You need some perspective - Meta wouldn't even crack the top 100 in terms of evil:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abir_Congo_Company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont#Controversies_and_crime...
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/meta-all...
I'm not saying Meta isn't evil - they're a corporation, and all corporations are evil - but you must live in an incredibly narrow-minded and privileged bubble to believe that Meta is categorically more evil than all other evils in the span of human history combined.
Go take a tour of Dachau and look at the ovens and realize what you're claiming. That that pales in comparison to targeted ads.
Just... no.
My original post was about all the comments saying they knew nothing about the regulation, but that they sided with Europe.
I think that gleeful ignorance caught me off guard.
Europeans are still essentially on Google, Meta and Amazon for most of their browsing experiences. So I'm assuming Europe's goal is not to compete or break American moat but to force them to be polite and to preserve national sovereignty on important national security aspects.
A position which is essentially reasonable if not too polite.
When push comes to shove the US company will always prioritize US interest. If you want to stay under the US umbrella by all means. But honestly it looks very short sighted to me.
After seeing this news https://observer.co.uk/news/columnists/article/the-networker..., how can you have any faith that they will play nice?
You have only one option. Grow alternatives. Fund your own companies. China managed to fund the local market without picking winners. If European countries really care, they need to do the same for tech.
If they don't they will forever stay under the influence of another big brother. It is US today, but it could be China tomorrow.
Perhaps it's easier to actually look at the points in contention to form your opinion.
Maybe some think that is a good thing - and perhaps it may be - but I feel it's more likely any regulation regarding AI at this point in time is premature, doomed for failure and unintended consequences.
How long can we let AI go without regulation? Just yesterday, there was a report here on Delta using AI to squeeze higher ticket prices from customers. Next up is insurance companies. How long do you want to watch? Until all accountability is gone for good?
Who's to say USB-C is the end-all-be-all connector? We're happy with it today, but Apple's Lightning connector had merit. What if two new, competing connectors come out in a few year's time?
The EU regulation, as-is, simply will not allow a new technically superior connector to enter the market. Fast forward a decade when USB-C is dead, EU will keep it limping along - stifling more innovation along the way.
Standardization like this is difficult to achieve via consensus - but via policy/regulation? These are the same governing bodies that hardly understand technology/internet. Normally standardization is achieved via two (or more) competing standards where one eventually "wins" via adoption.
Well intentioned, but with negative side-effects.
The EU says nothing about USB-C being the bestest and greatest, they only say that companies have to come to a consensus and have to have 1 port that is shared between all devices for the sake of consumers.
I personally much prefer USB-C over the horrid clusterfuck of proprietary cables that weren't compatible with one another, that's for sure.
If one company does though they're basically screwed as I understand it.....
As in: the EU regulation literally addresses this. You'd know it if you didn't blindly repeat uneducated talking points by others who are as clueless as you are.
> Standardization like this is difficult to achieve via consensus - but via policy/regulation?
In the ancient times of 15 or so years ago every manufacturer had their own connector incompatible with each other. There would often be connectors incompatible with each other within a single manufacturer's product range.
The EU said: settle on a single connector voluntarily, or else. At the time the industry settled on micro-USB and started working on USB-C. Hell, even Power Delivery wasn't standardized until USB-C.
Consensus doesn't always work. Often you do need government intervention.
If I had to pick a connector that the world was forced to use forever due to some European technocrat, I would not have picked usb-c.
Hell, the ports on my MacBook are nearly shot just a few years in.
Plus GDPR has created more value for lawyers and consultants than it has for EU citizens.
I don't know how this problem is so much worse with USB-C or the physics behind it, but it's a very common issue.
This port could be improved for sure.
I don't know if this is a fair comparison, just an anecdote.
Monetary value, certainly, but that’s considering money as the only desirable value to measure against.
That time and effort wasted on consultants and lawyers could have been spent on more important problems or used to more efficiently solve the current one.
You mean that thing (or is that another law?) that forces me to find that "I really don't care in the slightest" button about cookies on every single page?
Tell that to X which disables your ability to delete your account if it gets suspended.
Fun fact, GitHub doesn't have cookie banners. It's almost like it's possible to run a huge site without being a parasite and harvesting every iota of data of your site's visitors!
The European government has at least a passing interest in the well being of human beings while that is not valued by the incentives that corporations live by
Are you still sure you want to side blindly with the EU?
Feels like I need to go find a tech site full of people who actually like tech instead of hating it.
I don't like meta or anything it has done, or stands for
You don't like open source ML (including or not including LLMs, depending on how you feel about them)
You don't like React?
You don't like PyTorch?
Like a lot of really smart and really dedicated people work on pretty cool stuff at Meta. You don't have to like Facebook, Instagram, etc to see that.
Plenty of great projects are developed by people working at Meta. Doesn't change the fact that the company as a whole should be split in at least 6 parts, and at least two thirds of these parts should be regulated to death. And when it comes to activities that do not improve anyone's life such as advertisement and data collection, I do mean literally regulated into bankruptcy.
The comment I responded to said Meta didn't do anything good, which is obviously affecting their opinion on whether Meta opposing European AI regulation can possibly be good. Certainly there's a lot of not great stuff Meta does.
Probably partly because reddit somehow seems to have become even worse over the last several years. So there are probably more people fleeing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609135
That feeling is correct: this site is better without you. Please put your money where your mouth is and leave.
We don't like what trillion-dollar supranational corporations and infinite VC money are doing with tech.
Hating things like "We're saving your precise movements and location for 10+ years" and "we're using AI to predict how much you can be charged for stuff" is not hating technology
The EU AI regulation establishes complex rules and requirements for models trained above 10^25 FLOPS. Mistral is currently the only European company operating at that scale, and they are also asking for a pause before these rules go into effect.
It was a decade too late and written by people who were incredibly out of touch with the actual problem. The GDPR is a bit better, but it's still a far bigger nuisance for regular European citizens than the companies that still largely unhindered track and profile the same.
Newer regulations also mandate that "reject all cookies" should be a one click action but surprisingly compliance is low. Once again, the enemy of the customer here is the company, not the eu regulation.
And since most people click on accept, websites don't really care either.
Of course the business which depend on harvesting data will do anything they can to continue harvesting data. The regulation just makes that require consent. This is good.
If businesses are intent to keep on harvesting data by using dark patterns to obtain "consent", these businesses should either die or change. This is good.
The odds of the EU actually hitting a useful mark with these types of regulations, given their technical illiteracy, it's is just astronomically unlikely.
Meanwhile, nobody in China gives a flying fuck about regulators in the EU. You probably don't care about what the Chinese are doing now, but believe me, you will if the EU hands the next trillion-Euro market over to them without a fight.
True, but now they get to butt heads with the US, who call the tunes at ASML.
We (the US) have also given China every possible incentive to break that dependency short of dropping bombs on them, and it would be foolish to think the TSMC/ASML status quo will still hold in 5-10 years. Say what you will about China, they aren't a nation of morons. Now that it's clear what's at stake, I think they will respond rationally and effectively.
>Even in a lively discussion it was not compatible with Article 10 of the Convention to pack incriminating statements into the wrapping of an otherwise acceptable expression of opinion and claim that this rendered passable those statements exceeding the permissible limits of freedom of expression.
Although the expression of this opinion is otherwise acceptable, it was packed with "incriminating statements". But the subject of these incriminating statements is 2000 year old mythical figure.
Isn't that the exact definition of "blasphemy"[1]?
1984 wasn't supposed to be a blueprint.
It just creates barriers for internal players, while giving a massive head start for evil outside players.
Since you then admit to "assume by default", are you sure you are not what you complain about?
I, prior to reading the details of the regulation myself, was commenting on my surprise at the default inclinations of people.
At no point did I pass judgement on the regulation and even after reading a little bit on it I need to read more to actually decide whether I think it's good or bad.
Being American it impacts me less, so it's lower on my to do list.
I think perhaps you need to reread my comment or lookup "irony"
And that's the problem: assuming by default.
How about not assuming by default? How about reading something about this? How about forming your own opinion, and not the opinion of the trillion- dollar supranational corporations?
"Meta disagrees with European regulation"
That you don't have an immediate guess at which party you are most likely to agree with?
I do and I think most people do.
I'm not about to go around spreading my uninformed opinion though. What my comment said was that I was surprised at people's kneejerk reaction that Europe must be right, especially on HN. Perhaps I should have also chided those people for commenting at all, but that's hindsight for you.
Whereas EU's "heavy-handed and ill-conceived" regulations are "respect copyright, respect user choice, document your models, and use AI responsibly".
Meta is capable of having correct actions and opinions and you are grossly oversimplifying the EU regulation.
Sometimes the regulations are heavy-handed and ill-conceived. Most of the time, they are influenced by one lobby or another. For example, car emissions limits scale with _weight_ of all things, which completely defeats the point and actually makes today's car market worse for the environment than it used to be, _because of_ emissions regulations. However, it is undeniable that that the average European is better off in terms of privacy.
Am I the only one who assumes by default that European regulation will be heavy-handed and ill conceived?