Main issue comes from GDPR. When one uses the consent basis for collecting and using information it has to be a free choice. Thus one can’t offer “Pay us and we collect less information about you”. Hence “pay or consent” is blatantly illegal. Showing ads in generic? You don’t need consent. That consent is “I vote with my browser address bar”. Thing just is nobody anymore wants to use non tracked ads…

So in this case DMA 5(2) is just basically re-enforcement and emphasis of previous GDPR principle. from verge

“exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data.”

from the regulation

2. The gatekeeper shall not do any of the following:
   (a) process, for the purpose of providing online advertising services, personal data of end users using services of third parties that make use of core platform services of the gatekeeper;
   (b) combine personal data from the relevant core platform service with personal data from any further core platform services or from any other services provided by the gatekeeper or with personal data from third-party services;
   © cross-use personal data from the relevant core platform service in other services provided separately by the gatekeeper, including other core platform services, and vice versa; and
   (d) sign in end users to other services of the gatekeeper in order to combine personal data,

unless the end user has been presented with the specific choice and has given consent within the meaning of Article 4, point (11), and Article 7 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679.

surprise 2016/679 is… GDPR. So yeah it’s new violation, but pretty much it is “Gatekeepers are under extra additional scrutiny for GDPR stuff. You violate, we can charge you for both GDPR and DMA violation, plus with some extra rules and explicity for DMA”.

I think technically already GDPR bans combining without permission, since GDPR demands permission for every use case for consent based processing. There must be consent for processing… combining is processing, needs consent. However this is interpretation of the general principle of GDPR. It’s just that DMA makes it explicit “oh these specific processing, yeah these are processing that need consent per GDPR”. Plus it also rules them out of trying to argue “justified interest” legal basis of processing case of the business. Explicitly ruling “these type of processing don’t fall under justified interest for these companies, these are only and explicitly per consent type actions”.

Always 50/50 because two party system, FPTP and electoral college.

That is just its core function doing its thing transforming inputs to outputs based on learned pattern matching.

It may not have been trained on translation explicitly, but it very much has been trained on these are matching stuff via its training material. Since you know what its training set most likely contained… dictionaries. Which is as good as asking it to learn translation. Another stuff most likely in training data: language course books, with matching translated sentences in them. Again well you didnt explicitly tell it to learn to translate, but in practice the training data selection did it for you.

Well it could also be a lever or a switch.

Newer ever take Klarnas word for anything. They are the fine and Dandy company whose business model involved by routine fishing for customers bank authorization credentials.

Well difference is you have to know coming to know did the AI produce what you actually wanted.

Anyone can read the letter and know did the AI hallucinate or actually produce what you wanted.

On code. It might produce code, that by first try does what you ask. However turns AI hallucinated a bug into the code for some edge or specialty case.

Hallucinating is not a minor hiccup or minor bug, it is fundamental feature of LLMs. Since it isn’t actually smart. It is a stochastic requrgitator. It doesn’t know what you asked or understand what it is actually doing. It is matching prompt patterns to output. With enough training patterns to match one statistically usually ends up about there. However this is not quaranteed. Thus the main weakness of the system. More good training data makes it more likely it more often produces good results. However for example for business critical stuff, you aren’t interested did it get it about right the 99 other times. It 100% has to get it right, this one time. Since this code goes to a production business deployment.

I guess one can code comprehensive enough verified testing pattern including all the edge cases and with thay verify the result. However now you have just shifted the job. Instead of programmer programming the programming, you have programmer programming the very very comprehensive testing routines. Which can’t be LLM done, since the whole point is the testing routines are there to check for the inherent unreliability of the LLM output.

It’s a nice toy for someone wanting to make a quick and dirty test code (maybe) to do thing X. Then try to find out does this actually do what I asked or does it have unforeseen behavior. Since I don’t know what the behavior of the code is designed to be. Since I didn’t write the code. good for toying around and maybe for quick and dirty brainstorming. Not good enough for anything critical, that has to be guaranteed to work with promise of service contract and so on.

So what the future real big job will be is not prompt engineers, but quality assurance and testing engineers who have to be around to guard against hallucinating LLM/ similar AIs. Prompts can be gotten from anyone, what is harder is finding out did the prompt actually produced what it was supposed to produce.

Statistical photography aka computational photography aka supersampling. Statistically bin together number of smaller pixels to cut the amount of noise to create picture of a lower resolution than sensor level, but better quality.

Road or cycleway. Pedestrian only sidewalk is not place for bicycles or scooters due to their greater speed.

There is combined cycleway and walkways, but there the point is those are wider than mere sidewalks, so there is room for cycles and scooters to safely overtake pedestrians.

Well even on not being rare, lynxes are stalking predators. Given what noisy clumsy travels us humans are and their keen senses, one is lucky to see a lynx. Since firstly they are always stalking or hiding just naturally and specially so hiding upon most likely spotting human way before human spots them. One could go right by one and not notice it. We aren’t on their menu given our size and not being normally encountered prey species. Also as stalkers unless it is something like a mother lynx protecting its young, it won’t make itself known. Far rather hides and let’s you pass without encounter. Since one less risk of the lynx getting injured in fight, if it can’t just hide away and go unnoticed.

Though on top of that some species of lynx are very endangered.

Well many adblockers can be clever enough to load the asset, but then just drop it. As in yeah the ad image got downloaded to browser, but then the page content got edited to drop the display of the add or turn it to not shown asset in css.

This is age old battle. Site owners go you must do X or no media. However then ad blocker just goes “sure we do that, but then we just ghost the ad to the user”.

Some script needs to be loaded, that would display the ad? All the parts of the script get executed and… then CSS intervention just ghosts the ad that should be playing and so on.

Since the browser and extension are in ultimate control. As said the actual add video might be technically “playing” in the background going through motions, but it’s a no show, no audio player… ergo in practice the ad was blocked, while technically completely executed.

Hence why they want to scan for the software, since only way they can be sure ad will be shown is by verifying a known adhering to showing the ad software stack.

Well EU says that is not allowed, because privacy. Ergo the adblocker prevention is playing a losing battle. Whatever they do on the “make sure ad is shown” side, adblocker maker will just implement counter move.

Don’t threaten us with good time, Elon.

Also no way he is going through. He is way too much in financial hole to give up European market. Like Google or Meta, sure they have the financial standing to maybe pull such move and survive.

Xitter? They need every visitor and account they can have globally to even think about staying viable.

Empty bluster and pointless empty bluster, since EU would just go “fine. Our continental economy or prosperity doesn’t depend on your social media company. Social media isn’t a critical industry, so we are just fine with you leaving. Plus there is 10 others like you anyway”.

You can’t threaten people with something that doesn’t damage them and heck might be seen as benefit.

It will at minimum be a fight. It won’t just sail through. Also whole governments being against means one of them might challenge the law in to European Court of Justice. Since as nation-states also often have, EU itself has charter of rights part in the fundamental EU treaties. It also has normal limit and share of powers. EU Council and Parliament aren’t all powerfull. ECJ can rule a directive or regulation to be against the core treaties like Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Said charter does include in it right to privacy (which explicitly mentions right to privacy in ones communications) and protection of personal data. Obviously none of these are absolute, but it means such wide tampering as making encryption illegal might very well be deemed to wide a breach of right to private communications.

Oh and those who might worry they wouldn’t dare at ECJ… ECJ has twice struck down the data protection agreement negotiated by EU with USA over “USA privacy laws are simply incompatible, no good enough assurances can be given by USA as long as USA has as powerful spying power laws as it has”. Each time against great consternation and frankly humiliating black eye to the Commission at the time.

ECJ doesn’t mess around and doesn’t really care their ruling being mighty politically inconvenient and/or expensive to EU or it’s memberstates. They are also known for their stance that privacy is a corner stone civil right (as stated in the charter and human rights conventions also, their legal basis) and take it very seriously as key part of democracy and protection of democracy. Without free and private communications and expression there can be no free political discussion, without free political discussion there can be no democracy.

As I remember at the moment partly Von Der Leyen, the current Commission president. She is a German Christian democrat and apparently bit with capital C. Meaning she has bit of a moral panic streak on her of the “won’t you think of the children” variety. As I understand this current proposal is very much driven by her.

However her driving it doesn’t mean it sail through to pass as legislation. Some whole memberstate governments are against the encryption busting idea.

Also I would add, not like this is unanimously supported in EU among memberstates. So this isn’t a done deal, this is a legislative proposal. Ofcourse everyone should activate and campaign on this, but its not like this is “Privacy activists vs all of EU and all the member state governments” situation. Some official government positions on this one are “this should not pass like it is, breaking the encryption is bad idea”.

Wouldn’t be first time EU commission proposal falls. Plus as you said ECJ would most likely rule it as being against the Charter of Rights of European Union as too wide breach of right to privacy.

Also I would add inflation went up, prices jumped. Meaning not so much free spending cash any more. People might have previously had the cash to update phone, just for sake of update even without it being necessary. Now days? People have way more important things they have to spend more money on.