My company has been trying to tell my team to be “global” and support the EU for a good 10 years. Every time we even look it’s such a mess that we kick the can down the road and let the people who actually live there deal with it. Their footprint it vastly smaller than what we have in the US, yet seemingly much harder to manage due to all the regulations.
That was the issue, it still felt separate (I'm not sure if this was due to regulations or legacy systems). I was given logins to access their systems, and there were over a dozen, and no one ever did explain what they were all for. When I asked, the best I got was that it depended on the country, but even that wasn't too clear. I never did bother to figure it out. Eventually I transferred out of the team that had to care about that and had them delete my accounts. It's cropping back up in my new team, but so far the team in the EU is handling everything for their region. If they try to have us take if over, I think we'll need to run everything we do past legal, because none of us in the US have any idea what all the laws and rules are, not being around it.
Ah yes, here we go: if a country does not match the GDP of the USA, they will go bankrupt. Anything but America's GDP and military might means they have failed as a country and have failed their citizens
Yeah and we regulate ourself straight into liveable working conditions, public healthcare, paid vacations, parental leaves and all other kinds of really really nasty communist nightmares
How does low pay affect the “liveability” of work conditions? A waitress in the US makes as much or more than a software engineer in most of the EU. While the EU worker may receive more vacation time, and while he certainly has better personal financial skills (poverty will do that to you), he has no path towards a better future. A blue collar American worker, in the (increasingly unlikely) event that he chooses to manage his money well, can end up wealthy. A European who isn’t born wealthy will never become wealthy.
>public healthcare
Which everyone avoids, if they can afford it. The private system is really good though.
>parental leave
Because of the cost and risk of employing someone in the EU, when an employee takes maternity leave it’s the other employees who end up having to do the missing employee’s work. This is especially true with small businesses.
>communist nightmare
Over-socialized neo-feudal peasants who embrace their own impoverishment because they’ve been convinced that they’re superior to everyone else is pretty dystopian.
Over the years, overregulation will continue to lock the EU out of bleeding-edge technologies. Every feature, every website, every innovation that doesn’t launch in the EU further plunges the bloc into technological irrelevance.
It also often impacts more than the EU, we still have cookie banners on websites globally because EU came up with a good-intentions idea when 3rd party tracking ad cookies were a major privacy concern. But like a lot of regulations they stick after the world changes/adapts. Now 3rd party cookies are officially dying out at the browser level and browser fingerprinting has long ago eliminated any privacy gain of cookie banners (unless you care about some first party cookie on a site that can already track you across pages server side, or use URL identifiers and other JS/AJAX). Yet annoying non-standardized, sometimes mandatory, modals before you can read a news article or blog post persist for non EU internet users...
This is definitely a bit off-topic compared to the article, but it's worth noting that those modals are there to obtain consent to store and use your personal data, and aren't specifically related to cookies (anymore), but the GDPR. If the news website didn't store personally identifying information about you (anywhere! not just in cookies), it wouldn't have to obtain consent, and wouldn't need any modals.
I think the most annoying part of the regulation has been its lack of enforcement, because it has led to a weird sort of complacency where there's no clear knowledge of what is and isn't required, and then websites half-ass the banner (for example, they should be making it as easy to click Reject as it is to click Accept, not sending you down a dark pattern of checkboxes and stuff), or throw up a banner just to say they have one, even if they don't need it (I've seen that!).
So we get the worst of both worlds: bad modals that don't even do what they're supposed to, and no enforcement to correct any of it.
The European Union official website has a cookie banner (https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en), does that mean it is spying on me ? Should I be worried ? Or is the definition of "tracking cookies" so wide that even extremely innocuous websites still have to display that banner because the law is stupid ?
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's razor)
I would much prefer that to living in a state where Apple holds the power to simply kill any law or regulation they dislike by threatening not to launch their products in the EU.
EU productivity is already lagging its peers. Being locked out of having the most cutting edge technologies will further plunge the block into a productivity decay. Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards. This is not an outcome Europe can afford, especially considering its aging workforce.
There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.
Productivity is not a goal in itself. It is a means to a healthy and happy populace. Europe doesn’t have record breaking GDP but features many of the happiest people in the world. Different values result in different measures of success, I guess
Productivity is ultimately the measure of the efficiency of human labor. The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
In the short term, lagging productivity can be masked by debt spending and other measures, but in the long run, the only thing that increases human wealth and material abundance is labor productivity. Everything else is illusionary.
All human societies have sought to increase labor productivity. The first stone tools, agriculture, and nuclear reactors are all productivity-enhancing inventions. Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.
And to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing good about low productivity for workers. All that means is that you’re spending more time working for lower wages, to produce things of lower value.
You're conflating productivity and wealth, and wealth and happiness. These are, you'll forgive me for saying - very American fallacies. The productivity of a country says little to nothing about it's levels of relative and absolute poverty, social inequality, and capacity for social reproduction. Compare say Berlin - an historically 'depressed' city with a smaller economy than most German cities, with any first tier US cities. Free public kitas (similar to kindergarten), decent holiday leave, a significant amount of paid maternity / paternity leave, a large number of parks, excellent public transport, subsidised health care and (until very recently) affordable housing, make raising a family on a moderate wage possible. The overall potential for happiness and observable comfort and stress levels of the population are measurably different from a comparably sized American city where raising a family or living a normal adult life are compromised for a large percentage of the population by the absence of all or most of these things.
> Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.
I'd argue the reverse - any society that privileges productivity over social reproduction and liveable cities will never be able to tame violent crime, achieve real social mobility or provide a safe and enriching environment for a majority of its citizenry.
It’s real easy to say this right now, because the EU has only lagged its peers in productivity for only the last decade —- thus the compounding effects of lagging productivity are not yet evident. However several more decades of lagging productivity will eventually result in European living standards being several decades behind their peers.
If the EU thinks that low labor productivity is the path to happiness, going down that path is their prerogative, but long term that path will only lead to ruin. Lagging productivity has never in human history lead to civilizational success. Europe will be outcompeted and eventually dominated by its more productive peers.
Genuinely, look at the US in the same time period. The quality of life for most people across a a range of measures is enormously worse. Hours worked, health outcomes, housing security etc. Productivity - like GDP, is enormously more relevant to capitalist investment classes than normal people. A teacher, working in a US city any time between say 1900 and 1980 could save and buy a house, get married, have children - likely on a single salary. Towards the latter half of that period, they could also afford a car, pay for their children's university education, take annual holidays etc. Is that true today? Is it true in most cities of a nurse, a factory worker, a service economy worker? You're confusing the metric with the outcome. The metric is designed to measure only what is relevant to the most wealth, privileged people in society.
> The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
Just patently untrue. The more productive you are the more work your boss will send your way, while walking away with fatter margins. If he can. Which is where EU regulation comes in.
Europe’s rules govern the balance between capital owners and labor. It’s far from perfect but it has resulted in fairly stable and happy societies. (At least apart from certain external factors)
Now there is of course nothing wrong with productivity. It is, as you say, very good in many ways. But you cannot look only at a society’s productivity metrics to judge success-and my by success I mean happiness, because that is my goal. Look at happiness in the US vs Europe for example. I know where I’d rather live.
> Productivity is ultimately the measure of the efficiency of human labor. The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
Due to the demands for constant economic growth increased productivity does not actually result in more free time, just more economic output.
The average human throughout human has existed at subsistence level. That means that nearly all of their time was spent producing/collecting the food to feed themselves.
The average American now spends just 10% of their wages on food. That effectively means, just 10% of Americans’s working life dedicated to food cultivation. That’s the result of economic productivity.
If an American is happy existing at a subsistence level, they’re free to slash their working hours to a tiny fraction of the average person. However, humans have unlimited material desires, which tends to keep us working.
> The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
In a profit-driven business, the more productive the workers are, the more work you can throw at them. Free time doesn't enter into the equation unless business owners need to manage a compliance issue regarding labor regulations.
> The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy
Right, there are so many countries in the world where increased productivity led to 4-day work week. In fact, I could count these countries on the fingers of one hand.
I don't suppose you've heard of the Paul Krugman quote? "Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it’s almost everything." Without productivity improvements you are in peril of replaying the ant and the grasshopper as the grasshopper.
> Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards
We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia.
> There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.
The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
> We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia.
Give it a few more decades of compounding lagging productivity, and that will no longer be true.
> The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
Productivity has nothing to do with cultural imperialism. China has dramatically increased their productivity, and that story has nothing to do with American imperialism
To each their own I guess. Every human-centric development in tech over the past decade which puts people before the interests of corporations seems to have been pushed by the EU. I applaud it all. And it’s making the whole world a more private, less exploited place
Except the only ones building products and services actually used every day by humans are corporations - not “the EU”. Hardware, software, stuff I use for fun, work and live, comes from corporations of all sizes - not politicians.
Yes, europe suffered a hard decade once denied access to the technological utopia that some of the most mathematical minds in all of the san fransisco bay area had created, gpt 4 voice mode WHEN you push SIRI BUTTON technology.
I think the EU’s regulations are boneheaded, but I appreciate that there are multiple ways we’re seeing societies deal with the ambiguities of technology, and we can see how it plays out. Different strokes.
This take seems a bit overwrought to me, given that the AI technologies that Apple is launching look more like fun toys that are integrated into the OS.
Maybe less integration will turn out better. Do we need native apps? You can use a website and then cut and paste.
> Over the years, overregulation will continue to lock the EU out of bleeding-edge technologies
Agreed, and; hooray!
Rather than plunging us "into technological irrelevance", it saves us from nonsense nobody asked for, mostly existing to sell more hardware that nobody needs.
Europeans will continue to buy the hardware, except rather than being able to afford the Apple devices they’ll buy some very low quality knockoffs from Shein.
Another tangent: I feel this speaks to the hazard on building on these generative AI APIs. Your product may work great on Day 1, but there’s no way to guarantee it’ll still work as well on Day 500. Either due the models being nerfed, or due to the models becoming stale over time.
This is extremely interesting, in the light of YC providing early access for AI startups (with one of the big benefits being OpenAI credits). YCombinator explicitly used to advise against building platforms and startups over somebody else's tooling for reasons like these, yet it seems that they are past that advice now and back on the hype train.
My ChatGPT use is down. After the novelty wore off, it quickly became apparent that ChatGPT was exceedingly willing to outright lie to you. Which makes it not useful, unless you’re already a subject matter expert who can spot its lies. But if you’re a subject matter expert, you probably don’t need ChatGPT to help you in the first place; I can find answers on Google faster than ChatGPT can generate them.
I suppose it’s also useful for generating things like letters (things where exact truthiness doesn’t really matter). But even for that use case, I find ChatGPT creates overly verbose corporate gobbledygook whenever I ask it to generate text. So I just end up writing the text myself.
> I find ChatGPT creates overly verbose corporate gobbledygook whenever I ask it to generate text
I feel like this doesn't get enough attention; its writing style is _incredibly_ grating. It's not just corporate gobbledygook; it's a parody of corporate gobbledygook. Just awful.
If you ask ChatGPT an exceedingly trivial question, it’ll typically spend the next 60 seconds spewing out five paragraphs of corporate gobbledygook. And of course, because ChatGPT will lie to you, I often end up back on Google anyways to validate it’s claims.
Meanwhile, I could’ve found conclusive and correct answers directly from Google in about 10 seconds (I’m a fast Googler).
There are exceedingly few situations where I find ChatGPT is worth the effort. At least for factual Q&A-style queries like this.
I think the pull for most of us who use chatgpt is that google lies far, far more often than chatgpt ever will. Or is just otherwise inconclusive / does not give the relevant information you're looking for. The amount of SEO clickbait or quora/stack overflow answers that are either just incorrect or highly opinionated makes google very difficult to use for many things. As someone new to/learning Fedora it gives me the right answer 95% of the time, google gives me the right answer in the top 5 links far less.
Very much this. Back in the day, the Cluetrain Manifesto said that corporate writing sounded "literally inhuman" - like it didn't come from a human being. You can't hear the person in it.
ChatGPT reads similarly. There's no personal voice. It's like food with no seasoning; it's just... blah.
I write fiction for fun (just for me, don't ask) and asked it to generate a plot for an elevator pitch version of my big idea at the time. The plot was literally my plot. This confirmed my suspicions that I am a mediocre, at best, storyteller but it also made me wonder how much of what each person thinks makes them individually smart or talented is just mundane crap no better than this system can produce. Chilling to some, maybe, but confirmed my idea that what I'm doing is just for me to enjoy and that's ok.
I think it depends very much on your use case and what you expect.
My girlfriend is a judge, and sometimes we ask ChatGPT about some judicial problem for pure entertainment. To me as a law noob the answers sound absolutely convincing, but she always starts laughing and points out that the cited laws don't exist or the exemplary cases never happened.
I, on the other hand, work as a software developer and use ChatGPT as a discussion partner to get a better understanding of problem and solutions spaces. I don't expect ChatGPT to be correct but gladly take any inspiration or argument and use it to improve my own thinking process. And for this use case, I consider GPT4 absolutely invaluable. It's like a polite, knowledgeable, never busy, untirable colleague that is ready for my questions 24/7.
> I, on the other hand, work as a software developer and use ChatGPT as a discussion partner to get a better understanding of problem and solutions spaces. I don't expect ChatGPT to be correct but gladly take any inspiration or argument and use it to improve my own thinking process. And for this use case, I consider GPT4 absolutely invaluable. It's like a polite, knowledgeable, never busy, untirable colleague that is ready for my questions 24/7.
I often use ChatGPT as a starting point when researching new topics (usually in the software space). In the paragraphs of lies it generates, there are usually a few keywords you can put into Google to find accurate and reliable information.
Lies is a feature not a bug, they are open about that. You have to pick a link from search results too.
I think use is down due people going from "wow that's amazing it's even possible"
to
"but significantly worse than a little human effort and an Internet connected computer"
If it was a feature, then competing LLMs could simply leave out this "feature" and take the spot of the leading AI. But the other LLMs have that problem as well.
> but significantly worse than a little human effort and an Internet connected computer
In some cases perhaps, but there are a lot of cases where asking ChatGPT and then verifying its answer is (much) faster than trying to figure out the answer on your own.
I stopped using it. Then 4 came and then I used it extensively. And paid for it. Now last 2 months it's not created something useful that didn't cost me time in the end.
it quickly became apparent that ChatGPT was exceedingly willing to outright lie to you.
I've sometimes thought that these "AI" chat systems might be better if they were taught the simple human phrase "I don't know."
I think it would improve trust in these system if people knew that they had limits, and were aware of them.
It would be even better if something like the one on Bing, for example, could respond "I don't know, but here are some links to places where you might find the answer…"
It's like when it starts to become apparent that the new kid at school is a compulsive liar. Eventually people stop listening to him.
That's not really how it works, though. The line `if(dont_know) {make_shit_up()}` does not appear in the source code. It doesn't know it's lying; it doesn't know anything!
You could train one to appear terribly uncertain, but it would still 'lie'.
OK, but it's probability-based. It will pick lower probability answers depending on the temperature. But that means it knows what the probabilities are.
So what it needs is a line of the form 'if(highest_probability < threshold){dont_know()}.
> I suppose it’s also useful for generating things like letters (things where exact truthiness doesn’t really matter). But even for that use case, I find ChatGPT creates overly verbose corporate gobbledygook whenever I ask it to generate text
This makes it perfect for creating purely time-wasting "content" - I've started sending back generated responses to people who cold-email offers to buy one of my browser extensions.
8 paragraphs (why is it always 8?) of leading waffle which is relevant to their original email. If they read more than 2 of them they've wasted more time than I spent replying.
I’ll really be able to get my procrastination under control, now that Reddit has banned third party clients, and Twitter has limited users to viewing 600 tweets/day.
I don’t like the idea of giving Reddit mods even more power, at all. I’d much rather see users empowered to share Usenet style kill-lists and whatnot. But I have a bad feeling that my desired Goldilocks zone between 2023 Reddit’s overmoderation and 2023 Twitter’s hyper-radicalization engine is very narrow. Social media moderation might be an intractable problem at scale.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m really rooting for Reddit to crash and burn. I miss the old internet…
It’ll be interesting to see how Blue Sky shakes out, if and when it opens up to the public.
What’s worse is that CS is a transport simulator that’s heavily biased towards cars; to the point where every new game starts off with a giant unsightly freeway in the middle of your town.
I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.
CS gets way closer to "car free" than anything but the original SimCity (where you could just use rails instead of roads everywhere) - you need to use the Parks and paths and some pretty sneaky design, but you can get upwards of 80% using walking/transit. Takes a lot of work, however, and some mods.
That was my problem with the game as well. You don’t really have all that much freedom and there isn’t that much emergent behaviour. You just replay the same road builder scenario where the only interesting part is designing intersections.
I’d love to see a city builder game with an extremely powerful policy builder feature. Let me design new rules and see how the city responds. For example, let me implement congestion charges on roads, even if it’s just a text input with its own DSL like you have with minecraft command blocks. Then you could really break out of what the developers designed and start actually doing simulations.
Cities skylines has the policy builder feature like you describe. One of the policies you can implement is congestion charges. You can set the policies city-wide, or in certain districts.
In the latest builds with the newest DLC, you can even ban cars completely with pedestrian only districts/roads.
I actually found it the opposite. The more I intelligently laid out alternative transport the more that it got used, lessening traffic. But yes, the default mode is to just optimize traffic everywhere.
