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Privacy legislation by itself does not solve the problem; what Flo did was already illegal. Effective enforcement is also necessary.

They need to make an example out of these companies. If your whole business model is built around handling sensitive data, and you are caught shipping off that data to brokers, you should be liquidated or at least fined to within an inch of bankruptcy, as basically all of your profits are a sham.

Fined into bankruptcy and all managers up to and including the CEO criminally charged.

There needs to be penalties that piece the "limited liability" because otherwise it's just "pay to get away with it" as we currently have.

I've been for a "corporate death penalty" (if companies are people, they can be executed) which would result in the shareholders losing everything along with executives being perp-walked.


Not just executives. They don't will these things into existence. Someone had to build functionality to send user data to Facebook.

I need a way to make money too, but we have laws saying I can't do it by hitting you over the head with a club and taking yours. We also have laws saying Flo can't do it by lying about who they sell private data to.

I would advise anyone tracking medical data with an app to use something open source and local-only or network-optional if at all possible. I know there are open source cycle tracking apps, but I do not know if they're any good.


The purpose of firing a person shouldn't be vengeance but to remove someone who is unreliable or not cost effective.

It's similarly reasonable to drop a tool that's unreliable, though I don't think that's a reasonable description here. Instead, they used a tool which is generally known to be unpredictable and failed to sandbox it adequately.


The purpose of firing a person is to remove someone unreliable, but also, the person having that skin in the game makes him behave more reliably. The latter is something you cannot do with an LLM.

The cold hard fact is: LLMs are an unreliable tool, and using them without checking their every action is extremely foolish.


"The cold hard fact is: LLMs are an unreliable tool, and using them without checking their every action is extremely foolish."

You mean checking every action of theirs outside the sandbox I suppose? Otherwise any attempt at letting an agent do some work I would consider foolish.


The AI company has skin in the game which motivates them to produce reliable AIs.

Can you actually sue Anthropic over this when they clearly state that AI can make mistakes and you should double-check everything it does?

You can fire Anthropic. Anthropic can decide it's losing too many customers and do something about it.

> do something about it.

Pump more $$$ into marketing? ;)


Doesn't seem to be working though. :(

Why does using GoDaddy as a registrar instead of one with a better reputation like Porkbun or Namecheap make sense when you're small?

Namecheap looks really bad if someone does some due diligence and the word 'cheap' comes out, it's unproffessional and signals cheapness of materials.

Porkbun I'm not familiar, but it for sure can be a better option, it's just that when people start out they look for a familiar name rather than the marginally best option.

I just said it makes sense, not that it's the best option. It's just fine if you are a small or even medium business.


Ahh, I understood "makes sense" as "is a good idea" rather than "is an understandable mistake".


This is at the very least debatable. The site they took down contained multiple videos of animals being tortured and killed. Not all decisions are simple black and white.

Animals die too in a genocide. I don't understand your point here. Namecheap decided they should proactively police Namecheap customers for this, Namecheap should lose all its business as a result. Let Namecheap decide whether the income from Israel exceeds the income from all Namecheap customers.

> Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

A part of this is that consumers usually don't have very good information about products like that. I would almost always pay twice as much for an appliance that's going to last three times as long, but I usually can't find a review that's based on a teardown and rebuild or testing to destruction.

Aircraft engines are subjected to both.


Being banned from life due to a TOS violation is a real concern because it's already hard to do a bunch of things without a Google or Apple account. If Google and Apple can require a government ID to create such an account, it becomes very difficult to evade a ban.

Options to get around that problem include regulating Apple and Google or mandating that essential services not require accounts with third-party providers.


> Options to get around that problem include regulating Apple and Google or mandating that essential services not require accounts with third-party providers.

I would call for both of these things, for independent reasons.

All providers who get relied on in this way should need suitable regulation, even for non-essential things like supermarket loyalty cards.

Apple and Google in particular are now too heavily associated with a government hostile to the EU, therefore the EU should as a matter of urgency ensure that essential services do not require them in particular, and the surest way to do so (and make sure no shenanigans happen with mergers) would be to mandate that essential services do not require accounts with any third-party providers. Not even the postal system or a telephone number, you should always have a viable fallback to some physical office which is open at reasonable hours and is in a reasonably accessible location.


Yes, at first. If it was a typical defamation case based on a single incident or short pattern of conduct, and if Jones behaved like a typical defendant, hiring a competent lawyer and mostly complying with court orders, the judgment would have been a few million dollars. That's not what happened.

Instead, Jones repeatedly failed to comply with court orders and attempted to delay the trial. He lied under oath, broadcast lies about the plaintiffs, and mocked the plaintiffs on his show after losing a case. He additionally broadcast his intent to continue spreading disinformation about the Sandy Hook shooting.

The long-term pattern of treating the court with contempt and clear intent to continue his illegal behavior are an extreme level of noncompliance for a defendant in a lawsuit, and they added up to an extreme penalty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones#Sandy_Hook_Elementa...


If he did something criminal then there's a code of law that provides a remedy to that. As far as I know that's not what happened here.

Because what he did wasn't criminal, many people wanted a maximal civil settlement in substitution.


What he did is lose his civil lawsuits about as hard as it's possible to lose, which is easily explained by his behavior during those lawsuits.

That framing Makes it sound like the app developer has to do something active to keep message cleartext out of notifications. That's not how it is on Android.

A Firebase Cloud Messaging push notification contains what the app developer's server puts in it. That could include the message body or it could just be an instruction to the app to poll the server for new messages. It has nothing to do with the notification that's displayd on an Android device. Those are entirely local.

An app that cares about privacy wouldn't send anything more than a poll instruction over FCM.


You can implement either approach on iOS as well.

But if you have strong end-to-end encryption for messages, then you don’t have to care about the transport anymore, you assume they’re all compromised. At that point you might as well use the push notification system as your transport, given both OSs allow applications to intercept the push notification locally and decrypt it before it’s displayed to the user.


Plus, decrypting using a key stored locally cuts out a network roundtrip, which has battery and data usage impacts.

This has performance/reliability tradeoffs.

> Don't build anything of any significance in dynamic languages!

Posted on a significant website built in a dynamic language.

I tend to disagree. Static typing can catch some bugs, but most serious errors are not type errors, and the common situation where the type system disallows just enough invalid states for developers to get complacent is the worst of both worlds.


I'm not a fan of dynamic typing at all (currently maintaining a decade's old e-comm monolith written in Ruby on Rails), but instead of arguing about what bugs are caught where, I've instead switched to arguing from a position of developer experience. The _tooling_ that statically typed languages have is levels above those found in dynamic languages. Runtime errors are runtime errors, but knowing at typing-time that the shape of thing A is what thing B needs is a huge benefit.

Your car's ABS is probably programmed in something more error-prone than Python, like C or the assembly language of whatever microcontroller runs it.

This gets more terrifying if you've ever experienced spurious ABS activation. It's the third scariest thing that's happened to me in a vehicle.


What are the first and fourth?

First was hydroplaning on a motorcycle.

Fourth was probably a makeshift bridge over a creek collapsing while crossing it as a passenger on an ATV. I was pretty young when that happened.


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