Surely you see how installing unvetted software on a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc. probably shouldn't be part of the "happy path" for most people. You shouldn't even install software you haven't fully vetted from the google play store. This should be drilled into non-technical people.
Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.
> a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
I'd see it the other way around and say that a device running an operating system controlled by some company shouldn't hold your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
How do you get around this? Literally every bank, brokerage, etc... is hell bent on you using your phone for everything from 2FA to passkeys, etc... They dont even imagine people have computers anymore or want two+ physical devices/controls on what can be done with which factors
It requires collective action. Ideally with laws to force interoperability, so folks can move among platforms with ease. Then standards will arise to keep that feasible for app makers.
Without regulation markets coalesce as the winners eat each other like a game of snake. It's a miracle Apple hasn't yet eliminated Android. Although I suppose for some institutions there is only iPhone.
Certainly you can use those, but they're not mandatory (here in Canada at least). Can easily get a card and use physical bank and ATM to do everything, and website logins use email as 2fa.
Have you ever tried to educate a 70+ year old person on this kind of stuff? Their eyes gloss over and they don't care. I've told my mother not to install random apps on her phone several times yet she still does it. I could probably send her a phishing e-mail right now that 'looks like' it's from me (so long as my name is in the from: field that's enough) and she'd follow the instructions to install a malicious apk too.
"Everyone should just be smarter/more educated" is what I used to think as well. I now fully understand some people have no desire to be educated in any way and it's a net good for society to not have a large % of devices compromised.
It is like saying that you should not have free speech because someone might influence 70+ to say stupid stuff (well, that is already happening...).
Family should be responsible on education or making phone of people that are not educated enough (minors, elderly, etc.) limited - I do that using Family Link. I have there my child and also my in-laws - both of them can't install new apps without my permission.
So the tech is already there, one just needs to use it.
yes, got my father on linux a decade (or more) ago. He's 84. No problem. Most recently we discussed being vigilant against vishing.
Now my in-laws (similar age) one very demented, the other thinks he knows best because he was a chemical engineer...they could use some built in protections
so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
>so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
Which is really exactly what google is implementing here and why I'm so perplexed so many people are upset. You or I or smart parents (my mother has never used a computer in her life and wouldn't want to) will have absolutely no issue sideloading apps after the proposed changes.
Given Google's track record, I don't think it's just "being upset" to have serious doubts about the probability of this escape hatch staying indefinitely.
Google is the one peddling the malware. Any changes to 'security' that don't start with them removing the oodles of malware from their store are not security but profit driven.
That would be like requiring people taking driving lessons before driving cars - what nonsense! Just let them behind the wheel & they will figure it out just fine!
The answer to people refusing to care about important things in life is not to put restrictions upon everyone's freedom. Ultimately, being an adult means you have to take responsibility for your actions (or lack thereof). It isn't hard to learn how to use a computer responsibly, and I've known plenty of older people who did so just fine. There's no excuse here.
I'm not sure the situations are comparable when Windows doesn't have this permission system where the apps are still very limited in what they can access unless you grant specific directory access or access to the contact list or such
It does, but approximately nobody uses it, because Microsoft also tried to apply loads of constraints on what kinds of program could exist when they rolled it out, as part of their "all Windows software should also work on Windows Phone and Xbox" campaign.
It was true then and it is true now. Outside businesspeople and students and the middle class of OECD countries (all amounting to a low single-digit percentage of the world population), ordinary people never bought desktop or laptop computers. By contrast, everyone has a mobile one in their pocket today.
Today people get in debt to have the latest orange iPhone, for a long time before that most people in, ok, developed countries somehow got hold of a computer.
Yeah, compared to separate hardware HSMs mobile banking is a massive downgrade in both security as well as user being in control of the hardware they own (by forcing locked down closer source OS & forcing hardware updates).
If mobile banking really wanted to be secure, they would support something like a NFC yubikey for transaction verification. The fact they fully ignore separate secure HSMs tells you what you need to know about their security.
> And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............
The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use. This makes me sad, but it does have merit.
FWIW I still use the website to do all my payments. I find banking apps to be madness - you're entrusting all your money to what is essentially a toy.
The world may not of ended but to of people have been hurt by malware ruining their computer, cryptolocking all of their company's files for ransom, stealing all of your login credentials, stealing cryptocurrency, taking secret photos with your webcam, screen recording what you are doing on your computer, etc.
The "personal computer" has a terrible track record.
For many decades, people have been mistakenly putting diesel fuel into their gasoline cars, yet we never outlawed diesel vehicles. You can only do so much to protect people without destroying their rights to their property.
It is much rarer since it needs 0 day to do these at the same level as possible on a pc. The play store scanning apps for malware is an important safety mechanism against this. Further more imposter apps like YouTube but with no ads that are Trojans that steal people's accounts.
Or the accessibility permission, or to some degree the access all files ones; but it's also enough for the app to pilfer the data you trust it with.
The Play Store's scanning is very far from perfect, and the amount of crap that's on it, combined with the trust that people have towards it, and apps' unfettered access to internet, makes malicious software easily more common than on PCs.
Even without considering as malicious the enormous data collection that almost everything on the Play Store does, encouraged by Google
I'm not sure I understand this argument. If I go to the library every day for 10 years and learn everything there is to know about subject x I shouldn't be able to sell my skills to the world about it later because I didn't give the creators of the books I read any money?
Arguably LLM companies could have made large-scale deals with libraries and got the exact same knowledge (much, much more slowly). I wonder if people would have the same issues then? My guess is probably. Goes back to the meme that if libraries were proposed today there's no way they would ever be allowed.
This is something I've thought about as people complain about things like restaurant photos being AI and such. You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that complain about minor details that don't really matter. Might be a net good for many businesses.
To the people who are saying these little details aren't an indicator of what matters:
As a chef of close to a decade I will tell you right now:
If people in the restaurant aren't getting small details right...
They DEFINITELY aren't getting the rest right either
Someone who isn't paying attention to the food they're serving and the conditions they're serving it in just doesn't care and isn't paying attention to how they wash their hands or that piece of meat they dropped behind the fridge a few days ago that's bringing in roaches and rodents or the sour smell coming from the bag they just opened or the open wound that just dripped blood into your sauce
Most likely, they probably don't even know what allergens are present in their menu, posing a genuine risk to people
I promise you
Who are you people sticking up for?
I don't understand the "I mean they clearly didn't put any effort in here, but I believe 100% that they're doing their absolute best everywhere else!" sentiment
It's great to be optimistic about life and people in general but that's entirely unreasonable and you're only gonna be let down (or in the case of a restaurant probably get sick)
Would you trust a pilot that advertises his services with some half assed ai generated ad with spelling mistakes?
There's a great episode from the Search Engine podcast about this. The gist is that it takes a lot of concerted effort to make something great, otherwise it will probably suck. The host got interested in a restaurant that seemed obsessive about doing things well and talked to the owner about it. The episode title is "How to pursue excellence ... in noodles".
Alternatively: if you're wasting a bunch of your time on the minor details how do you have enough time for the major ones? I'd much rather my restaurant owner worry about sourcing ingredients, keeping the kitchen clean, improving the taste of the food than anything else.
If you don't have the time or money to have actual menu photos taken, what are the odds you have the time and money to source high quality ingredients, keep the kitchen clean, or improve the taste of the food?
The minor details are precisely the ones that require the least time and money to handle, so if those are being skimped on, it's likely that the major details are too, in my experience.
It depends, probably. If we are talking about high end, off the beaten path places, marketing is important. For the $1.50 slice pizza at the hole in the wall in Times Square? I doubt those places are cleaned and no one is checking the reviews, people just line up because others are, and because the smell and taste is right.
Hell yeah I will ship you a box of ‘food’ for two hundred dollars. You know it’s going to be great because I don’t spend my time on stuff like describing or photographing it
Major companies are using these LLMs on their already hardened software and finding countless thousands of security flaws. Is that all theater too? If not then it's very easy to see how these things are dangerous.
I made an AI video of a picture of me when I was about 2. Had a huge smile on my face in the photo so as a lark I made a 5 second video of me laughing. The look in my mom's eyes when I showed her and the way she grabbed the phone from me to look closer was such a good moment.
It's not an alternate reality. I was laughing at the time almost certainly. New ways of seeing old memories really needn't be depressing at all. It's so strange how so many people seem to only see the bad in a technology that can be used in countless different ways.
Windows 11 LTS is a dream to use. Unfortunately I need 25H2 for dumb gaming reasons so I can't use it. It proves Microsoft can make windows properly they just refuse.
When I opened up the old notepad and my add/remove programs was 3 entries long I couldn't believe it.
The problem is they really are the best TVs. I have one sitting next to me that thankfully hasn't been connected to the internet in 5 years. Take the subsidies they give you for being able to spy on you then don't let them spy on you is the better move.
I just find it such a fascinating technology. It's finally fun to be a nerd again! For me it's the same feeling as when I was on the internet in the early '90s and was trying to tell people how useful it would be. I don't hold a grudge against anybody who held out until the iPhone came around or whatever it was that got them to finally realize the usefulness, but I still question why it was so hard to convince so many people when the benefits were just plainly obvious.
If you want to avoid the technology go nuts. I just hope you're doing so knowing how important it will be to the future. It's also almost satire how outdated the assumptions of many people who don't engage are. "It mostly lies to you anyway" or "It can't even count the number of letters in a word" are such silly things to say about the technology these days. As is the typical "but it uses so much water!" as the person orders a hamburger.
My gripes mostly come with people who don't engage with it and then spout memes/misinformation (ironic) about AI as if they're experts. Usually akin to "That internet stuff is garbage, pictures take 2 minutes to load!" after everyone and their dog already has broadband.
You can also find something uninteresting without brow-beating people about it. Goes both ways. Just giving my experience with it, take it or leave it. The comment I was replying to seemed to wonder why people didn't understand non-engagement with the tech, I gave my reasoning. The cost of engaging is also so slim (and it's freaking everywhere) that it has to be an almost religious aversion to not, which I find quite perplexing in itself.
The amount of strawmen and false equivalencies here is crazy. I bet you can't name one person who refused to get Internet because photos don't load fast enough.
There was a whole gaggle of people who refused to get it for that and a few other "user friendliness" reasons. And I completely understand it.
>Across all groups of users, taking too long to download pages (i.e. "speed") is the most commonly experienced problem with the web (64.8% of respondents).
>Online retailers especially should take note: 53% of respondents reported that they had left a web site while searching for product information simply because the site was too slow.[1]
It's strange to think about now but roughly half of people in the US didn't have internet in the year 2000. And half of people that had the internet weren't making any purchases. People didn't trust or see much use for the tech back then and it was really hard to convince them.
I understand that internet adoption wasn't universal in 2000. You're saying they refused to get it because photos took too long to load. That's an absolutely absurd statement.
I genuinely cannot understand how you can possibly find fun in LLMs. They are poor tools that can't do the things they are claimed to be able to do, they are being shoved down the throat of the entire industry by massive FOMO, and if they ever can actually live up to the hype it's clear that we will all (every human, not just programmers) be out of jobs as the oligarchs replace us with machines who don't get tired or require a cut of the money. So they are either useless toys, or the most dystopian thing the tech industry has ever created. Where, exactly, is the fun in either of those outcomes?
Some of us don't believe they're useless toys or that they're going to destroy society.
I was a skeptic of them for a long time, but I appreciate that I can use them to get tedious nonsense out of the way thus allowing me to spend more time on the interesting and challenging parts of my projects.
The initial hype of them is annoying, but as time goes on it'll die down and we'll figure out where and how best to use them. There's no reason to believe that this will finally be the time a new technology ruins everything.
>They are poor tools that can't do the things they are claimed to be able to do
This is the one I don't understand the most out of all the gripes. I find it genuinely unsettling how much I've done over the past couple of days (and with little to no mistakes or bugs in the code that I can find) by just broadly asking Astra to do it. I understand why you'd feel the technology sucks 2 years ago, but these days the models are becoming way too good at what they do.
I agree that if it lives up to the hype we're in for major societal upheaval. Existential crisis is a very real part of looking at this tech for what it is. But I also don't see how not using it stops that. It'd be like not ever taking an airplane to prevent climate change and wondering why it didn't work.
The fun is in being able to finish projects you've had rattling around in your head for years but never had time to do. Or researching and discovering things that you'd never bother with previously because the internet has become an impossible to navigate cesspool. Or learning things in a way that is completely customized to your speed and level of knowledge.
I have to hold 2 thoughts in your head at the same time: the technology is empowering at an individual level while also being highly disruptive at a societal level. We're not going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point.
> As is the typical "but it uses so much water!" as the person orders a hamburger.
As is going on about the water thing being somewhat over-blown, while quietly ignoring the other environmental issues:
• The use of energy meaning greater carbon output because that side of the power industry can initially spin up more quickly (in part by using resource that we'd previously decided not to use in favour of other options), an issue exacerbated by the US essentially trying to block one of the alternative options (due to Trump's fear of wind).
• While the use of water might be overstated overall, it is a problem in some places where new datacentres are being planned - this is one of the reasons that some cities are blocking permissions currently.
Other issues with the growth of datacentres is local parts of power grids not being designed to cope with the load and many building plans not taking this into account (and therefore offering investment to help the situation).
And there are economic factors…
[splicing in your other comment to keep things together]
> The cost of engaging is also so slim
For now, because all the providers are currently pumping in the investment money without turning a profit, with the notable exception of the shovel sellers (Nvidia and to a lesser extent AMD and smaller chip makers, ref: https://isaiprofitable.com/). Even most of the paid accounts operate at a loss ATM, it is the Amazon model pushed industry-wide. Unless there is a miraculous improvement in efficiency right around the corner, that is a trap and those becoming dependent on it being a cheap resource are going to get bitten badly when it comes time that those investments start getting called in.
Then there are the problems elsewhere with demand making other equipment much more expensive both for end users and companies.
Of course me opting out won't affect these issues in any meaningful way, but I can at least claim not to be even a small part of the problem. The same for supporting companies that have run roughshod over the sort of IP issues that an individual would have seen ridiculous fines and even prison time for, with slaps on the wrist being the most anyone saw from their actions (at least going by their own public accounting) - I don't want to feel part of that either. And the weighing down sites with constant scraping matter.
And that is before considering that maybe I'm a bit odd and the things it is taking on in my profession are the few parts of it that I haven't grown a dislike for! I want to puzzle over the details and not lose contact with what is actually going on, thankyouverymuch. “It is like being a manager” people say, as if that will attract me despite knowing how many times I've refuse advancement in order to avoid being a manager over the years. That and “why not consider it a remote colleague”, when it is known in the company that remote work really doesn't work for me (i nearly went completely bat-shit in 2020/2021) and only put up with it because I have no choice but to make the effort (I may be in the office, but if the people I'm working with are not then I'm still effectively remote). I foresee a future where most devs have no one to talk to all day but Claude or similar, and before that happens I will have long since left for pastures different (and yes, I know, likely rather menial).
> (and it's freaking everywhere)
So is vaping, I don't fancy trying that either.
> that it has to be an almost religious aversion to not, which I find quite perplexing in itself.
Or a principled aversion. You might not agree with the principals, or consider acting upon them to be pointless self-sacrifice, but that doesn't make them non-existent. The fact that you must have read some of these concerns from a number of people by now but either dismiss them out of hand or just assume those acting on them are nuts, is a soft form of the religious reaction I initially referred to: anything that isn't what you are comfortable with, is pointless, silly, or just plain wrong.
I don't badger colleagues and friends who use the tech for doing so, but by buggery do some of them badger me for not.
These companies are going too far too fast like we always do as humans, and I agree the negatives aren't going to be pleasant. But there are industries and products out there that we all use currently that have way worse externalities that we just shove to the side in our minds because they've been around since before we could yell on twitter about them. The beef industry is a nutty thing to exist in its current form. Oil and plastics what the hell are we even doing? My guess is if you put your head down and did the research AI doesn't even rank in the top 10 of problematic things that people use daily.
Air travel, everyone having a nice green super watered lawn / golf courses, air conditioning in every home, fast fashion. A single person using AI for their work doesn't even register on the list of offences if you compare it to these things. Driving an ICE car every day for more than 30 minutes is wild. Hell it probably doesn't even use as much power as playing a video game on a good graphics card for 2 hours.
The thing I've resigned myself to is very few people will change anything at all for the greater good of society that gives them even a minor inconvenience. See: COVID restrictions. My honest take is we're absolutely doomed as a species unless we come up with novel solutions to the problems we're facing. And guess what AI is showing itself to be extremely good at in various fields [1][2][3]? It's a pipe-dream hope, but the hope is there. And AI when compared to the decades (sometimes centuries) of oil, beef, coal, whatever else won't even be a pixel on the screen of reasons why climate change is happening for some time yet. And it will highly incentivize mass production/adoption of the cheapest power sources which also happens to be renewables. I understand it doesn't look like that right now as people like Elon make their disgusting data centers, but over time I'd bet on it only because the financial incentive is there.
The discussion is far more nuanced than "AI bad". I understand the horrific aspects of it, but there is plenty of good to be found there too. Accessibility, translation, help with learning disabilities. The list of good outcomes goes on for a long while. It's a powerful tool that can be used for good or ill. In my opinion we need more people with the principles you speak of to be using powerful tools for the benefit of those principles.
You can still install your own apps and in my case your own operating system (graphene). The 24 hour wait to activate sideloads indefinitely seems like a non-issue to me.
How is this not mentioned in the article anywhere? I've seen similar articles and keep thinking: is this about the 24 delay or something else. It just leads to confusing messaging.
Personally I generally agree with guardrails for regular consumers. The kind of people who don't want to do things like go into developer options and enable "unsafe" options usually should be protected against installing a random .apk on a device that contains their bank info and whatever else.
Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.
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