It isn’t.
6,397 karma · joined November 30, 2008
Ex FAST/Yahoo/Google/Telenor
It should be enough that it is overwhelmingly likely.
It is hypocrisy because Meta are knowingly creating a product that is perfectly suited for filming or photographing people without their knowledge. I find that it speaks ill of someone's character to pretend otherwise. And then they react badly when the very thing that these products enable happens to them. Demonstrating how this is a problem. They try to pretend it isn't a problem and then their actions demonstrate that it IS a problem.
It isn't because we do have laws that actually cover these things already. Of course, they're not the same across the world, law enforcement are not always aware of what the laws are, and this causes confrontations and sometimes overreach. There are also different legal systems that interpret laws differently. For instance in some legal systems the letter of the law carries more weight. In other legal systems the intent of the law is what matters.
There are two great risks here:
1) we pretend we can get by with existing laws. That the existing laws had enough foresight to meaningfully fulfil what the laws were intended to accomplish.
2) we can overreact and damage legitimate freedoms in our eagerness to solve an immediate problem.
For instance, where I live there is a law on the books that prohibits photographing someone being arrested. The law was well-meaning. It was there to protect people from being plastered all over the media until guilt has been determined in a court of law. But it would also prohibit someone from documenting police brutality during an arrest. So the law was never enacted because it failed to balance interests properly.
Right now, where I live, there is a real risk that rules about photography may become overly strict because politicians feel they have to demonstrate an ability to act. So they may end up passing laws that have unforeseen consequences while probably failing to make much of a difference anyway.
We know why these cameras pose a problem. Let's not insult each other's intelligence by pretending they are exactly like poking a traditional camera in someone's face. They're not and we should be able to agree on simple facts. But we also know that we need to have a public discussion about what we're going to do about this so we don't end up introducing draconian laws that take away freedoms we should have. For instance the freedom to document abuses of power, criminal activity, artistic expression etc.
For the most part I am thankful that the EU regulates things strictly. As long as I am the consumer of what is regulated and not the maker. Because while the regulation is well meaning, it is not always effective or efficient. And sometimes it achieves absolutely no positive results.
And yet, I am generally for regulating a lot of things.
For instance the cookie-popup-horseshit is failed regulation that came about mainly because regulators were squeamish about real solutions that would have required constant judgement calls. Instead of posing an existential risk to companies that run roughshod over our privacy, they created impotent regulation that is a dual failure: it protects exactly nobody and it wastes everyone's time multiple times over.
Companies that do bad things should face existential risks. It is the only mechanism that works. Fines only work for small players. For large players it is surprisingly often a calculation where the numbers dictate you DO bad things because the downside risk is mostly quantifiable and financially acceptable.
Yes, sanctioning companies guilty of egregious violations of privacy would have been noisy, but it would have been the right thing to do. And it would have been cheaper and more effective than what we have today.
Quality was what you judged products on and the origin of brands.
The overwhelming majority of brands today are meaningless because they have nothing to do with quality. They are either status markers or tools for exploiting our tendency to form habits.
You need go no longer than your local hardware store. Almost all the consumer grade electrical tool brands today are from perhaps 2 manufacturers. But you are likely to have a preference that you tell yourself is grounded in a rational, informed choice. Except, it mostly isn't. You probably buy the same toothpaste every time. Not because you have done an exhaustive study of toothpaste and concluded it is the best one for you. But because it is what you are used to buying.
(Yes, there are still some professional tool brands that make their own electric tools, but the kind of stores consumers shop in don't have those since they cost an arm and a leg)
Yes, quality used to matter. A lot. But most people alive today have not lived in those times. People have a hard time imagining things that are outside their own experience. So much so that they can even conclude "it can't be if I haven't experienced it".
A while back Claude went down in the middle of a somewhat frantic initial deployment of a product to production at a company where a friend of mine works. And suddenly nobody was able to do anything. Because nobody had actually read the code and had no idea how it worked.
So essentially: much of their day to day work now depends entirely on the availability of a couple of frontier LLMs.
Even in the previous political climate this should, objectively, be deemed a problem. Having 90% of all eggs in one basket is neither good, nor does it constitute functioning market.
I'm not sure what the Cloudflare market share is in the US, but if it is the same as in Europe, this is a problem for US companies as well.
We're beyond holding huge companies accountable. The only way they could be held accountable is if there was personal risk involved for the CEOs. There isn't.
As for "ecological lifecycle", that's a more complex question than can be expressed in a few paragraphs because one needs to understand what timber is and where it comes from. As well as how it is used.
If this genuinely is a worry of yours then I'd be more worried about what to eat, since the deforestation that actually matters, that of untouched virgin forest, is mostly to produce what ends up on your plate. Mostly beef, but also oil crops etc. The timber in your furniture comes from managed forests. Essentially crops. Of which there is no shortage.
However, there is a shortage of virgin forest. In Europe genuinely untouched forest, which is the kind that matters for biodiversity, is somewhere in the region of 2%. Which is why most Europeans will never see actual virgin forest during their lifetime. The thing they think of as forest is managed plantation with low biological diversity.
(The situation in the US isn't nearly as bad as in Europe. Alaska has mostly virgin forest for instance)
This is why countering deforestation isn't about "just planting trees". If it were about that we wouldn't have a problem because we plant orders of magnitude more trees than we fell in virgin forests. In the US alone about 1.2-1.3 billion seedlings are planted yearly during the planting season. To maintain an equilibrium.
Where I live he amount timber, by volume, has tripled in the past century. The problem isn't that we have too few trees - it is that we are behind on managing their age distribution. 40-45% of the forest where I live is harvest ready. About 10-15% of it is overdue.
(And we haven't even touched on recycling, and the amount of recycled materials found in the products of IKEA and others. Of course, if one has romantic notions of solid wood furniture then one would most likely sneer at products made from recycled wood)
Why would I want to buy furniture that lasts centuries? I'll be dead in a few decades and exactly nobody would be lusting after a couch with decades of my flatulence trapped inside it.
As for durability, the average age bit of IKEA furniture is old enough to vote.
It's like that (probably apocryphal) hipster story that was doing the rounds on the interwebs a few years ago. Angry with someone for having used an image of him to describe the stereotypical hipster. Only to then find out it wasn't a picture of him, he did look like the stereotype of a hipster and that there was nothing unique or individual about being like all the other affected "unique and individual".
What a horrific idea: to expend effort to stand out just for the sake of standing out. How does one end up there without first having lost a big chunk of individuality?
They'd laugh because they knew it wasn't about the accuracy.
And I'd get some satisfaction from the fact that they thought I didn't already know that.
I too own things where the price tag can't be justified by the objective merits of the product. So I do get it. But what they have in common is that these things generally are very good -- but you can get the same level of quality for less. I won't buy a low quality product with a hefty price tag.
Anyway, these days most people around me wear some kind of smart watch. And the funny bit is that the people who own expensive watches now have to choose: show off or practicality :-)
And I do have to agree. I can remember what ghastly furniture most shops used to have around here. There was a lot of what we call "cabin furniture" - which isn't made to look good, just be practical. (Well, some people like that look, but it is a bit...dull). Sure, there was more solid wood furniture, but guess what: that durability comes at a cost. Not only in terms of money, but also in terms of how easy it was to install and move.
And who buys furniture to pass it on to your kids? Your kids will be unburdening themselves of your old furniture before you are in the ground.
As for quality: I have owned some pricey designer furniture and I can't say that I'm always impressed with the quality. Yes, if you have a lot more money you can get really well built furniture. But IKEA is more often than not more than sufficient quality. (Also see their "hidden tags" campaign)
If I pay $5000 for a chair I have reason to expect a lot from it. And more often than not, pricey furniture doesn't actually deliver sufficient quality to be able to defend the price. (Collectible furniture is a whole different deal where you don't actually care all that much about quality, but more about it being an original piece).
For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning. Especially for young people or people of modest means. And I'm not trying to make some clever rhetorical point here. I can't really think of any company that offers what they offer and comparable quality, looks and price here in Europe.
(I once found myself in the same meeting as two of the people who made the mistakes that meant you couldn’t just pipe stuff through an XML parser and hope it worked. I tend to speak my mind)
For something to become a GUI app (or a web-based UI) the GUI needs to offer something more valuable than a TUI can offer in terms of interaction.
I have one TUI app that wrote a while back to keep track of what I work on. It started off as a "wizard"-style UI. You choose project, then subproject, day, hours, activity and then hours and comment in a sequence of steps.
Arrow keys -> enter -> arrow keys -> enter .... -> comment -> enter
It takes about 2-3 seconds for me to do. And this is a time-sensitive task: if it isn't fast the user will not do it as often. There is a web interface to do the same thing, but the backend is slow. My TUI utility speeds that up by caching (between sessions) the things that the web UI has to look up (slowly) every time.
Then I wrote a more involved UI for it that "looks more like an application". Result? Now we were up to 15-20 seconds of interacting. Oh year it could do more and it certainly looked better, but it was less efficient so I noticed that I would postpone using it to record what I was doing. Because it now had friction. Lots of it. So a couple of weeks later I just did a hard reset and went back to the wizard style, minimalist version.
I would make a web UI, but that would burn 2-3 seconds just to navigate the browser there, juggle tabs (which I have too many of already), find the right browser to open the tab in etc. Once there do I keep it for "faster access" or close the tab? Keeping it is almost always the wrong thing.
There's a reason I have perhaps 15 different tools in my garage that can attach to a given fastener size. And there's a reason for that. Not all 19mm bolts are treated the same way. Some are low torque and live in tiny spaces. Some require precise fastening torque. Some need a lot of force to come loose - some will only come loose with force and I'm okay with destroying them. This is why I have so many tools that all do essentially the same job: apply rotational force to a piece of metal that has a standardized interface.
Similar tasks are not always best solved with the same tool because the context and the details do matter. Same goes for UIs. There are some things TUIs are very good at. Not least portability and remote usability.
It is easier to think poor quality of life is ok for people you cannot identify with.
Or, not quite: the workers are being exploited just like they were during the colonial period. But at least now their rulers have power over our rulers that they didn't have before. So they get to be happy about that as they make novelty items out of toxic plastic for Temu.
I used to have long conversations with frontend developers that "no, when I log on I don't want to be forced through a look-at-the-new-feature-we-made" sequences. And then they went ahead and did it anyway. And usually whatever flag they tried to set to make sure you only saw it once would malfunction, so next time you'd get to click through it all over again.
(If you want to tell users about new features, show a unread flag on a notification icon and make it a one-click affair to make it go away. Don't get in users' face with stuff they don't want)
When I see these dialogs listing they have 1289723 gazillion vendors they share data with, I know that whoever is in charge of analytics, privacy or both at the company is incompetent.