jessriedel

You already have the web on your phone. The sensible comparison for the (non-web) mobile app market is to the (non-web) desktop app market, and that's not a clear-cut improvement. I'd guess people currently have more mobile apps than desktop apps, just as you'd expect if the desktop app market were suffering due to lots of garbage/spam/malware from insufficient garden-walling.

A plethora or suspicious things? If the companies are breaking the law, the FTC can sue them and win. If the companies are complying with the law, the FTC should indeed do nothing. If the law is bad, congress can pass new laws.

What's not OK is for the executive branch to not like the law, but be unsuccessful at passing new law through the democratic process, and then use the FTC to unsuccessfully sue companies in order to punish them (and threaten others) with costly legal expenses.

Hmm, thanks, that sounds plausible enough. Have you seen this possibility discussed anywhere?

The FTX stake in Anthropic was liquidated at a very high return back in ~May.

I’m not suggesting the justice system should change. I’m suggesting that civil servants who file and lose a ton of suits should be presumed to be doing net harm. Just as we would for prosecutors in criminal law.

And when it’s politically motivated, it is not just harm in the sense of economic inefficiency, but further is unjust and lowers public trust in institutions.

Google (gemini) does the same thing.

Google (gemini) does the same thing. You think they've bet the company on it?

Using public resources to sue companies, force them to pay for expensive defense in court, and then losing when the court decides they did nothing illegal?

> And where's the cookie banner?!

There actually is a cookie banner on the bottom, unfortunately. Presume that's legally required.

> and it gives you a paragraph from the NYT, then YOU are responsible for the copyright infringement. Even though you of course had no clue it was plagiarized.

No. They indemnify you for from copyright lawsuits that arise for your use of ChatGPT output. https://openai.com/policies/service-terms/

> Until AI generated imagery has been tested by the legal system it may be a bit too optimistic to call this "Royalty-free, copyright-free gallery of images".

Although it's conceivable there's a surprise legal finding, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are confident enough in how it will go that they are willing to insure you for any lawsuits, which would be ruinous for them if they consistently lost.

(One can certainly argue that AI means the law should change, but that's a separate question.)

> If I grab a series of photos from shutterstock, run them through a generative AI photo enhance process to improve the white balance, contrast and levels is that adequate enough to be considered "copyright free"?

No, just like it's not enough for me to grab a photo and change white balance and contrast. AI doesn't change anything here. Copyright infringement is generally tested by comparing the two works directly.

> How different from a source image do these AI generated images need to be to be considered "copyright free"?

The same way it's always tested: "substantial similarity"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

My memory of the consensus, the last time this topic came up, is that the number is in fact less than a hundred microseconds. But it doesn't matter for my point if it's a few milliseconds or whatever. The problem is solvable.

Yea I agree. AM seems like the most viable.

No. Ending hunger is hard.

1. When I have looked into this, it turns out the basic WiFi standard has rules about polling rate (allegedly to save power). Like, the standard is literally something like “poll for a few hundred microseconds every couple seconds”. Macbooks even have special workarounds that decrease the connection time by ~half by mildly abusing the standard.

1 is not unavoidable. I’ve never gotten a clear answer on the explanation, but the most reasonable ones involve power-saving and frequency-saving strategies (only poll for new connections for a few hundred microseconds per second). And I think these are eminently solvable.

On 2, my question isn’t “why haven’t they fixed #2 for this use case?” it’s “where does the effort to address this relatively small use case come from while #2 remains unaddressed “?

You can re-phrase my main question as: why is there enough interest in doing these minor improvements when there is apparently little interest in fixing the major and long-lasting deficiencies?

Thanks!

Any idea if the law requires the redesign (i.e., requires that the AM radio meets some level of audio quality when operating in the vehicle) or if it just requires the AM radio to be present and (somewhat understandably) the manufacturer don’t want to include an AM radio if it consistently sounds bad?

This seems like a super important fact for the discussion. Do you have a cite that it really constrains the rest of the car?

I also think the marginal cost of making a FM radio an AM/FM radio is less than $10. Probably more like $1?

Seems so cheap to include, but I guess it’s the same weird reasons that car manufacturers are willing to make their UI baffling to save a single mechanical button.

Yea, even if the major space powers Kesslerize all the satellites (like Starlink) in low-Earth orbit, the civilian geostationary sats like Sirius XM will likely be flying. (Geostationary sats can, I think, only be brought down individually with anti-satellite weapons, and that would presumably be prohibitively expensive for all of them.)

The overwhelming issues with WiFi are

1. It is slow to connect, taking multiple seconds rather than a few milliseconds. (Wifi unreliability would have much less practical impact if there was rapid reconnect.)

2. The lack of a sufficiently flexible standard interface for logging in and accepting terms, leading to the terrible captive portal workaround.

I cannot for the life of me understand why the standards committee cares much about various other minor improvements when these issues are still unsolved after two decades. (Similar complaints can be made about Bluetooth.)

“Insignificance isn’t ineffectiveness”

Well, you can’t blind it but you can still randomize. If your outcome variables are sufficiently objective and important (e.g., mortality or cancer risk, not just perceived health), the possibility that the causality flows through a placebo effect is much less worrying. If [people correctly believing that they ate yogurt] reduces [the incidence of cancer], great!

Ron Miller is an artist who made some very nice visualizations. I can’t vouch for the scientific accuracy, but they seem plausible enough to me, and consistent with the images I’ve seen of Saturn’s rings from nearby probes.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/20130626-earths-skies-sat...

That article says

> Epidemiological research on specific health effects of yogurt is still limited but a few studies suggest a benefit.

It then describes three non-randomized observational studies.

This mistake is so unbelievably frequent. Need a concise quip like “correlation isn’t causation”.

This would massively disenfranchise small inventors, and force all inventive work into large companies. There is no reason that the person who does the inventing should also be the person developing and selling a product.

It is weird and unfortunate that the longstanding deficiencies with patent law (chiefly: issuing patents for things that are too obvious or numerous) are being blamed on transferability of property rights. It’s the same broken intuition as over regulating housing construction and then blaming high housing costs on ownership by Chinese nationals.

I dunno. I skimmed the intro of the journal article and they say they achieve

> high conductivity of SRL under standard battery operation

but I don’t know if the losses are truly negligible. I think we need someone who knows more about batteries.