs’ own coding skills.

These issues create a dependency on that tech in the same way GPS has many people unable to navigate by map and in the same way too many essential things require a smartphone now.

I don’t like the term hallucination because it would require a perception of reality in the first place. It predicts a text that sounds plausible, but because it lacks any understanding of the reality those words represent, it fundamentally cannot take that meaning into account for its prediction. That’s not hallucination so much as ignorance.

The harm comes from people mistaking that ignorance for confidence and trusting it to “look up” things. A minor “can make mistakes” disclaimer isn’t enough if people assume it mostly does tell the truth. It would be the responsibility of companies peddling these things to make it clear the LLMs don’t communicate facts…

But that wouldn’t be profitable, so instead they pretend it’s a direct substitute for human reasoning, or even an improvement over it, and quietly sweep the limits under the rug.

That’s why the topic gets such hate. Sincere technical discussions have no place in public forums full of people that don’t understand the technical intricacies, because they will misunderstand it for the type of AI SciFi has been dreaming of for decades, a lie the corporate frauds are all too happy to cash in on.

Or maybe people hate that it’s a toxic technology wasting resources to spare you having to exercise basic skills, which is being hyped as replacement for actual intelligence, deceiving people into trusting a text generator’s mimicry of meaning and mistaking its facsimile for facts.

Regardless of what you folks think about Valve, does anyone believe that a marketplace should have this kind of leverage over their suppliers?

On principle, no, and Valve should not be above criticism.

I’m cautiously in favour of uniform retail pricing, such that no sales platform could either gouge customers or undercut to win more people over, such that the competition is determined by the available selection of products and other amenities, but my gut says that kind of price fixation would end up a minefield of complications, exceptions and loopholes. Few things are ever as easy as a layperson may think, and I sure am one.

Either way, one retailer dictating the prices for all others definitely seems unfair.

For instance, should Amazon be permitted to force manufacturers to set the price of a product outside of their marketplace?

Aside from the obligatory “fuck Amazon”, that would open the door to a particularly vicious level of fuckery. They would set their own price, sustained by cheap, fucked-up working conditions and the capital to afford selling at a loss, which they already do and which is bad enough, but to also dictate that price to other vendors that definitely can’t afford to operate at such a loss? If they’re currently on the road to monopoly, that would turn it into a bullet train: fast, on rails and with no stop to get off at.