person3

Having used Windows XP this bothers me because it's just slightly off.

> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated

Given Coinbase is a financial platform this doesn't make me feel great. Hopefully they're contributing in areas that don't affect security or money.

This might be the most brain dead way to waste tokens yet.

I'm trying not to be negative, but would a human ever read any of the content? What value does it have?

It is challenging. In my CS degree grading for programming questions fell into two areas

1. Take home projects where we programmed solutions to big problems. 2. Tests where we had to write programs in the exam on paper during the test.

I think the take home projects are likely a lot harder to grade without AI being used. I'd be disappointed if schools have stopped doing the programming live during tests though. Being able to write a program in a time constrained environment is similar to interviewing, and requires knowledge of the language and being able to code algorithms. It also forces you to think through the program and detect if there will be bugs, without being able to actually run the program (great practice for debugging).

This scared me - I thought he died for a minute.

I can type like 45 WPM on my phone keyboard right now. I'm definitely faster on a full size keyboard, but I'm not sure if I would be faster on this small keyboard. I know a lot of people wanted keyboard like this when the iPhone first came out, but now with a lot of practice using mobile keyboards, I'm not sure it's needed.

One of the main arguments for hardware keyboards was you could type without looking. I don't really look at my phone keyboard when typing, I roughly know the spacing of the letters. Plus auto correct is really good at this point, so when I do make mistakes the phone usually just corrects them.

The only use case I could see for this is if the keyboard had control/alt/esc keys - in that case shelling into a machine on my phone might become slightly more efficient than an onscreen keyboard.

> 1. I want _nothing_ to do with user data. Nothing. Toxic nuclear waste. The idea of keeping the waste on hand needs strong justification.

Additionally, with regulations like CCPA in some jurisdictions, this isn't even optional anymore. At some point you will need to hard delete user data.

I don’t know a lot about how it works, so forgive me if this is a silly idea. I wonder if attestation could be done using real Apple devices, while leaving the private key on the user’s android. So similar to the old beeper to get the signed attestation, and send the result to the phone. Still could be secure since you can keep the private key used to encrypt messages local on the users device. I guess the issue might be a cat and mouse game if detecting beepers flock of Apple hardware to try and disable them all… (given many people would be using the same Apple devices)

This is new to me, so I might be wrong, but I don't get why they share revenue with the creators of these GPTs. They are basically just prompts that consist of a few sentences. There's no value add, and the more ChatGPT improves the less prompting will be required. These GPTs feel closer to bookmarks than an actual program.

It is. See: - https://webkit.org/ - https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins

This won't even work to solve the problem they're trying to solve. If I'm a scraper or someone that wants to drive fake ad impressions, what stops me from faking the attestation info? There's some mention in the original article about the attester validating the attestation data is signed on the client, but that just pushes the problem down the stack a bit. Someone could still spin up VMs, and just automate the scraping in a real environment that passes attestation. The author is claiming this will ensure only humans are viewing said data, but it doesn't really ensure that, it only adds a couple steps.

I also find it funny that the authors point to mobile platforms as an example of how this will work well. Last time I worked with ad tech, mobile ads were flooded with fake impressions, and I highly doubt that has changed. The funny thing about players like Google is that they want to be able to tell advertisers they're doing a lot to prevent fake impressions to get them to buy ads, but they don't really want to solve the problem because it would cost them a lot of money. So they kinda play the line and develop tech like this that sounds fancy but doesn't actually stop the problem in practice.

It's a bit odd though. What if you built your own ML model and trained it over a set of data that your wrote yourself. Would the work generated by the AI based of your prompts be not be copyrightable?

The original copyright laws were thought up way before even cameras, and we're still trying to apply them today to generated AI. Why can't we just realize that the world is very different now, and just create new laws? Instead we keep trying to arbitrarily interpret the law in a biased way to try to fit our modern goals as best we can.

I definitely agree, "open" in the name is pretty annoying and wrong. I'm a bit torn though - I tend to think GPT-3 is approaching a level where ML is becoming dangerous. Spam bots + GPT-3 is not my idea of a fun time. So the restrictions they put on usage do seem important.

Regardless of that moral question, I don't think a fully open model on the level of GPT-3 is even possible. Given the required cost to train and the expertise involved, big tech will always be a few years ahead. And it's unlikely they would give it away with how much they invest in creating it. Unless capitalism suddenly ends, I don't see any of the major tech companies parting with state of the art ML.

This seems kind of cool, but honestly the benefits described don't really solve actual problems I've run into in development. The overall article reads like marketing talk and doesn't actually describe concretely why it's better than existing solutions. For something as core as a database I would expect more rigorous descriptions and benchmarks.

> We shall do better than SQL The EdgeQL language looks cool, and I'm sure querying via a graph structure makes certain problems easier in some use cases. However as much as people have complained about SQL, it's just so ubiquitous there needs to be a very good reason to switch away from it. Not having to write joins isn't really a good enough reason, in my opinion.

> The true source of truth I'm not sure why this means EdgeDB is better. Tons of applications use a traditional or cloud SQL database as the source of truth right now. This section seems to imply with microservices you no longer have a single source of truth. But if they're trying to say a microservice system should instead us a single common database that breaks separation of concerns and moves us into an annoying situation where you have a bunch of services communicating via a shared database.

> Not just a database server It sounds like they have a solid client, which is awesome.

> Cloud-ready database APIs > The vast scale of modern application deployments requires that inelastic computing resources are managed very carefully. Until cloud-native databases reach complete functional and performance parity with traditional databases, we will have to contend with the fact that the database is a scarce resource.

This used to be true, but is definitely no longer true. Cloud-native databases are everywhere and incredibly common. See any major cloud, https://www.cockroachlabs.com/, or any of the tons of other database solutions.

It's great to see a new database coming out - innovation in the space is super important. However this announcement reads like marketing speak, and is light on the details. When I see a new product I want to hear things like: - about how it scales - what the architecture is - why is it stable and trust-worth enough to put my data on - is it multi-node? How did they make it serializable? - how fast is it? Performance is super important.

Based on their website it seems like a thin skin over postgresql. If that's the case I'll just use postgresql. If it's a clustered new and advanced database, then I'll be wary about trusting it for anything real.

I never really got this... Surely just forking Android and replacing all the closed source Google apps with open source alternatives would be easier? Why build an entirely new operating system, when Android already uses the Linux kernel and is open source. A free software fork of Android could accomplish all the of the same goals as PinePhone while providing all the benefits of the existing support and ecosystem.

edit: apparently this already exists: https://replicant.us

In fairness, Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War crashes constantly for me on Windows. It's not a polished game on any platform.

I agree though, the uncertainty is definitely an issue. Maybe if enough games start to get played on linux, this will be the push that's needed for game devs to start supporting games on linux (even if that means it's through wine).

Agreed. Where I work we have a core team that created a framework that manages the Kubernetes configuration for us. As a backend developer I basically just have to throw a config file into my service with some basic options like which port to listen on and where the docker container is, and then it gets deployed with everything setup for me (using helm I believe).

I really hope we move more towards these opinionated tools that can handle 90% of the use cases. Most people just want to host an app on a port, and it's a pain to have to develop that pipeline at every company that wants to adopt Kubernetes.

That's correct. I just think saying "most aren't buying" gives the impression that it's not popular, when in fact it is a pretty widespread product. Not to mention Alexa being added into tons of other products such as smart thermostats, home theater speakers, etc. The number is only growing.

Except that The Washington Post operates independently, and has strong editorial standards, something that a lot of "news" sites on the Internet today don't even pretend to have. The Post continues to publish articles about surveillance, as well as articles critical of Amazon.

For example, here's reporting on an interview with Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor:

Mr. Bezos holds conference calls with The Post’s leadership every other week to discuss the paper’s business strategy but has no involvement in its news coverage, Mr. Baron said. During his occasional appearances at The Post’s building, Mr. Bezos sometimes stops by a news meeting “just to thank everybody,” Mr. Baron said.

“I can’t say more emphatically he’s never suggested a story to anybody here, he’s never critiqued a story, he’s never suppressed a story,” the editor said.

“Frankly, in a newsroom of 800 journalists, if that had occurred, I guarantee you, you would have heard about it,” he added. “Newsrooms tend not to like those kinds of interventions, particularly a newsroom that’s as proud as The Washington Post.

“If he had been involved in our news coverage, you can be sure that you would have heard about it by now,” Mr. Baron added. “It hasn’t happened. Period.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/business/media/to-trump-i...

(edited for formatting)

Not true, a simple Google search reveals [1 in 4 US adults have a smart speaker](https://marketingland.com/roughly-1-in-4-u-s-adults-now-owns...). It _is_ a choice people make, and most don't care about privacy.

Not that it matters though - phones are [already a vector](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/nsa-bug-iphone/) for the government to listen to you. I'm not sure this news really changes anything - the government already works with large US companies to spy on people, and then makes sure they're not allowed to disclose it to the public.

Also, I think Kindle is a great product, and wouldn't consider it a useless spying device. Each to their own though.