- pjc50I wonder if that's for bypassing Chinese restrictions on getting money out of the country.
- Why? Just the online convenience? You can take the cash and exchange it for gift cards at a shop.
- Rarely does it look like a clear "debank X" system; it's more like "you look suspiciously like someone who might use our systems in a crime, in a way that will cost us money and get in trouble with the law, so we're not going to touch you". Which is much harder for an innocent person to deal with.
I do think there ought to be some sort of fallback banking and account denial review process, if we're going to make it that critical to society.
- It looks from the diagram that a turbine is the energy extraction mechanism? As you'd expect.
- After the five years of planning approvals and grid connection approvals, of course.
- So .. significantly less dangerous than a corresponding volume of natural gas, which is also unbreathable but also flammable/explosive?
- Patrick very carefully declined to give examples of such legitimate yet debanked businesses. Presumably because they're all grey market stuff that sets off a whole other "wait, is that legal?" conversation.
I have never seen a legitimate business asking for payment in gift cards. I've encountered the traditional tradesmen offering discounts for cash, though.
Edit: I think he may actually be talking about businesses accepting payments in their own gift cards, which is so obvious that it's easy to forget. It's not a scam when Apple ask you to pay in Apple gift cards. It's just the only non scam such case.
- It also means that their claims of "autonomy" are fraudulent, like most "self driving" cars. A car which depends on powered infrastructure outside the car to drive is not autonomous.
- It's interesting to see where the "too famous to prosecute" line lies. So far the highest profile casualty seems to have been Prince Andrew - as a result of the files, and NOT as a result of his actual court case with Virginia Giuffre, which he settled before her suicide.
Maybe it's possible. Berlusconi was brought down by his habit of young women eventually hitting one under 18.
- > Any AI product I pay for is great. Any AI product I don't pay for is terrible.
This doesn't sound like the "free sample" model is working then? If I try the free version of product X and it's terrible, that will discourage me from ever trying the paid version.
- > The buttons offered to you are "FUCK OFF AND NEVER, EVER BOTHER ME AGAIN"
I've already hit that option before reading the other ones.
> "On search engine result pages and social media sites, use a local LLM to identify headlines, classify them as clickbait-or-not, and for clickbait headlines, automatically fetch the article in an incognito session, and add a small overlay with a non-clickbait version of the title"
Why would you bother fetching the clickbait at all? It's spam.
The main transformation I want out of a browser, the absolutely critical one, is the removal of advertising. I concede that AI might be decent at removing ads and all the overlay clutter that makes news sites unreadable; does anyone have the demo of "AI readability mode"? Crucially I do not want it changing any non-ad text found on the page.
- "AI" is the technology that makes your computers and electricity more expensive, while slowly ruining the authenticity of everything you come across on the internet.
I saw a sad post on bsky today about how the joy of animal behavior videos has been destroyed for that poster, because they can no longer be sure if it's real or just a fake.
- People wonder why there's a backlash when the pro-AI side sounds like the Borg.
- Yes. We could have had Windows on Arm ten years previously, but Microsoft tried to use the platform transition as an opportunity for lock in. Fortunately this meant there were no apps and basically zero take up of WinRT.
- All the solutions are going to have a few false positives, sadly.
- I've given you a disagree-and-upvote; these things are significant quality aids, but they are like the poka-yoke or manufacturing jig or automated inspection.
Accountability is about what happens if and when something goes wrong. The moon landings were controlled with computer assistance, but Nixon preparing a speech for what happened in the event of lethal failure is accountability. Note that accountability does not of itself imply any particular form or detail of control, just that a social structure of accountability links outcome to responsible person.
- I tabbed back to Visual Studio (C#): 24990 "unit" tests, all written by hand over the past years.
Behind that is a smaller number of larger integration tests, and the even longer running regression tests that are run every release but not on every commit.
- That sounds harder?
There's a lot of pedantry here trying to argue that there exists some feature which doesn't need to be "manually" tested, and I think the definition of "manual" can be pushed around a lot. Is running a program that prints "OK" a manual test or not? Is running the program and seeing that it now outputs "grue" rather than "bleen" manual? Does verifying the arithmetic against an Excel spreadsheet count?
There are programs that almost can't be manual, and programs that almost have to be manual. I remember when working on PIN pad integration we looked into getting a robot to push the buttons on the pad - for security reasons there's no way of injecting input automatically.
What really matters is getting as close to a realistic end user scenario as possible.
- Yes .. and no. Someone who does this will definitely make the staff clean up after them.
- Cities are generally worse because that's where the organized crime is, and a nasty spiral of people carrying weapons because other people are carrying them.
Scotland used to have the worst reputation for stabbing until the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit incredible success. You won't hear about it in England because it reflects well on the SNP.