alkonaut

24 ms·

391.
by alkonaut 1y ago
For the sake of argument, the only interesting discussion about telemetry is about whether it’s ok when done right. I don’t think anyone thinks it’s ok when it’s not done right (not anonymous, dark patterns for opt in/out, etc). So it’
392.
by alkonaut 1y ago
The shitty thing isn’t phoning home, the shitty thing is doing what’s not described on the label. If a piece of software says “this will do X if you run it” and then it does X then I don’t see the complaint (yes I realize lots of software u
393.
by alkonaut 1y ago
I think I’m going to opt out
394.
by alkonaut 1y ago
If the user develops something they can do it however they want. It’s not “theirs” because it’s installed on their machine. They can’t even control how it runs on their machine short of sandboxing it. They can choose to run it as the develo
395.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Yes if it can be deanonymized then it’s not anonymous. Almost a tautology that. You can’t send the telemetry over http without revealing an ip, but obviously that ip can’t be stored as part of the telemetry data. That’s PII and not anonymou
396.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Testing? You can’t say how your users use your software through testing. Not by surveys/panels/interviews either. But yes: alternatives are also morr expensive (which means it’s expensive for the end user). Users pay one way or an
397.
by alkonaut 1y ago
But should developers not be allowed to have it in their software? So long as it has a label “this software sends usage stats, if you don’t like it don’t use it, or don’t opt in” should that be banned? Or is that acceptable?
398.
by alkonaut 1y ago
I think this is really simple: telemetry should be opt in, anonymous, and _in_ the interest of the user in the long term by the improvement of the software. Because it’s _not_ possible to get this information any other way through user stud
399.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Anonymous usage statistics means no one stores what _you_ do though. Obviously sending a url you visit or a file you open is way over the line. That’s about what you do. I think there is a difference between that and feature usage as counte
400.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Have you developed large applications with/without anonymous usage data? You need a good volume of data and you aren’t going to want to pay for it for one simple reason: you can get it for free and only a tiny group of users are going
401.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Apart from the reason of ”if they spy on this, who knows what else” and ”I don’t want to waste resources on telemetry” what is the reason to not allow a vendor to see which settings page you visit? Obviously if you opt out (or rather, didn’
402.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Can’t see why that couldn’t be done? You save a http request for a ton of the urls.
403.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Or why the LLM doesn’t do a lookup into a subset of the training data as a database and reject the output if it seems to be wrong. A billion of the most urls and the entirety of Wikipedia, arkiv and stackoverflow would go a long way.
404.
by alkonaut 1y ago
We have had weapons which are autonomous for decades. You launch them consciously then you know that it will find and destroy weapons based on some "intelligence" (A homing missile with a radar you know is likely to hit the thing
405.
by alkonaut 1y ago
I can’t even get copilot to autocomplete 5 working lines consistently. I spend hours every day arguing with ChatGPT about things it’s hallucinating. And Agents? It took me a year to convince anyone to buy me a copilot subscription. It’s no
406.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Haha yes, copy paste failed me so I tried (and failed) to type
407.
by alkonaut 1y ago
> The U.S. desire a stable world where change is evolutionary rather than evolutionary The US could now power the entire continent by just the conservatives rotating in their graves.
408.
by alkonaut 1y ago
> why wouldn't it be reduced by R&D costs that happened elsewhere? It would be reduced. The profit can’t be 100% of their German as revenue because obviously they have costs elsewhere. But the argument of some countries is now t
409.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Yes, this is arbitrary. So e.g in Germany there would be an argument about how much of the ad revenue Facebook does in Germany should be reduced by R&D costs that happened elsewhere.å
410.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Yes, but the EU are "collaborating" adversaries in a lot of ways. There is a lot of pressure that can (and is) being put on e.g. Ireland for this.
411.
by alkonaut 1y ago
This sort of thing really needs to be coordinated on EU level. Having different countries doing this in their own way isn't going to work out well in the end. But it's clear something needs to be done. Taxes should be extracted on
412.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Does this recompile each time? It should be simple to cache the binary on the hash of the input? A sub second first run followed by instant rerun seems acceptable.
413.
by alkonaut 1y ago
I love that I never even jumped on the whole "internet" thing when it arrived to software development in the 90s. After that, dodging blockchains and later AI was even simpler.
414.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Games are like songs. The songs played on the radio are the bad ones from this year, together with the great ones from any time in history.
415.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Maybe a contrived example but shouldn't Qt6 be answering with a compatible answer if a Qt5 app asks it what the theme is? And shouldn't the app be asking what the "theme" is, rather than what the Qt5-theme is? It seems l
416.
by alkonaut 1y ago
They do to some extent in the larger distros, but for proprietary/binary packages they don't have much chance anyway unless they are willing to do some pretty time-consuming forensics.
417.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Why do these things not work properly when apps are flatpaks? e.g. if an app tries to query the environment and ask "what's the theme", how would it get a different answer when run from a flatpak?
418.
by alkonaut 1y ago
I think this is the key. If you have a problem where it's slow to produce a plausible answer but quick to check if it's correct (writing a shell script, solving an equation, making up a verse for a song) then you have a good tool.
419.
by alkonaut 1y ago
I always found myself to be very good at Googling/Searching. Or asking: like emailing an expert or colleague. I'm good at condensing what I'm trying to ask and good at knowing what they could be misunderstanding, or what foll
420.
by alkonaut 1y ago
Apps take screenshots all the time, e.g for crash reporting. Then they phone home with them. Most apps obviously ask politely when this happens but I’m sure there are exceptions. Not to mention malicious apps. There is no real security or i

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