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Actually latency is way less of a problem, if the input is buffered, as you can just type ahead.

And how ridiculously slow software is. Unless you are doing bulk processing most task should be ready in milliseconds.

But the servers are not in space (yet), so the signal needs to come back down somewhere.

You can still consider it unauthorized, if you do not consider the authorization to be valid in the first place. I can also get people to sign away their life on a contract, that's not going to mean anything, because signing away your life is not possible in the first place.

> If people actually read these clickthrough agreements

I would live in such a world too, but that is a fairy tale. In a lot of situations, you don't get to see the contract before you have signed it. I had the situation in a bank contract. The bank clerk tells me it's mandatory, to sign that waiver, I tell her it's not. She won't sign the main contract, until I signed that waiver. I tell her that's illegal. Doesn't matter. After I signed it, I get to read the waiver, it clearly states, that it is not mandatory, and whether it gets signed does not have any effect on the main contract, as is required by law (with citation).

Because of these things, the laws says some things can't be established and most other things must be established with informed consent. It's on the company to ensure that this is collected. No, a tick on "I have read and understand the Terms and Conditions" is not informed consent.

Honestly, we don't need any law changes actually, because most of these things the tech companies do is plain illegal in every step.

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On the first page of a web search: https://www.legal500.com/intelligence/germany/privacy/german...

The Regional Court of Berlin held in a judgment of 16 January 2018 (docket no. 16 O 341/15, German language version of the judgment available here) that Facebook's default privacy settings and parts of their terms and conditions were invalid. This judgment provides important guidance on consent and transparency.

Background

The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (Federation) sued Facebook and requested cease and desist regarding some of its default settings and terms and conditions.

The Federation argued that Facebook's default settings violated the requirement of explicit consent. For example, the default settings included a location service in Facebook's mobile app revealing the location of the person that the user is chatting to. In addition, boxes were pre-activated allowing search engines to link to the user's timeline.

The Federation also argued that various clauses in the terms and conditions of Facebook were invalid, including clauses that provide consent of the user (i) to transferring personal data to and processing personal data in the U.S. and (ii) using the name and profile picture of the user for commercial, sponsored or related content.

Judgment of the Regional Court of Berlin

First, the Regional Court of Berlin found that five default settings were invalid because the requirements of informed consent were not fulfilled. The court stated that informed consent requires that an organization must provide comprehensive information about the background and the scope of the consent in order for the consent to be based on an entirely free decision of the user. Default settings cannot be regarded as informed consent if the user is not explicitly and actively notified of the default settings in the registration procedure. Facebook did not sufficiently ensure that the user was aware of the default settings. The court noted that a "virtual privacy tour" that Facebook offered, but that was not mandatory, did not change this. Not every user would make use of this privacy tour and "realistically", most of the users would not further review the privacy settings.

Next, the court held that the consent declarations in the terms and conditions were not transparent and therefore the users were not able to give informed consent. With regard to the consent to the transfer of personal data to the United States, the court observed that the user was not informed about which categories of personal data were transferred, why they were transferred, how they are further used in the U.S. and which standards of data security are applied. Further, the court concluded that the consent language for using the name and profile picture for commercial, sponsored or related content was not transparent. The extent of the usage of the name and profile picture was not clear for the user and not further explained. The court noted that the example that was provided in the consent wording (i.e., use for a brand that the user likes) was not sufficient information about the scope of the consent.

Btw., after using it for a year every day, the US population would be 2.52 people. And I think the US military plans to use their expensive systems for much more than a year.

I agree, that most real world problems, are not binary choices. But in this case actually yes, just do the opposite.

For that reason error rates above 50% don't make any sense. Building a system, that is reliably wrong, is as hard as building one that is reliable correct, because the systems are the same, just with the output inverted.

The worst you can get with a system is 50%, at which point you can just flip a coin, because that is just pure random. Any deviation from that is going to be an improvement.

> Even rare events become very likely when you repeat it.

True, but in my opinion 5 innocent dead out of hundred is not remotely small. For any serious automated decision anything larger than per million is completely unacceptable. (For reference, among Germans the amount of Jews killed by Nationalsocialists, is "only" 2.3‰ [160k vs. 69M] I don't think anyone considers that to be small.)

> A 5% wrong chance means half are dead after 10 tries

Actually ln(0.5)/ln(0.95) ≈ 13.513

> The point is, you're going to use the mouse with Firefox

I was imprecise. I am solely talking about using a terminal emulator program on a display server, I wasn't talking about refraining from using anything outside a VTE. That would be pointless, yeah.

> there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.

My point is that it is. Typing 'firefox' is way simpler to open the program, than traversing an application list and selecting it. The latter can become faster once you have a shortcut, but then it's equivalent to 'f<TAB>' or '!!' and the like. Language is more versatile, that's why we use it for fast communication. If you want the scissors from someone, you tell them, you don't make gestures or draw a picture, because that's way more work (unless you are mute).

> Absolutely. In the middle of 50-deep templatized call stack?

That is also not going to be done by a developer, so it's not a counter argument against deferring such work to the compiler.

The word purpose exists to describe something that is independent of it's current behaviour. If you do not mean that, don't use that word.

If it is a binary choice you can just do the opposite.

It's not, if the status quo ante was not deemed to be moral in the first place.

The decision to blow up 1000 buildings, without any background check wasn't done by claude.

> There is a tendency for software people to say “it has a 5% error rate, so make sure to carefully check every time”. Even though we know that humans simply won’t check carefully the results of a 95% accurate system.

This should really be framed differently during training. "Assume you have 100 neighbors in your area/house. We expect you to kill 5 innocent neighbors each time you use the system, and don't actually think for yourself. (After using it once every day for two weeks, you will have killed half of your neighbors.)"

Suddenly 5% doesn't sound that small/95% not as good to the laymen.

Yeah, but Git is a tool, that in the face of an accident shoves you it's manual in the face.

You can't use it "in" the desktop either, you just start it from there. Same as with the terminal.

It's still around and what I use. It's called Mate now.

Often these clauses ARE deemed null and void, but you need to bring it to a court and who has time for that?

Which is why your parent says this behaviour should be fined. Laws override "consent" between contracting parties.

You mean 273.15°K.

You could say meta-biology is called chemistry and meta-physics is just called meta-physics.

> also applicable to a cloud service provider that is headquartered in the EU and has operations in the United State(sic)

As if any company isn't going to create a subsidiary for that.

Isn't regulatory capture when a company shapes regulation to achieve business interests? How is this the case here?

It is just a query language for the filesystem, which is what "finding" means.

It's essentially like the SQL SELECT expression.

Or:

  total = calculateOrderTotal(user.order);
  total *= user.discount;

or:

  return 
         calculateOrderTotal(user.order)
       * user.discount;

Not necessarily.

   return 1 - user.isPremiumMember * 0.1;

would also cut it.

The latter example, sounds like something trivially done by the compiler. I mean I would sometimes, adhere to it, but only if the loops afterwards become substantially different. If I would just repeat most of the loop body, I would prefer the former.

Is it much more powerful, than pushd?

It's basically like your internal congestion handling missing data, which it interprets as a congestion, and wants to pause the transmission.

I wanted to bookmark this essay, only to find out I already had! Thanks.