FriendOfDeSoto

People who really want to communicate with each other will find a way.

I think English<>French is a language pair you could get instant translations with the help of Google. So there's a tech solution that will cause humorous misunderstands but will make do. You could hire somebody who is bilingual for the first meeting to let the parents talk behind their kids' backs.

If they are French, they may actually be able to have a simple conversation in English but the boyfriend wouldn't know because they lose this ability the moment they cross the border back into France. That's a silly stereotype but I like it.

So, as I said, we need to look at the legal situation at the same time. The assholery of the bank is possible due to the assholery of these OS restrictions and the duopoly of mobile OSs. Everybody wants to have a walled garden. Outlaw or at least restrict walled gardens.

One thing politicians like to say is that they want to protect consumers. Forcing consumers into walled, privacy-invading gardens for essential services such as banking should be a change item on their agenda.

So looking at the status quo you're correct. I'm just hopeful we can change that. I'm also looking at these mobile compute devices in our pockets as universal ones. They can run any instruction set that doesn't burn their hardware. All of these restrictions - chipped components, unaltered OSs, software only from one place - are man-made/big corp imposed. With a view to a walled garden. That's where the law needs to intervene so you can bank safely from where you want.

We humans always underestimate the time it actually takes for a tech to change the world. We should travel in self-flying flying cars and on hoverboards already but we're not.

The disseminators of so-called AI have a vested interest in making it seem it's the magical solution to all our problems. The tech press seems to have had a good swig from the koolaid as well overall. We have such a warped perception of new tech, we always see it as magical beans. The internet will democratize the world - hasn't happened; I think we've regressed actually as a planet. Fully self-drving cars will happen by 2020 - looks at calendar. Blockchain will revolutionize everything - it really only provided a way for fraudsters, ransomware dicks, and drug dealers to get paid. Now it's so-called AI.

I think the history books will at some point summarize the introduction of so-called AI as OpenAI taking a gamble with half-baked tech, provoking its panicked competitors into a half-baked game of oneupmanship. We arrived at the plateau in the hockey stick graph in record time burning an incredible amount of resources, both fiscal and earthly. Despite massive influences on the labor market and creative industries, it turned out to be a fart in the wind because skynet happened a 100 years later. I'm guessing 100 so it's probably much later.

Google has a vested interest in keeping Android open source. Because the moment they turn away from that more antitrust action is going to hit them like a ton of bricks.

What's an "important app" to you here?

But that's not all phones, is it. If you buy your phone directly from Google, you made a mistake. Like buying one from Apple. If Google want to continue to claim Android is open source, they have to allow for devices that forego any of this crap and boot vanilla non-Google-Services Android. And if you're privacy oriented enough, you will give up on apps that are not.

And given enough time somebody is going to work out how you fool a modified system into booting. The problem is legal. Depending on where you are circumventing any digital locks can mean jail time at worst. We have to address the legal situation at the same time.

The solution should not be one single provider. Use Ente for pictures, maybe Proton* for other cloud storage and Docs replacement, look into a Nextcloud server hosted by another provider for calendar and email. Don't put all your digital eggs in one walled nest.

*Proton is plagued by a CEO who can't keep his mouth shut about politics. Look into that and how you feel about it before you sign up. Their VPN is good but I wouldn't use them also for email to make switching less of a headache - and I don't think you could use your own domain there anyway.

I think with PCs it will be harder to lock them down and not disgruntle consumers too much in the process. I'm also hopeful that over time right to repair will be the standard, so they have to allow for third party repair. So all these restrictions like chipped components and software only from our store will be phased out by incremental legislation. The EU is not perfect but it's on this path. Even in the US people are thinking antitrust more often now. There is hope, however small.

You can run whatever you like in your Android phones. Jailbreaking iPhones is also possible. All these devices are just computers that can run anything within their hardware specs. Hacking some of these things may be against the Ts and Cs or even illegal. But technically possible. The restrictions are mote political, not technical.

Chromebooks are not the way to the future. They fill a niche in education for cheap hardware in connection with limited capabilities. They are not technical limitations, they are designed to limit users in what damage they can do. AFAIK you could technically wipe a chromebook and put Linux on it. It may violate the Ts and Cs and we're right back at political. Google would like to develop future customers at an early age. They don't care about the education so much as about their bottom line.

This is the "how much is a pint of milk?" politicians gotcha question of the so-called-AI age.

Sci-fi is delightfully circumspect on how an intergalactic empire would work. Maybe Herbert's Dune universe is clearest and he just took us back to the middle ages with sandworms and drugs, fiefdoms and nobility.

I think whatever area shares the same government is a country. It doesn't have to be contiguous or on the same body floating through space. It could be the size of the Vatican or half the universe.

I suspect the definition of the word will change once (if) we make it to the stars. We have gone from nomadic life to loosely defined borders to kingdoms to empires to multinational and intranational federations of sort. These terms may no longer be fit for purpose when we colonize Mars etc. And maybe that's why you struggle to comprehend how it would all work behind the scenes. We don't know for sure, sci-fi authors don't know (or don't want to be too specific and limit themselves in what stories they could tell in the future).

I don't like Facebook, I don't like this "legend," I don't like so-called AI being forcefed down our throats. I've yet to see a reliably good use case that makes me forget how many polar bears get cooked while we are playing around with this quarter-baked tech. And I don't think it's right to just syphon off the training data either.

That being said, I want to defend old Nick a tiny bit. Why doesn't he think it's feasible to go to every copyright holder and ask for permission? Because the stuff is readily available online. Either because people put it there voluntarily. Or because people torrented it, file-shared it, stole it. I'm not excusing one crime with another committed by somebody else. This is just about the motivation: why don't they go around to every artist and ask? Because they don't have to. And they have deep enough pockets to pay later if they have to. If you were sitting in Facebook's c suite (you know what the c stands for), and you were entangled in a race to the bottom with the Googles and OpenAIs of this world, this makes business sense unfortunately. And if you have ever enjoyed pirated content online, you are (as I am) culpable in a homeopathic dose. If we didn't occasionally break the law, Meta would have to go ask more artists because there would be no other way. That's the status quo we find ourselves in. The moral gray zone.

I suggested in another thread a new law, based off of Murphy's. Anything that can be training data, will become training data. Whether it's a big company or a rich privateer with large server capacity - somebody is going to take it. It's not right and just and legal and at the same time an inevitability. That's why all these measures to get these companies to ask artists is akin to trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. We need to milk these companies for money, percentages of revenue and raised funds, and find a way to distribute this among the artists. Fines, taxes, voluntary contributions - all the tools need to be thrown at companies that train or apply the various models. The longer we spend pearl clutching at the audacity of these big corporations, the more money they get to keep.

Technically, smoking weed in the Netherlands is illegal. The law just isn't enforced. Stealing bicycles is illegal everywhere but they get stolen all the time. Abortion may be illegal but tolerated until a certain time where you live. We have many scenarios where we're stuck in the moral gray zone. Where illegal things just happen and life goes on. I am afraid that so-called AI has provided us with another one.

I don't like it, I don't like it at all. I just don't see any other way to move forward. Weavers hated the industrialization, horse breeders the introduction of the automobile, the music industry Napster et al., and everyone will hate so-called AI.

There are legendary villains too. But truthfully, he doesn't even fit that bill either despite having worked for Facebook. Maybe he's just the legendary wart on the arse of history.

Normally, when somebody on the internet starts a question with "Am I the only one ...?" my first reaction is to say no, of course not. This is the first time that I really need to question that conviction. I think you just might be the only one!