illiarian

> Most of the time they don't.

Don't comply? Most of the time?

> Ever wonder why food health and safety inspections discover serious issues in basically all restaurants they inspect?

As a person whose mother has worked at restaurants for over 40 years, and whose best friends owned a restaurant for close to 20, I can tell you that those "serious issues" and "all restaurants" are FUD.

> Most restaurants stay in business because the inspection are generally pretty lenient (issue warnings and don't close the business down)

So you write this ^. And then you immediately go on to write this:

> Now let's try to imagine how a restaurant is going to approach GDPR compliance.

It will be the same: they will get it wrong the first time, get issued a warning, fix it, and carry on.

Don't forget that those poor hapless restaurants also have to deal with:

- handling money

- taxes

- accounting

- labor laws

- zoning regulations

- smoking regulaitons

- fire regulations

- contract laws (becuase they have contracts with many external parties)

And this is why your "most of the time they don't comply" is bullshit is that they do comply, most of the time. And when thry don't, they get issued a warning, fix their shit, or go out of business. This is no different.

And yeah, small business (or any business for that matter) really has no business collecting my private data, and selling it to third-parties.

> if a model knows about rooms and doors and floorplans, there's no obvious reason why it mightn't think up an arrangement of those things that would be novel to the people who trained it.

Once again, you're missing the point.

In 16th century people also knew about floors, and rooms, and floorpalns. And yet, the first architect to use a coridor used it for the first time in 1597.

What other "corridors" are missing from LLMs' training data? And we're sure it can come up with such a missing concept?

The Othello paper and the examples (are you referring to the example of coming up with new words?) are doing the same thing: they feed the model well-defined pre-established rules that can be statistically combined. The "novel ideas" are not even nearly novel because, well, they follow the established rules.

Could the model invent reversi/othello had it not known about it beforehand? Could the model invent new words (or a new language) had it not known about how to do that beforehand (there's plenty of research on both)? Can it satisfactorily do either even now (for some definition of satisfactorily)?

People believe it can only because the training set is quite vast and the work done is beyond any shadow of the doubt brilliant. That is why the invention of new words seems amazing and novel to many people while others even with a superficial armchair knowledge of linguistics are nonplussed. And so on.

LLMs currently statistically regurgitate existing data. An LLM in 1600s would tell you that a house layout is "rooms connected to each other" because that would be its pre-existing data. It remains to be seen if LLMs can come up with "oh wait? we can create a passageway, and have rooms open into that" based on satistical models of pre-existing data.

Can it come up with a corridor when it has no idea that such a concept exists? That remains to be seen.

I will admit that there's also a slowly grown understanding of where the cookie banners come from, so it's not "100% blame the EU".

This comment from one o the linked discussions sums it up well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29529190

The sum total of human knowledge has increased exponentially, so it's harder to come up with an example for that :)

> only because they contributed some magical ingredient from their souls, which didn't exist anywhere in the world's collected pre-Rust printed materials

You're focusing on the example too much. Here are more examples illustrating the question. It's doubtful that LLMs could infer solutions that lie outside their statistical models trained on existing data.

"In 1597 John Thorpe is the first recorded architect to replace multiple connected rooms with rooms along a corridor each accessed by a separate door" [1]

"Despite various publications of results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings" [2]

"Button-like objects of stone, glass, bone, ceramic, and gold have been found at archaeological sites dating as early as 2000 b.c.e... One of the earliest extant pieces of clothing to show the use of buttons as fastenings is the pourpoint of Charles of Blois (c. 1319–1364)." [3]

And so on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallway?wprov=sfti1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis?wprov=sfti1

[3] https://www.encyclopedia.com/sports-and-everyday-life/fashio...

> Small companies have less code and complexity but don't have internal resources specialised in law, security and web development available to fix things.

When you clamp all those things together, this sounds like a great burden. Please tell me, how these poor small businesses comply with, you know, actual laws, rules and regulations that they have to comply with? By breaking them?

GDPR for small businesses is much easier because small businesses depend on much less data, and often don't even need to collect any (much less sell it to third parties).

> 7 years of complaining about it hasn't changed that.

Funnily how "7 years of complaining" was, and continues to be, only about the EU. Not about the predatory businesses creating these banners (often in direct violation of GDPR).

> Or enforce the existing ones.

That's definitely the biggest criticism you can level at EU: they are too slow in enforcing this.

I think the tide is very slowly changing. First they started showing reject buttons https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come There's a report on the cookie banners in the works: https://noyb.eu/en/data-protection-authorities-support-noybs... etc.

Because the industry doesn't want to give up on tracking and siphoning user data.

The incessant "think of the small businesses" is becoming the new "think of the children".

It's easier for small businesses to comply with GDPR.

ePrivacy predates GDPR, and is in effect.

However, it still doesn't require a banner.

> You don't even understand the term

"Big web" isn't a term. It's some vague unspecified idea that you may have.

> By definition their stance is 100% about "a big web".

By what definition?

> It's an ideology that the browser shouldn't become another OS competing vs one that it should.

Of course this is not Firefox's stance.

> Superficially, the banners appeared due to how the law was made

So stop being superficial and read this 7-year old law. I wonder if you could point to me where it talks about cookie banners

> You seem to think that the EU should be immune from criticism

No it shouldn't. But it should be criticism and not blaming it for what is 100% the responsibility of the business.

> he EU is mostly about making people miserable while convincing them it's actually better for them.

See, this is not criticism. This is emotionally-charged whining and demagoguery

> Having a clear cut "CALL TO ACTION" dialogue option which presents one positive ( don't track me ) and one negative ( track me ) option.

That is literally the requirement by GDPR

> Cookies/tracking banners on website completely obfuscates the choice.

On purpose. In violation of GDPR.

Businesses: destroy the social fabric of the internet

Regulation, literally: do not collect people's data without their consent if you don't require that data for services you provide. Applies in equal measure to websites, banks, grocery stores, shit processing plants and nuclear power stations.

...

4ad: I still blame the EU, and it's a pointless regulation.

Edit: This comment really says it much better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567507

> Most internet businesses need tracking to survive

Of course they don't.

GA collects insane amounts of data. And you might have to disable a lot of that collection manually https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9019185?hl=en#zi...

And even then it might not be strictly compliant due to Schrems II ruling

> What info?

Any personally identifiable information.

GDPR is not a complex law no matter how shady businesses and clueless devs are trying to tell you. It's also been in effect for 7 years. You'd think it's enough time to have at least some clue on what it's about.

And yet we still have these inane threads on HN claiming it's about cookie popups, and people having no idea what info trackers collect.

I mean, you could literally read what their banner says. E.g. Eu Paarliament

"We use analytics cookies to offer you a better browsing experience. You have the choice to refuse or accept them. Reject. Accept".

Those analytic cookies are not required for the functioning of the website, and those web sites are required to ask for your consent to gather any additional data.

Businesses: want to track users and collect their data with reckless abandon

Businesses: implement rampant dark patterns to trick people into accepting tracking and data collection

Businesses: flood the internet with inane, obnoxious and blatantly illegal cookie dialogs

...

4ad: I blame the EU

(Hint: show me where GDPR says anything about cookies)

>The vast majority of people DO NOT care about cookies nor do they care about trackers.

When presented with "Ask app to not track" on iOS, 96% users clicked "do not track" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...

> Anything can be used for fingerprinting.

Yes and that's a major issue

> If Mozilla are really serious about fingerprinting then they need to remove <canvas> right now

Ad absurdum is not as great an argument as you think it is

> Fingerprinting cannot be solved by disabling browser features in a standard browser.

It also shouldn't be facilitated by just blindly turning them on without propert mitigation. And proper mitigation is complex

> It can be mitigated by using content blockers

So now you're shifting the responsibility onto the user. Even though it's been shown time and again that users can't really understand all the complexities of modern systems, their capabilities and the far-reaching results of what these systems can and do.

You can participate in transaction. If the business asks you if you want to participate in the transaction, literally no one is stopping you from saying yes.

> Why do jumped-up little bureaucrats always appropriate other people’s power of choice

They don't. What they say is that businesses shouldn't assume that people's private data is theirs for the taking. People still have the choice to opt-in to pervasive tracking.

I sort of agree with you on that. I guess I'd like to see it not in the main body of the regulation, but as an additional law/regulation/addendum that reflects the current state.

GDPR. Does not. Mandate. Browser. Or website. Cookies. Banners. Or UIs.

In it's simplest form it says: if you want to collect more data than is required, you have to ask users for consent.

This applies in equal measure to sites, banks, grocery stores, shopping malls, shit processing plants, nuclear reactors etc.

What they usually have is a tidy banner saying something like "We use analytics cookies. Reject. Accept".

Compare it to the abominations that the greedy tracking leaches from OneTrust, IAB etc. are presenting.

> that the EU made this cookie banner mess

It didn't.

Companies not willing to comply with GDPR did. As they didn't want to comply with Do Not Track header and used it for fingerprinting.

Their stance has nothing to do with a "belief in a big web", whatever "big web" is.