The example of convergence between fish and dolphins, birds and insects, the infamous "why does everything evolve into crabs" study and so on should tell us that while we should be open for radically different forms of life, the most likely outcomes will look like something we've seen here on Earth.
I'm personally expecting something like 80% humanoids and 20% exotic forms. Maybe I'm primed incorrectly by cheesy soap operas and sci-fi TV shows, but I think they're not far off (even if for unrelated reasons like SFX/VFX budget and character empathy).
What are we referring to as humanoids though? And what are we about as intelligent? Crows? Crows aren't going to build spaceships and don't really have the means to because a beak isn't a great manipulator, even though they use tools. I don't think the person above is saying that quadrupeds would be out of the realm of possibility (maybe they are. IDK I'm a computer scientist, not a biologist. I could totally see body size, caloric intake ratios, and brain mass being related in a way that would make these unlikely), but rather things like fractaling appendages would be expected because intelligent life would need to have fine motor control. (Is a centaur humanoid?) There are just more efficient ways to do things than other ways. Yeah, maybe alien life will have a beak. Maybe their pupils will look different but I'd still expect them to have eyes with squishy lenses because that's pretty much required to be able to focus and intelligent creatures need to be able to sense things both near and far (without technological enhancements). Light sensing isn't enough if you want to build things, you need depth perception. I think if you follow this line of reasoning you'll find that a lot of attributes humans have would be pretty likely for intelligent alien life as well.
Yes but it is very expensive. Here's some more on bats[0] (mentions expensive echolocation around 5:45 and moving from sonic location to echolocation evolution). Eyes do also convey more information. You can get colors in addition to depth and shape and that's a good reason and easy path for eyes to develop since light sensing is a pretty easy thing to develop. Also, bats aren't blind, despite common belief.
Also consider an octopi's environment. That environment is not well suited for being able to build lots of things. How do you get to the bronze age underwater? How about even earlier. Land based creatures have pretty similar forms. Snake like, bipedal, quadru/multiped, and flying/winged creatures. Snakes don't have arms and so aren't going to have fine motor control. Winged creatures are going to have a hard time dealing with heavy objects (they have hollow bones to fly and wings are incredibly fragile and I don't see nature creating super materials, plastics, or metal structural systems for animals). Quadrupeds probably aren't going to develop arms like centaurs (more likely legs become arms). So if we want a creature that can have fine motor control, live in an environment that can easily create metals, not be extremely fragile, and is able to devote a significant amount of its energy intake to its brain, you're probably going to come up with something ape like (bipedal). There are other forms here, but we can see that there are some pretty good hints that we learn just from mechanics and aren't so much dependent on specifics of Earth or humans.
"Also consider a human's environment. That environment is not well suited for being able to build lots of things. How do you get to the <untranslatable> age on earth?"
Earlier, you mentioned that beaks can't make spaceships. Well, maybe neither can hands. What we call a spaceship might be laughable nonviable. In fact, we know it is.
We're struggling at limits that some other lifeform might not have. We're hill climbing for tools that will let us do things we really want to do. Quite likely a lot of our progress is orthogonal or even oppositional to what we need to do to get off the planet.
We have no idea if some of our progress might be backsliding or entirely halting our future progress. Due to our natures. Due to our beaks.
> Earlier, you mentioned that beaks can't make spaceships. Well, maybe neither can hands.
Except hands did create spaceships...
The "beaks can't make spaceships" is a comment about crows not having hands. Crows use their beaks to manipulate objects. This does not imbue cows with great motor control. The use of tools is very different than the ability to finely manipulate tools. Aliens could have beaks, but these would not be their way to build spaceships. Similarly they wouldn't have pincers. Such grasping mechanisms just are extremely inefficient and don't allow for certain tasks.This excludes a lot of classes of tools from crows. This isn't biology, this is physics.
Our hands are like beaks to some hypothetical species, and it is hubris to assume we're great manipulators. Our fingers could be closer in utility to cow's hooves, than the manipulation techniques of some unknown species are to our own gesticulations.
And they would have tools as multipliers for their natures, just as we use tools to extend ours.
Our wonderful inventions might be another species child's play. Our herculean efforts to reach the stars might be a triviality to a species that can synthesize novel compounds in their bodies, and/or those of their stock animals. We're just at the early stages of doing that with algae, after a very long climb from first making fire.
Just as I could train and arrange to walk to Mexico, they might be able to self modify and reach the stars. No spaceship needed.
Our great ideas and dreams might be trite to bigger minds out in the galaxies. They could have easily skipped over what we struggle with.
You call those cans "spaceships"? They can barely get to your moon and back.
"Humans can't even excrete flexible ceramics. They need air. They need heat. They can't stand up to ionizing radiation. This isn't biology, this is physics!"
Cephalopods have got onto land at least twice. Nothing says they can't do it again.
But this form is also extremely rare. You're also ignoring the main component of the argument, which is where calories are going, not that arms can come out of a body.
The calorie part is about where you're spending calories. Brain or body? This gets complex real fast though. One easy part to understand is surface area and volume (but there's also things like metabolic rate and many others that go in here). But consider that brains are pretty resource intensive. In a human it's 2% of the mass but 20% of the energy. There's a linear relationship between neurons and calories but humans are an outlier in percent of energy that goes to brains. Additionally, it is the third most resource intensive system (for humans), behind skeletal muscle and the liver[0]. Which those last two parts matter a lot. Skeletal muscle scales with volume. So if you're bigger you have to eat more. The more you have to eat the more time you have to spend eating and your metabolism is probably going to slow. So it gets really complicated here really fast (and I'm admitting to my naivety to the subject matter) but basically it's not hard to see here that if you're pretty big you're probably not going to have the resources (or metabolism) to spend time thinking, which means a downward selection pressure on brain and thinking. There's going to be a Goldilocks zone here (like most things).
So basically if you can get food and don't have to spend significant time thinking to do so, there isn't going to be a selective pressure to encourage brain growth. And if you have a selective pressure to devote energy to the brain you're also probably going to have a selective pressure to reduce energy from elsewhere.
Additionally, I'll add that humans both lost fur and stood up because it is better for thermal regulation (there are other pressures too, there's never _one_ reason). So this also helps with the surface area-volume issue.
Basically what I'm saying is that there's these locally optimal conditions that need to exist at the same time to produce intelligent, tool using, civilization making creatures. (I mentioned in another comment that environment matters too. Can't get a bronze age underwater. But I also didn't mention you can't get a bronze age if you don't have a social structure, something, for example, octopi lack). Basically what astrobiologists are looking for are the combination of these optima necessary to produce certain traits. What many commenters here are missing is the combination part, mostly thinking that only intelligence matters to create a space fairing civilization, but you can't get to space if you can't create advanced composites, explosives, and many other things. Or in other words, the astrobiologists aren't idiots and probably know what they are talking about despite what it looks like. It only looks like they are dumb because people are overly simplifying the problem.
Not disagreeing with you, but aren’t these local minimums/maximums quite dependent on eukaryotic cells, and/or protein-based life? Wouldn’t the resources required by the brain vs muscle be vastly different than what we have know?
Also, what if a non-protein based molecular machinery can be so energy efficient and powerful that species having that can skip some seemingly necessary part of development? But I’m by no means an expert on the topic, just asking. If the reasoning was about absolute limits, I would be much more accepting of them (eg. Energy required by the simplistic work done, like a given skeletal structure picking up a weight with muscles only consuming the minimal physical necessity)
Most of what I've mentioned is more physics based rather than biologically based. Even if your muscles are more efficient your skeleton is going to grow with volume, which means non-linearly. Given this, all those same things will still apply.
Brains are resource-intensive only if you are in a massive hurry. Starfish do fine, entirely without a structure you would call a brain. Packing it all into one noggin is risky, for no benefit. If you're not in a hurry, you don't need nearly as much of it, because it doesn't have to do everything at the same time.
There is no natural speed that life has to operate at. Any aliens we encounter are much more likely to be very, very slow, because it is they who can stand the vast chill void between stars. If they visit, and you dare to chop one down, you wouldn't find anything recognizable as brain inside.
Something resembling this has actually been observed in a species of deep sea snails. Iron sulfide is incorporated into the hard bits (shell, foot armor). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaly-foot_gastropod)
That's a wrong way to think about it, since all modern "humanoids" are descended from the same ancestor not that long ago.
And if you consider dinosaurs humanoid, then so is that meme cat that can walk on its two back legs.
If there was an apex predator in every tree of life, in the "humanoid" shape, and I'm talking "humanoid ants" here, then it would be reasonable to assume that there's something beneficial in the "humanoid" shape that helps long-term survival.
And that's not even taking the majority of lifeforms into account - those in the seas, and greatly discounts birds. We still can't agree on if dolphins and crows are intelligent.
So, no, chances that the "humanoid" shape is somehow special out there are basically 0, since it's not even special here on Earth. We're an accident. Insects, mushrooms, plants - all those life forms are better adapted for mere survival than us (judging by cumulative mass of live organisms).
That's the wrong way to think about it. Nothing is 'better adapted' than anything else. Each is adapted to its own niche. And no accidents really - convergent evolution shows that similar ecological pressures very very often result in similar forms. Witness fish ("there's no such thing as a fish") or trees ("there's no such thing as a tree").
And that dinosaur comment - I don't know what to do with that. Dinosaurs only walked on two legs in internet memes? That's so far wrong I can't comment.
Many convergent evolution paths led to the same similar form, in time. That was the point. If the environmental pressures are similar, the forms may be similar.
The convergence between dolphins and ichthyosaurs is even more remarkable. Ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles; air breathing tetrapods that, like dolphins, had ancestors that walked on land but eventually returned to the sea to kick fish ass.
Sure, organisms that already share a massive amount of commonalities can diverge and then converge again.
What about the branches that happened early on? We essentially have only two lineages of macroscopic organisms that are actually fundamentally different: Plants and animals.
I would expect any kind of macroscopic extraterrestrial life to be at least as distinct from Terran plant and animal life as they are from each other.
I think it's fine to lump fungi together with plants for the spirit of this discussion. The distinction between plants and fungi are made on the basis of metabolism but in this thread people are clearly talking about external behaviours observable with the naked eye.
Metabolism influences external attributes (I think behavior isn't the right word you're looking for). A larger creature requires higher caloric intake than a smaller creature (and this process isn't linear). A larger creature has different thermal regulations than smaller creatures because surface doesn't scale with volume linearly. The bigger the creature the more it calories it has to expend on the body vs the mind. There are equilibriums here that are physics based.
And then consider the selective pressures from plants vs fungi. A fungi gets its environment. Plants do some, but also need to perform photosynthesis. These have very different selective pressures for these lifeforms.
DNA is extremely flexible, there's no macroscopic form or shape it can't take, as various insects camouflaging themselves as sticks and leaves and what not shows.
So the idea we'll see some vastly different concepts with different starting blocks is possibly unfounded.
Alien life might be very different at low level depending on their environment, but in terms of macroshapes, things like the formation of a head with eyes and mouth, upper and lower limbs, bilateral symmetry and so on will repeat over and over.
Yeah, but so what? The geometric shape isn't very interesting. The insect camouflaging itself as a leaf still functions as an insect. It doesn't perform photosynthesis.
Considering that we have a whole class of lifeforms that have nothing like a head with eyes and mouth or limbs, the idea that this would evolve independently more likely than something completely different, is also possibly unfounded.
Having two eyes, as a simple example, is arguably the cheapest way to perceive 3d at things-may-want-to-eat-me distance: just two points that enable triangulation. Similar constraints reduce the configuration space a lot. It still remains huge, but I don’t think someone that believes about certain convergence to be necessarily naive.
> DNA is extremely flexible, there's no macroscopic form or shape it can't take, as various insects camouflaging themselves as sticks and leaves and what not shows.
That feels like a really bold claim given the evidence.
Physically you could have wheeled animals, but wheels just won't evolve. They are perfect for somewhat smooth surfaces where you want to travel in a somewhat straight line. Organisms just cannot confine themselves to that and survive.
Unless we find a planet composed entirely of solid smooth rock we won't find wheeled animals.
> To get things done, you have to decide on the one or few things you should be working on at a point in time. A todo list doesn't help with that.
If you have 100 things to do, certainly a list helps you at least not forget most of them, before you even start work.
I don't know what David Allen recommends, but if everyone is left with the impression he recommends TODO lists and he doesn't, it might be because the alternative is hazy and vaporous and poorly defined.
I scanned your answer for that alternative and it wasn't there, either.
Consider grocery shopping. You have 20 products to buy. Does a shopping list help? Uhm, heck yes. Otherwise you'd need to go to the store 10 times and not one time.
Well shopping lists, are just a TODO list in the context of a grocery store.
Issue reports on GitHub and other bugtracking systems are TODO lists in the context of software development.
Medical checklists enumerate all required steps in carrying out procedures. That's a TODO list in the context of medical practice.
I can go on forever. So, clearly, the statement "TODO lists don't work" is false. It contradicts reality. And the supposed alternative is apparently unmentionable. Odd.
Maybe we should clarify what is meant by "it works" or "doesn't work", because in general it only means "it's effective for certain uses" and it is effective for certain uses. No, a TODO list won't necessarily motivate you, unless your lack of motivation is specifically due to confusion what you're supposed to do. But I'm very suspicious that any similar "mechanical" alternative would work either.
Gamification works because it draws you into its own world. Posting comments, like mine and most of them, is low effort. Playing a game with colorful characters doing cute things is low effort. Checking for new tweets is low effort. All those are low effort things. This is why it's easy to be motivated by a system that gamifies those low effort actions.
I really doubt any game would motivate you to do an actual 9 to 5 job for years.
> I don't know what David Allen recommends, but if everyone is left with the impression he recommends TODO lists and he doesn't, it might be because the alternative is hazy and vaporous and poorly defined.
He actually defines a specific framework in detail. But most people can't be bothered to read the book.
> Consider grocery shopping. You have 20 products to buy. Does a shopping list help? Uhm, heck yes. Otherwise you'd need to go to the store 10 times and not one time.
A shopping list works because it very much isn't a TODO list - it's a well-scoped list of things that you are going to do in a particular place at a particular time. If you started dumping random non-shopping tasks on your shopping list, it would be a lot less effective.
> I don't know what David Allen recommends, but if everyone is left with the impression he recommends TODO lists and he doesn't, it might be because the alternative is hazy and vaporous and poorly defined.
Maybe a lot of people just read the short blog posts on the internet for how to setup a tool to implement his system. A lot of the ones I’ve seen (with the notable exception of one I found showing how to implement it in Org-mode) get the methodology completely wrong. So maybe it’s just the bad examples are copied?
People should just buy and read his book. It was updated a few years ago for the modern world (but I guess even that edition is now probably dated). Also there’s even a workbook available too to help drill it in for people that prefer that way of examples.
You're talking about lists in general. His system is built on lists. The TODO list, as he's using the term, means a single list where you dump all the tasks you need to do or might want to do. Without further thought, you end up with a long list of items, no guidance about what you should be doing, and stress because there are incomplete items on your list. If you're not going beyond that, the TODO list is a terrible idea.
There's nothing about TODO lists that says you have one list per person. And "TODO lists don't work, unless you have many of them" is counterintuitive and misleading at best.
While from purely monetary perspective this seems like it tips the scales more to a balance, from systematic perspective, this is more corruption on top of corruption.
You have politicians colluding with businesses to save them a billion in taxes, contrary to the intent of the law. Then you have the same politicians colluding to basically go pirate and surprise fine the same business a billion for some semi-arbitrary violation out of nowhere.
There's no system here, no law, just both sides one-upping themselves in being absolute fucking assholes.
The result is instability and environment not conductive to businesses or the people that makes them up.
Think about it, how come everything is fine, and then out of the blue you get sued for a billion? Was there a warning? Was there a grace period, a chance to rectify things? No.
This is not law enforcement, this is law abuse. It's like the US cops that stop random cars, and if the driver carries cash, they just take it under bullshit pretense.
We're moving towards an anarchy, under the guise of justice.
I think the parent's point is that in a more well-functioning system Amazon would be given notice and time to rectify their presumably mistaken wrong-doing which they would then appropriately rectify in good faith or to avoid penalties.
The parent is pointing out how the current system incentivizes "surprise" fines as an alternative to up-front tax and how this dynamic trends towards fines being seen as a simple cost-of-business rather than a true penalty/punishment.
GDPR was published and companies had time to get ahead of it before it went into effect. There were special recital sessions where guidance was given for what parts of it meant. Many companies put into place a lot of changes to comply. Yes, parts of GDPR could be a little ambiguous, but as with every law, a company can be more or less conservative in making sure they're above reproach.
Why should violations be "presumably mistaken" if a company has a legal department and the resources to comply with the law? If the speed limit is posted, I don't expect a cop to give me a warning when I've exceeded it under the assumption that it was inadvertent, and give me a reasonable period to come into compliance.
This is a massive understatement. There's a lot of comments here by people who clearly want to like and support GDPR but have never actually tried to "comply" with it in a large business. GDPR is a textbook example of how not to write law (unless of course you're actually trying to create a despotic regime). It has so many problems when viewed from a law engineering perspective that it's really quite expected that a lot of companies will just give up, because the only plausible explanation for the way it's written is to be able to arbitrarily fine certain types of companies on demand.
1. Absolutely everything is maximally vague and subjective. Whoever wrote it never wanted to have to justify any decision made under its authority. Everything is defined with terms like "legitimate", "disproportionate", "significant", "likelihood", and the perennial favorite "reasonable effort". If you believe you have a legitimate need or made a reasonable effort and a regulator doesn't, or that your users are giving consent and then someone else claims it isn't explicit enough, who can say who's right? There are no standards on which to judge anything so it turns into a pure difference of arbitrary opinion. Merely being conservative is no use at all because you don't even have any idea, based on reading the law, whether what you're doing would be considered conservative or aggressively non-compliant. Nor does anyone else.
2. Compliance is basically impossible for any large institution. The EU Commission was itself non-compliant on the day GDPR came into effect, which was noticed immediately, and their response was that they had written themselves (and nobody else) an exception into the law so that they had more time to comply with it. When the government that writes a law acknowledges an inability to follow it by the deadline they set for everyone else, you know a law has problems.
3. Because the law is written so badly you can find plenty of people interpreting it in ways that would imply Amazon is doing nothing wrong, like this page [1] which purports to be busting GDPR myths and states that "processing is subject to stricter rules only if the profiling "produces legal effects" concerning the data subject or "similarly significantly affects" that individual. This will unlikely be the case for most advertising-related profiling and for the personalization of offerings".
4. GDPR theoretically requires every company in the world to comply, or does it? It's triggered by "offering" services to people in the EU, but what counts as "offering" is left undefined and like everything else, could be interpreted in dozens of different ways. Is having a website sufficient? Nobody knows. Here's PriceWaterhouseCoopers' advice on GDPR compliance for Switzerland [2] which starts by saying "My company is only Swiss-based, does it have to comply with GDPR? Alas, there is no simple answer to this.".
The fact that so many results when searching for GDPR are articles that claim to be debunking myths about it, and that so many such pages directly contradict each other, is indicative of the massive level of confusion this law has justifiably generated. It can be interpreted in any way any government wants to justify almost any level of fine imaginable, and governments are directly incentivized to do exactly that. Cynicism about GDPR and its motives will not go away by simply having lots of EU-loyal HN posters tell Americans that compliance is easy when it so obviously isn't.
Yeah that's not how GDPR is written, there's no provision for notices, that's the law and it's available to everyone to read.
All of Amazon's competitors, including my employer, have spent a lot of money and energy to comply. Why Amazon decided to just ignore what everyone else knew was a big deal is beyond me.
We could broaden the conversation and also ask who are the people who got harmed to the tune of $1B, and how they will be redressed for that harm
The point is not the legal matter at hand but the nature of the law itself and how it came to be. As much as i like that we don't get spam calls anymore in the EU, the problem was pushed under the rug, not solved (all the spam calls are now from UK numbers). The bigger problem is that while the legislators legislate for putting restrictions on eu businesses, they have not legislated an equal amount that would be conductive to business in the eu.
Do you know what the phrase "throw the book at them" means.
It means you have a rich set of laws, which punish various offenses which look fine on paper, but in practice everyone violates just to do their regular job, so they're widely not enforced.
But if you want to fuck someone in particular, you can easily find them in violation of a dozen or two of them, and put them in jail for a long time or fine them substantial amounts.
You threw the book at them.
This is basically what most of EU's data privacy, cookie and so on laws are about, in practice.
It's interesting how you can take a collection of seemingly or genuinely good-intentioned rules and use them to basically rule as a king, but there you go.
That not really how, at least some, European countries work. Laws are written and companies are generally expected to follow them. We’re try to catch up, going from an society where rules are followed, without the need for actual enforcement, to one where companies don’t follow the law unless the court makes it unprofitable.
Are companies expected to follow laws the day they get signed, even if it might take over an year to implement compliance? Think about it. Because here's what happened:
> The penalty is the result of a 2018 complaint by French privacy rights group La Quadrature du Net, which filed numerous lawsuits against Big Tech companies on the behalf of 12,000 people shortly after the GDPR was established that year.
This privacy group waited for the law to get signed, and promptly sued every big company that clearly handles user data.
Do you think finding everyone a billion or two would help them come up with a time machine and go back in time to implement a law before it exists so they're compliant by the time it's signed? Curious.
You'd think that if this was a legit defense they would use it in court, instead of "There has been no data breach, and no customer data has been exposed to any third party" clinging to anything irrelevant, as I'm sure they don't hire incompetent lawyers waiting for an online poster to come up with a solution
I think GDPR discussions are always heated on the 'EU vs US' line because of different approach to trust in the govt. In the EU people tend to (surprisingly maybe) trust politicians more because they at least want to be re-elected and distrust corporations/billionaires because they want to increase profit. In the US, I think, it's different, there is a distrust in the government because they are here to get us and more trust (surprisingly maybe) in corporations/billionaires because they are just like me working hard to earn money
The GDPR was enacted two years before it came into force. Companies trading in the EU had plenty of time to come into compliance.
LQDN didn't "wait for the law to get signed" - it was signed ages ago. They waited until it was enforceable.
It's worth pointing out that the GDPR is an EU "regulation". It doesn't have to be ratified by member states, and they don't have to implement some kind of compliant national legislation. This is very different from the previous EU privacy legislation, which required member states to enact suitable laws, which many of them were apparently reluctant to do.
The GDPR came into force the day the regulation was issued. It's just that "came into force" means that the 2-year breathing-space provided for in the regulation began at that time.
If we're talking about GDPR, it came into effect on 25 May 2018, after being adopted by the European Parliament on 14 April 2016.
That's two years, one month, and 11 days for implementation. Those additional days are days after it was published in the EU's Official Journal. It's not EU's fault that companies waited until 2018 to give a fuck about it.
> Do you know what the phrase "throw the book at them" means.
It's perfectly reasonable to throw the book at them, because unlike their competitors they don't seem to have made even a token effort to begin compliance.
If they didn't have the book thrown at them, people would complain that the law is toothless.
I've worked for two companies that had to implement GDPR, in both cases the legal departments were extremely serious about it and we had to do a lot of work to comply. Why should Amazon get a pass?
It wasn't out of the blue. This complaint has been ongoing for a long time. Regulators have been vocal about these concerns for a while. Discussion of these issues,such as how the ad industry is at odds with privacy activists and increasingly regulators too, are common across various academic and industry forums. Amazon will have taken expert legal advice and likely have been involved in lobbying at all levels. Regulators typically have carefully constructed action policies which cover a range of measures, including warnings, which may well be delivered privately. Not everything that happens in the world makes the front page of Hacker News :)
> n you have the same politicians colluding to basically go pirate and surprise fine the same business a billion for some semi-arbitrary violation out of nowhere.
I work for an online retailer that's not Amazon, we took GDPR very seriously and have as a result stopped collecting a lot of data and spent months implementing compliance. It seems Amazon has done next to nothing compared to what we did and chose instead to ignore the issue. It's absolutely no surprise what's happening to them, it's precisely what our legal department warned us about. Are you saying that Amazon should be above the law?
Also, the assumption that a grace period is due assumes that such behavior is only marginally inappropriate. Suppose Amazon was reading its customer's email; would you also argue that it needs a "grace period" after a demand to stop doing that before it actually stopped?
>you have the same politicians colluding to basically go pirate and surprise fine the same business a billion for some semi-arbitrary violation out of nowhere.
Your wording here implies that you think this fine is not justified and is nothing more than a shakedown against Amazon. Am I misunderstanding here or is that really what you're saying?
I think people's reaction to Copilot betrays their own shortcomings.
* If you have so little care, agency and skill that using Copilot results in you generating mountains of code you don't understand, that's on you.
* If you think what basically amounts to AI autocomplete will turn you into a bad programmer, then you were already a bad programmer, and that's on you.
* If you think what basically amounts to AI autocomplete will replace you, then you don't provide enough value to your employer, and that's on you.
* If you are angry about Copilot training on your FOSS code that's FOSS not only to people, but also to companies, machines and to the companies and people using these machines, then you publish under FOSS license without understanding what FOSS is, and that's on you.
The only objective problem here is that Copilot will mix-in incompatible licenses, or even proprietary licenses in its training base, and that should be rectified.
But it's in beta. So out feedback is expected and welcome, and no need for drama and vitriol.
So in a nutshell, the author's argument is that Safari is "killing the web" because apps written specifically for Chrome, may not run on Safari.
I find it cringeworthy to even have to explain the problem here. "The web" is not an app written for one browser. By the same logic, Firefox is also "killing the web" because it can't run Chrome-only apps.
The web is all mainstream browsers, and the web standards. Do you want to know what's really killing the web? Google subverting the standards process and unilaterally adding all kinds of random "standards" (like connecting to USB and Bluetooth devices, for some reason) as part of the web, then guilting other browsers into not following along.
Instead of critiquing Google for acting as if they singlehandedly own the web, web developers are parroting their line and enabling them.
What a disingenuous summary of the article. I thought the points about persistent bugs in Safari were particularly pointed. Also most of the features Safari hasn't chosen to implement are supported by both Chromium and Firefox and are standards.
If you think standard APIs for screen orientation, pixel density, or touch events are some Chrome conspiracy, please do explain why.
The author points to many APIs supported by Firefox, so it's not just Google. In addition, they point out that many of the APIs that were "contentious" were added to Safari years after all the other browsers.
The author has already addressed many of the things in your comment, including Google doing whatever they want (they clearly stated that it is unacceptable).
Mozilla is basically forced to do whatever Google wants at this point. Firefox doesn't have the marketshare to influence standards, and if it doesn't maintain feature compatibility with Chrome, websites will drop Firefox support, and Firefox will loose even more marketshare and have even less influence.
Mozilla quite clearly didn't want to implement EME, for example, but they couldn't afford for Firefox to not work with Netflix!
Apple has more freedom than Mozilla precisely because Safari users can't just switch to another browser. And for as much as I find that abhorrent and anti-competitive... if Apple is going to retain so much power anyway, I'm at least happy they're using it to prevent Google's total dominance.
To be clear, I'm not happy with Apple's approach to iOS. At all.
But Apple doesn't particularly care what I think, so I'm glad they're at least making moves which help preserve the open web, regardless of their motivations.
That rebuttal doesn't make sense. You're claiming that Mozilla is dragged into implementing bad standards by saying EME is a bad standard that they were dragged into, but Apple implemented EME before Mozilla did. The example standards the author gave have nobody arguing against them.
I wasn't making a judgement on whether EME was good or bad†. I was saying Mozilla didn't want to implement it, and was forced to, whereas Apple has more ability to push back against browser features they dislike.
As it so happens, Apple has no issues with DRM; their products are full of it.
† I do think EME is bad, but that's beside the point.
1) you can decide to use other browsers besides Firefox if some sites don't work on it, but on iOS you can't use anything else (every browser still uses safari under the hood)
2) you can still use "chrome apis" even if you don't use chrome. More and more browsers use chrome's engine (see: Opera, Edge, Vivaldi etc.) and while I am not happy with that, it is becoming more and more commonplace.
- User: "This site is broken. Fuck Safari, I want Chrome on my iPhone!"
What users actually think:
- User: "This site is broken. Fuck it, I'll go to another site."
Safari isn't THAT BAD that sites can't work on it. It's mostly minor differences, and lack of some "nice-to-haves" that are not crucial to UX (or in fact, their lack improves UX).
No one cares about your site that much to go to another browser just to browse it ON A PHONE. This is why I said, outside the web dev echo chamber, no one cares.
I've been around for IE6, and comparing Safari with IE6 is honestly absolutely ignorant and laughable. But I did also make my sites work fine with IE6 back in the time. That's our job.
Safari will move at its own pace. The only thing I care about it, is that it's secure, power efficient, fast and user friendly. I speak also as an iPhone user, because users matter more than developers and their endless whining about features.
> No one cares about your site that much to go to another browser just to browse it ON A PHONE
Because they literally CANNOT switch from Safari’s rendering!?
The fact that you wrote this with so much confidence (featuring all caps and gratuitous swearing) signals to me that you aren’t genuinely listening to the argument(a) at all.
It signals to me that you are only interested in tribalistic hyperbole.
Besides: “It’s fine for me therefore it should be fine for you” is a terribly unconvincing argument.
No you missed its point : even in Android, nobody it’s going to change browser if your site is broken. Users will just assume your site is broken. And to be fair, it’s the same thing on desktop browsers.
So, like it or not, even if iOS allowed other rendering engines on browsers, you would probably be stuck with supporting Safari anyway.
>nobody it’s going to change browser if your site is broken. Users will just assume your site is broken. And to be fair, it’s the same thing on desktop browsers.
Sorry but, history says otherwise:
1) Netscape users came across "works best in IE" banners and IE usage skyrocketed.
2) IE users came across "works best in Firefox/Chrome" notices and IE usage plummeted in favour of those better browsers.
Chrome didn't get to where it is solely based on marketing - it had some very strong advantages in the early years.
>you would probably be stuck with supporting Safari anyway.
I don't disagree there. But increased competition would force Apple to up their game. A win for everyone.
The debate requires so e nuance, where Chrome and Safari are at both ends of the extreme. The Chrome team seems tk have the resources to churn out one API (proposal and implementation) after the other, some of them are obviously made just for Google products. Safari on the other end does not even seem to care for very prominent APIs that have been standardized with Mozillas Support.
Somewhere in the middle lies Mozilla. They need to stay competitive to chrome, but also want good privacy and most importantly lack the resourcing to just implement all of Googles whims. You don't just implement a Bluetooth API into your browser that works on Windows, mac and Linux!
Users can't make an informed choice about what browser engine they use. They don't understand what a browser engine is, and what impact it has on their security, battery performance and so on.
So no, you can't choose. When we say "you can choose" we need to realize that this is only good when you can make an educated, informed choice. If you can't, you need to be protected. And that's Apple's role.
Random choice is not a choice. Would you have your infant "choose" what drugs to take for headache for example? What criteria will they use? Pill shape, color, size and flavor. Well that's basically also our proverbial mom and pop picking a browser engine.
Furthermore browser engines have this peculiar habit of getting into everything. Open any app at all and it's probably using WebKit without you realizing it. What if the app uses some random outdated fork of Netscape, why not? Do you realize what "choice" you made by opening that app?
Yes, users can make an informed choice about what product to use or to buy. This is true for computers, this is true for mobile devices, this is true for any kind of software, and obviously this is true for web browsers. People have been doing it on all other OSes since web browsers have existed.
There is no reason to prevent competition in such a market, and hopefully regulators will become aware of the issue and act on it soon.
So your answer to all specific problems I stated is "I reject your world and substitute my own".
Not one reasonable and intellectually honest person expects that the average phone user out there even knows what a browser engine IS, let alone compare two of them, or know where it's used (when it's not even disclosed).
Keep in mind smartphones are even more widely used than "computers" in general. So I guess even 8 year olds now are expected to do a security analysis on the browser engine their game uses before playing.
I honestly thought showing how consumers are able to make informed choices in other and as technical markets like computers, mobile devices and other softwares categories, plus the fact that it is the case for web browsers on any other OS, would be two strong enough arguments to dismiss yours...
Probably more than 95% of car owners do not understand how the engine of a car works. So, following your reasoning, it would justify having no competition in the car market?
Thankfully most of the world chose the free-market economy model, of which free competition is a pillar. There is no reason for the web browser market to be an exception and justify obstructed competition like Apple does on iOS.
Consumers clamored for Flash engine, against their interests. Chrome aims to be the new Flash. iPhone rejected one, to the benefit of open web, and must be free to reject the other.
Just because the average consumer doesn't understand browser engines, doesn't mean that those who do should have that option removed. Hide it in developer settings behind three warning prompts for all I care but make the option available to those who want it.
What you suggest actually can't work, it means applications have no control themselves what engine they run on. Browser engines can't just be a config setting, you're basically asking for chaos.
Also you should review what "ad hominem" means. Saying "no one intellectually honest would say 2 + 2 is 5" is not ad hominem.
Ad hominem doesn't mean "don't say bad words about me and my opinions". Ad hominem would be disregarding an opinion not by discussing the opinion, but by discarding the opinion based on WHO said it.
It's in fact very hard to commit ad hominem against an anonymous person online who has said nothing about themselves. If they said "I have a history of delusions" and I said "therefore your opinion has no merit", that's ad hominem.
The fact that despite that you constantly hear people complaining about "ad hominem" online is just that much funnier. Strawman is another one that most people love to say, while having no clue what it means.
You called the argument delusional, and therefore it wasn't an ad hominem, so you're right about that.
But, "Delusional" is often associated with name-calling, so it sounds more like you're calling the person delusional, rather than what they said. Something like "This sounds delusional to me" would avoid that confusion.
But even if I decided to call the commenter names, that wouldn't be ad hominem (link above on details).
It's rude, it's uncivilized maybe, we can have qualifications like that. But it's not "ad hominem", because "ad hominem" isn't about "you insulted someone".
> Users can't make an informed choice about what browser engine they use. They don't understand what a browser engine is, and what impact it has on their security, battery performance and so on.
> So no, you can't choose. When we say "you can choose" we need to realize that this is only good when you can make an educated, informed choice. If you can't, you need to be protected. And that's Apple's role.
I'm getting strong deja vu to arguments over authoritarian nanny states in this.
Even if I accept the contentious value judgment that people need to be guided and protected by an entity that has strongly conflicting interests to them, I still don't think this is a strong argument as the default browser would still be Safari. People with little to no understanding of what a browser is are hardly going to download some outdated fork of Netscape.
> Users can't make an informed choice about what browser engine they use. They don't understand what a browser engine is, and what impact it has on their security, battery performance and so on.
why do they have to make this choice, why can't they just use safari?
> Users can't make an informed choice about what browser engine they use. They don't understand what a browser engine is, and what impact it has on their security, battery performance and so on.
My 80+ year old grandma made the informed choice to use Firefox on macOS. She can't use Firefox on her iPhone. She wants to use Firefox everywhere. She disagrees with you.
I don’t remember my parents losing sleep at night because third party ISP couldn’t get the same access to copper lines. Yet we got meaningful regulation of that market.
I think as long as there’s big enough third parties losing money there is hope for change.
> I've always been baffled by why Google search — the flagship product by the world's largest tech company — has so many totally undocumented features.
If I can speculate on their overall behavior, there's no intent behind this. They are relatively decentralized, and everyone is throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
To have a feature known you need concerted effort by design teams to make it accessible, marketing to make it known and so on. There's nothing of the sort with Google.
Programming is unbounded, it spans the range from so easy, a child can do it untrained, to impossibly complex.
So "it's hard" is the natural outcome, given we always strive to optimize our efforts, therefore we keep pushing programming beyond "it's easy" right until "it's hard" but before "it's impossible".
Therefore programming is most typically "hard" for most people programming at any given moment.
So what does it say and about whom, seems like a wrong question. It only shows a property intrinsic to systems (including social, biological, artificial and so on) and how systems balance themselves.
Hmm, someone downvoted you for asking a good question, for shame, Hacker News.
A printed QR code adds few complications to the process:
- You can't print the QR code with the rest of the cup, as it has to be unique. So we need a separate printing step. That also adds costs, and the question is does it cost almost the same as embedding an RFID chip (which is 7-10 cents).
- You need to align and scan the code before a refill, which is a lot more intentional for a customer, than simply holding the cup for a refill as usual. So it's worse customer experience.
- The only flat surface of the cup is on the bottom, so any spill means you're spilling drinks over the scanner. So that would mean scanners constantly requiring maintenance to keep working.
I'm personally expecting something like 80% humanoids and 20% exotic forms. Maybe I'm primed incorrectly by cheesy soap operas and sci-fi TV shows, but I think they're not far off (even if for unrelated reasons like SFX/VFX budget and character empathy).