benedictevans

7 ms·

31.
by benedictevans 2y ago
Well, I'm not trying to explain the state of the science and the engineering, but to work out what this means to everyone else. There are no products to analyse yet - which is part of the problem.
32.
by benedictevans 2y ago
See slides 58 and 59 - this can take a while. ChatGPT got to 100m users much faster than anything else because it's riding on all the infrastructure we already built in the last 20 years. To a consumer, it's 'just' a web
33.
by benedictevans 2y ago
I tried to capture this on the last slide before the conclusion - maybe all AI questions have one of two answers - "no-one knows" or "it will be the same as the last time" this is one of the "no-one knows" ques
34.
by benedictevans 2y ago
Most of the presentation is saying that is isn't clear how this will work, it will take a long time, and it probably won't do everything. Indeed, you would see that if you'd read even the first half-dozen 5 slides ;)
35.
by benedictevans 2y ago
Americans generally still have to compile and file tax returns. In other countries that is often entirely automated.
36.
by benedictevans 2y ago
He didn’t object to jobs. He objected to a woman having a job.
37.
by benedictevans 2y ago
"Where are the numbers coming from?" The numbers are sourced, both in the charts and in the text. You can find a half-a-dozen more sources that say the same. It's great for you that you're in the low-single-digit percent
38.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Nokia thought that phones would be like cars. Most car companies have dozens of models with different characteristics and prices, and that's fine. Even BMW has 20(!) top-level model categories. Nokia was selling devices all the way fro
39.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Your proposed solution is an insecure system that can and almost certainly will be hacked. That’s the point. You could make insecure encryption pretty easily. What you can’t do is make something that is secure and yet also has a key that ge
40.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Google News is tiny and irrelevant - that's not what the law is about. Again - do you really think that if you do a web search, and one of the results goes to a newspaper, then the newspaper should get paid? And none of the other links
41.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Thea's a lot of rhetoric, so let's get really specific about how these laws are supposed to work. You do a search. You get ten blue links. One of them is to a newspaper website. Google has to pay that website - but not any of the
42.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Originally, the EU had one paragraph on this. That paragraph literally said that you had to let 'any' third party interconnect. That turned into a separate 50 page draft once messaging people explained that 'any' meant s
43.
by benedictevans 3y ago
If you give the key to every government that demands it (USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan... ), and every agency (CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, DEA...) then how long will that remain secure? The key will leak and then you have no security.
44.
by benedictevans 3y ago
I am not a cryptographer, but the standard objection to this is that the NSA key will leak, either generally or be stolen by a Russian/Chinese agent. And in implementation, how many keys are we talking about? USA, UK, France, Germany,
45.
by benedictevans 3y ago
The entire point of the essay is to debate this assertion, and it provides a great many very basic reasons to think is wrong.
46.
by benedictevans 3y ago
William Gibson described 'capitalist dystopia'. The UK has a very strong, active and centralised state - indeed much more so than the USA. It presumes that healthcare is free, that everyone has access to education, that everyone i
47.
by benedictevans 3y ago
As I said, sometimes the job goes different people in different places, and there’s always frictional pain in the adjustment On the other hand, you are correct that I didn’t post data saying that unemployment hasn’t fallen, but then that i
48.
by benedictevans 3y ago
This list is shadow IT, which means the things that the corporate IT department isn't paying for and often doesn't even know about. The tools you mention are in the Productiv (and Okta) data in a different category.
49.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Yes, Evernote surprised me too.
50.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Snippets are explicitly declared in the metadata of a web page. Those previews only appear because the publisher explicitly asked for them to be used.
51.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Google and Meta (or Twitter or anyone else) don't 'borrow' them. Websites explicitly declare what image and snippet they want anyone to use to summarise a link in the metadata on the web page. it's a choice by newspapers
52.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Those phones weren't abandoned. They just didn't get much use for anything beyond calls, text and sometimes the camera.
53.
by benedictevans 3y ago
It was $600 without a telco subsidy, which was a mistake, and one reason the first model really didn't sell. Then it went to $200 with subsidy in the USA (more complicated elsewhere). I presume you know that '$0' feature phon
54.
by benedictevans 3y ago
If you look at the chart in the essay, you'll see that though there were lots of what I called 'proto-smartphones' before the iPhone, and enthusiasts (like me!) loved them, the actual user base was tiny. SMS was huge, MMS was
55.
by benedictevans 3y ago
The next paragraph makes exactly that point: "where the iPhone was a more-or-less drop-in replacement for the phone you already had, nine years after Meta bought Oculus, VR is still a new device and a new category for almost everyone.
56.
The UK post office database scandal – “can't see the bug = user is a thief”(postofficescandal.uk)
9 points by benedictevans 3y ago|2 comments
57.
by benedictevans 3y ago
Today in the UK Post Office database scandal: this support engineer spent an hour looking at an error report, couldn’t see anything obviously causing it, and so decided it was OK to go to court and testify in a criminal trial that they were
58.
by benedictevans 4y ago
It’s a bug somewhere in my custom layout code conflicting with a recent squarespace change and I’m not enough of a developer to fix it yet :(
59.
by benedictevans 4y ago
If you 'know' that, you're wrong. Frankly, this is a classist prejudice with no basis in fact. My boarding school had 700 names on the memorial to WW1. Mostly junior officers: 200 captains and 340 lieutenants. That's ou
60.
by benedictevans 5y ago
Apple makes you opt into the first, but the second two are turned on by default. Those are Apple’s own services. Framing is important.

More ›