I did nothing and I’m all out of ideas!

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I assumed it was a shitpost, instead it is a real tweet. What a time to be alive.

    Jokes aside the only real reason I can fathom for the collectibles company to call their mother is because they had used it as the contact number in the registry. I would be surprised if this was some kind of intimidation tactic instead of just miscommunication - in the sense they probably just wanted to legally intimidate the itch’s owner not their immediate family. They are not 2K /s.


  • I was reading @superkret@feddit.org and @MaggiWuerze@feddit.org exchange and I found it an interesting - albeit moot - topic. So I went and spent the last hour to download some data and filter it: I will post some numbers with no commentary. I will add my opinions after them in a spoiler.

    imf.org GDP, current prices, Billion of U.S. dollars

    2023 GDP Nominal
    NATO 52392,344
    BRICS 27330,345

    2024 GDP Nominal (estimates)
    NATO 55148,819
    BRICS 28442,630


    imf.org GDP, current prices, Purchasing power parity; billions of international dollars

    2023 GDP PPP
    NATO 63996,245
    BRICS 66010,889

    2024 GDP PPP (estimates)
    NATO 66812,821
    BRICS 70911,69


    imf.org GDP based on PPP, share of world

    2023 GDP PPPSH
    NATO 34,731
    BRICS 35,824

    2024 GDP PPPSH (estimates)
    NATO 34,339
    BRICS 36,446


    BRICS

    Brazil, People’s Republic of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Russian Federation, South Africa, United Arab Emirates


    NATO

    Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Republic of Türkiye, United Kingdom, United States

    MHO

    This comparison makes no sense for a multitude of reasons, starting from the difference in effective cohesion, motivation and raison d’être of the two organizations.

    Even if there were multiple tries, especially by Russia, to push for more integration in the economic and military structure, you can see how it is still incredibly fractured: if you are interested you can check on the current state of the SWIFT alternatives to see how much each of the big players still pull to be the leader.

    A more apt loose organization to compare BRICS to would probably be the G7, but even there it really is not the same, considering the member list and how integrated they are in other ways. Still, a better one.

    Aside from that the PPP is often touted as a great way to compare completely different economies, and it has its uses to understand how people live in different countries. Its use in a comparison like this one has, IMHO, no space.

    If someone comes to me with a one Billion random-currency investment, even if for them it only buys a loaf of bread but for me it means a new factory and 100 full-time employees, if they withdraw it it is a disaster.
    Then again GDP is not even the parameter we should be looking into, considering the article: We should check the international trade between China and the European Union, and make consideration about that.

    Last, but not least, I used the IMF numbers because they are easy to get in a nice format. They are not the best, but they are not the worst too. More info here, have fun.











  • I feel there’s some kind of miscommunication going on here.

    Probably I’m not understanding what you are putting forward, but to be clear: They are not doing this because they want to. They are doing it because they are forced to do it by the DMA.
    It’s true that allegedly they were working on some kind of interoperability layer already. For years now. But no evidence of it being more than lip service to avoid being regulated has ever surfaced - as far as I know.

    Which would have been in line with your “Do Nothing”.


  • as an unwilling Whatsapp user the ability to migrate without having to convince all my social circles to do anything but check a checkbox sounds like a huge step forward.

    That’s the point. I feel it will not be a “simple checkbox”, and they will make it the most obnoxious process they can using the Best Dark Patterns the industry has to offer.

    Already the general public is not interested in the alternatives or the concept of interoperability - wanting something that Just Works™ - putting in front even the smallest step (and some scary text!) will make the percentage of willing people become even lower.
    And that’s not all. As it is portraited in the article by the Threema’s spokeperson it is pretty clear that Meta will just try to make the maintenance of the communication layer as cumbersome as they can - both technically and bureaucratically.
    They are explicitly the ones keeping the reins of the standard, the features, the security model, the exchanged data and who, how and when will be approved.

    So from one side if they make it hard and scary enough to tank the use rate, they will have the excuse of not being there enough people to give priority to fix it or add features, and from the other side if maintaining the interoperability will be difficult and time consuming enough, the people and businesses from the alternatives or wrappers will not have the incentive to do or keep doing it for the long haul. As we can already see in the article.

    Is it better than nothing? Sure, probably. Will it be a slow cooking, easy to break, easy to get excluded from, just bare minimum to comply to the letter but not the spirit of the law? I feel that’s a pretty good bet to make.

    Let’s be clear: I will be extremely happy if all the red flags and warning bells that I saw in the article will just end up being figments of my imagination. But yes, I’m very pessimistic - maybe even too much - when I see these kind of corporate speech and keywords.


  • “One of the core requirements here, and this is really important, is for users for this to be opt-in,” says Brouwer. “I can choose whether or not I want to participate in being open to exchanging messages with third parties. This is important, because it could be a big source of spam and scams.”

    Let me translate this for you: "We will make users hop on the most cumbersome, frustrating and inefficient way we can think of to enable interoperability. And making it defaulted to off will mean people using other apps will need to find other channels to ask for it to be enabled on our users’ end, making it worthless.

    And don’t forget: we will put a bunch of scary warnings, and only allow to go all in, with no middle ground or granularity!"

    Great stuff, thank you. I can’t wait.

    “We don’t believe interop chats and WhatsApp chats can evolve at the same pace,” he says, claiming it is “harder to evolve an open network” compared to a closed one.

    Ah, so they are going for the Apple’s approach with iMessage and Android sms. Cool, cool.

    I hope my corporate-to-common translator is broken, because this does just sound bad.



  • Yeah. GDPR should have been implemented as a mandatory part of HTML or even HTTP that interacts with a builtin browser feature.

    Well, it kind of is. The Do Not Track header has recently seen a court win in Germany (source):

    It turned out that the judge agreed with vzbv, ruling that the social media giant is no longer allowed to warn users it doesn’t respect DNT signals. That’s because, under GDPR, the right to opt out of web tracking and data collection can also be exercised using automated procedures.

    And it is basically the same in California too Source

    GPC is a valid do-not-sell-my-personal-information signal according to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which stipulates that websites are legally required to respect a signal sent by users who want to opt-out of having their personal data sold.


  • Any foundation model is trained on a subset of common crawl.

    All the data in there is, arguably, copyrighted by one individual or another. There is no equivalent open - or closed - source dataset to it.

    Each single post, page, blog, site, has a copyright holder. In the last year big companies have started to change their TOS to make that they are able to use, relicense and generally sell your data hosted in their services as their own for the intent of AI training, so potentially some small parts of common crawl will be licensable in bulk - or directly obtained from the source.

    This does still leave out the majority of the data directly or indirectly used today, even if you were willing to pay, because it is unfeasable to search and contract every single rights holder.

    On the other side of it there have been work to use less but more heavily curated data, which could potentially generate good small, domain specific, models. But still they will not be like the ones we currently have, and the open source community will not be able to have access to the same amount and quality of data.

    It’s an interesting problem that I’m personally really interested to see where it leads.