I was actually thinking the same thing when I wrote it but I think we may finally actually be getting somewhat close to that, and I don’t think we’re even remotely close to discussing AGI outside of pure science fiction. LLMs have made us appear deceptively close; they can spit out sentences that look like stuff people write, but we haven’t moved even marginally closer to true comprehension, which would be required for actual AGI.
kirklennon
joined 1 year ago
Experts from different companies have been saying AGI within a decade
AGI has been five to ten years away for decades.
At one point google did have a service with a physical card and since they were essentially a cash app where you had a digital wallet of funds held by google in app (they way you would if you were paid via paypal etc), they were in fact issuing cards and holding consumer money similarly to a bank.
I don’t recall the specific partner(s) off the top of my head but Google itself never issued cards or held customer deposits. Actual banks did.
If you can go for a 6 hour hike without getting sweaty
No, I don’t think most people in most climates can, actually.
you can bike to work for substantially less than 6 hours without getting sweaty, right?
Do your sweat glands just not work like most people? You can probably bike very slowly on level ground without breaking a sweat. The faster you go and the warmer or more humid it is, the more likely you are to sweat. E-bikes move that threshold significantly. Every person is a little different, of course, but it moves the sweat threshold for everyone.
We’re generally assuming that walking is impractically far for the trips in question. It’s quite obvious that you can bike faster and further on an e-bike without breaking a sweat than you can on a regular bike.
E-bikes are kind of a red herring here anyway; there’s little practical use-case for them that isn’t already covered by unpowered bicycles unless you live somewhere very hilly.
Even in a place that isn't very hilly, an e-bike could make the difference between arriving to work sweaty or not, which can easily mean the difference between biking or not. The extra help also expands the available user base to those who are less fit, and expands the range of what is doable for any given person. And, again, I want to emphasize the sweat difference, which also ties back into range (how far can you bike on a regular bike versus an e-bike without breaking a sweat?)
I really don't understand what the CFPB is aiming for here, and the prominence of Apple Pay and Google Pay in articles about it seems particularly misplaced.
Seventeen companies would be affected including Apple, Google, PayPal (PYPL.O) and Block's (SQ.N) CashApp, which together facilitated roughly $1.7 trillion worth of payments in 2021, the CFPB said.
It sounds like they're including tapping your debit/credit card using your phone in these numbers, but this makes no sense. If I use Apple Pay to pay a merchant with my, for example, Chase card, Apple doesn't even process the transaction; the merchant is still directly charging my Chase card. We're not missing any degree of regulation here; it's still the same bank. The privacy angle is particularly weird. The CFPB already knows that Apple has no idea what I bought; meanwhile Chase and Visa are monetizing the hell out of that transaction data.
The CFPB already supervises PayPal and CashApp under its international money transfer rules, but Apple and Google would be subject to CFPB oversight for the first time. Google declined to comment and Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Apple Cash, the service for transferring money to people you personally know, is available only in the US. There are no international transfers. The money, meanwhile, is stored in Green Dot Bank, which is already regulated. All of these services store your money in real banks.
"Silicon Valley is already a major part of the financial marketplace," the CFPB said in a statement. Subjecting large tech companies in the payments market to similar oversight as banks will increase competition, the agency said.
But the money is in banks and is already subject to oversight.
Without regulatory scrutiny, they could leverage their growing dominance of consumer payments to capture other services like lending and card issuing, analysts said.
This part is just ridiculous. Only banks issue cards. If they want to get into issuing cards, they need to buy or create a legal bank, which would then be regulated like every other bank. You don't regulate a non-bank on the false assumption that it would magically start doing something only banks can do.
Worried by this trend, the banking industry has been lobbying financial regulators to crack down on tech giants, arguing in public letters, blogs and congressional testimony that they are putting consumers' privacy at risk.
This part is just too rich.
People care that SMS and MMS suck. "Green messages" is just a shorthand, nontechnical way of describing it. Nobody legitimately cares that the green background is every-so-slightly lower contrast than the blue background.
They picked a tint of a color used on low priority text. Someone argued that this particular tint is slightly worse for certain people. If you don't have vision problems, it's not really worse for you at all. We're talking about small differences in relative contrast between different elements. If you do have vision problems, you can easily make it and other similar situations across the entire platform easier to read with an accessibility toggle.
No, I don't buy the argument that the UX for reading SMS messages is meaningfully worse than for iMessages.
It's just an incredibly weak argument. Messages that you, yourself, wrote are in slightly lower contrast? Who cares? For users who actually have vision problems with low-contrast, there's a single Reduce Transparency toggle in Accessibility settings that will resolve this issue and a bunch of other ones.
Hopefully Apple will implement the encryption.
Apple said they are going to implement the open standard so no. Encrypted RCS is proprietary to Google.
I hate writing defenses of big tech companies but I also late lazy journalism that treats them as an easy punching bag. Anyway, here goes:
The thing about governments is that they’re supposed to last basically forever, and their budgets are enormous, so if they have to wait a while to get some money, is it really that big of a problem? There’s a power imbalance between the parties so it makes sense that the company should be able to avail itself of the full rights of the legal system. In many of the cases cited in the article the money has already been placed in escrow or is subject to interest payments so if the government ultimately prevails, it’s not really out anything and there’s no risk it won’t get the money. Would we prefer governments to just seize assets immediately when, under their own laws, there are legal disputes remaining?
To pick an example from the article: "Apple has fought for years against a French antitrust fine of 1.1 billion euros and an order to pay 13 billion euros of tax to Ireland.” Apple has actually already mostly won that fight against the antitrust fine. The legal system agreed that it was excessive and reduced it to roughly one-third the original. Apple still disputes the remaining third. I honestly have no idea if they’re right or wrong on that, but the fact that they were fairly quickly able to get several hundred million dollars of fines erase by the court indicates to me that we shouldn’t just automatically accept that all of these fines are legitimate; some may indeed be regulatory overreach. The tax bill to Ireland is an interesting matter. The government of Ireland is steadfastly opposed to it. They intentionally created a low-tax system to court foreign investment. Apple took advantage of the program and has employed thousands of Irish people for decades. The EU says Apple owes the tax to Ireland; Apple and Ireland say Apple doesn’t. Again, clearly a legitimate, ongoing legal dispute and not simply a case of someone not paying a fine, as the headline makes it sound.
Most of Meta’s fine (€1.2 billion) is from just this May and (we’ve got a theme here) the government of Ireland didn’t think that Meta’s violation warranted a fine at all, but they were overruled by some other members of the European Data Protection Board. If Ireland’s own Data Protection Commission didn’t think Meta should pay them a fine, surely Meta should be able to avail itself of the legal system to dispute the ruling?
Anyway, it comes down to this: I believe that we should be a society governed by laws, and those laws include the right to appeal or otherwise contest an initial ruling. Given the fact that there’s no real downside for the governments to wait, I believe it’s reasonable that companies want to wait to pay until after exhausting their legal rights to appeal.