Now I'm feeling how bad it is on the other side of the fence, and the funny thing is people don't seem to give a shit because they never experienced decent regulation and being fucked by brands is just the way of life.

As regards the lesser availability of American tech, I'm sure that's much more limited in China, which coincidentally happens to have the most notable domestic AI industry outside of the US. It's something that economists can be reluctant to admit, but for which there's solid evidence by now afaik, that at least temporary import barriers, if done right, can be a boost to industrial development. The thing that is weird about the EU regulation is that they're putting the same shackles on their domestic tech industry, which is dwarfed by the giant US incumbents who have more resources to invest in compliance than startups (apart from the bits that apparently only target said encumbants that some posters have mentioned here, which I don't know anything about).

I don't get spam mailing lists or robocalls. I can safely sign up to services knowing I will be able to unsubscribe easily. I can buy things online knowing they can be easily returned.

Yes, some of my clients lament the inability to use those patterns. I politely smile and nod.

It was a bit of a pain to manually reject all the _purposefully_ annoying cookie consent banners that companies started pulling, but now there's plugins for that, which rejects everything for me by default.

Is it possible for the law to be amended so that non-EU citizens can use a browser flag that just says "I'm fine withe the cookies"? That way Europeans can enjoy all the cookie consent clicking and the rest of us can go back to how the web was before?

Yes, because I can tell them to fuck off from harvesting all my data and have an easy, legally enforceable way to tell them to delete whatever data they've harvested off me. I've reported a few websites that have done shady shit with the cookie banners and even saw them get some fines, so I'm perfectly happy that companies can't hoover up any and all data about me that they want to feed the pockets of some rich assholes an ocean over.

If a company can't exist without massive privacy violations and personal data exfiltration then they deserve to die.

Yes, "you chose to use them so you decided to follow their terms of use and privacy clauses" but key here is how you're more and more often required to use certain services online or you're put at significant disadvantages ranging from keeping in touch with your family or friends to being disadvantaged in the job market.

* https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/11/16/preview...

And even though I tend to complain about UNIX like OSes, maybe they are the key to free Europe from US corporations operating systems, like a few other countries are already doing as well.

We should stick to international regulated programing languages and OSes, that free us from dependencies on export technology regulations.

Absolutely. It goes far beyond cookie management, it's a fundamental thing about what you're allowed to do with my data without my consent.

You know you can block them right? Ublock origin has "annoyances" in the lists, just tick that.

It is very annoyous but it is also the choice of the sites, you can put a discret banner at the bottom and not disrupt the reading if you want to not annoy people.

These "regulations against us giants" may also have positive effects. They forced Microsoft to offer a choice of browsers on Windows, something requested by Firefox and Opera and that killed Internet Explorer and permitted modern browsers including Google Chrome to florish.

The cookie banners are a bad outcome for sure, but GDPR does not mandate them. They are an indirect result of the bureaucracy installed by GDPR which does not incentivize user-friendly design of privacy-aware features. I don’t want GDPR rolled back, even as a software developer, because I think it creates the kind of protections everyone in the world should have. But I would like a rule clarification on how to build compliant websites without cookie banners, so I blame the administration (the EU commission) but not the legislation.

The digital markets act similarly is the kind of regulation we need everywhere. It’s only hostile to online businesses because other places don’t have those kind of guard rails on the abusive behavior of big tech.

Now, as far as the EU AI act. I think that in its original intent when it was specifically targeting things like public face recognition by governments it was a very good idea, but it has been hijacked and in its current form it would be very harmful if passed. I don’t think it particularly targets american tech companies, because the biggest victims would be EU AI startups like Mistral.

And also let me mention the unified usb-c atpater regulation, the opening of messenger protocols and app shops! I honestly believe the EU is making tech better for the whole world!

you're picking out the cookie banner (which is annoying mostly because companies aren't implementing it properly) which is just a small part of a wealth of regulations which give us control over our data. and then you're ignoring all the other extremely valuable regulations that protect customers. and online shops are still able to make a profit here. they just can't completely abuse their customers as they please. yet. for the most part.

That said, as with most heavy bureaucracies there's just not enough internal organisational tech education so lobbying and misunderstandings end up diluting the process.

Example is the cookie banners leading people away from smaller competitors strengthening monopolies, and teaching people to click at 100 banners a day because no one has time to read so much.

Another is GDPR policies which are great but a huge hassle for smaller orgs and companies, and not really targeted them in the first place.

Everything always ends up a win for the largest players, while the smaller ones struggle to maintain legality.

That has been my experience with a few GDPR processes.

Another annoying thing is the forced Public Procurements of software solutions if you're more than 50% publicly funded in EU.

Again good intentions but it just makes the big players hire huge amounts of lawyers and sales people to game the process to win then create bad software.

That's the problem with regulation. The free market is definitely not free after consolidation and monopolisation but if you're going to regulate you need the absolute best consultants to guide the process and somehow that step always gets bungled.

Also, you see how hostile some stuff in the US is to non-US visitors. Lots of local US news sites, for instance, just throw a plain HTTP error at you because they don't want to mess with GDPR.

Sadly the EU is being led by a clique of unelected beaurocrats (commisars - like in the USSR) and the most democratic of institutions - the EU parliament as well as national parliaments have very little influence on what is being proposed and bulldozed in. For example, let's say in a given country literaly everyone is opposed to ACTA and the country has the balls to veto it (despite the beaurocrat's usual tricks of rolling in together things everyone wants and needs with absolute crap like ACTA). The same idea is brought back again 2 years later (ACTA v2). It is vetoed again, it is brought back again 2 years later and this time bypasses the veto by being "voluntary". "Countries that don't want it don't need to implement" - great on paper. Until you realise most people in the EU oppose it, including in the countries that implement it and by the fact of implementing it in the majority they make it a de-facto standard which increases the cost of doing business affected in the countries that now have differing regulations.

Same thing is being done with the "EU constitution". No one, other than it's rulers, wants the EU to be a country. The idea got shot down immediately in a popular vote. So they are essentially implementing it anyway bit by bit by stretching the law and outright breaking it (especially against countries that vote in parties that are not in the EPP club).

I'm a big fan of the idea of EU as it was before the treaty of Nice. It was a group of countries with similar values creating an open market and agreeing to make decisions affecting it together. Sadly the institutions that were created to oversee that structure have the priorities of their own (increasing their own power) and using both the method mentioned above and simply doing things "extra legally" (as lawyers say) they do whatever they want and if the extremely corrupt "court" tied to them decides it's OK there is no way to question it. These bastards say they are "strenghtening the EU". They are destroying it. Anti EU sentiment is increasing especially amongst younger voters in many countries and guess who will be very happy when it all goes tits up? One guy called Putin who has been financing a lot of the corruption we see (through countries like Qatar etc).

Google has far too many services and products which are always touching the boundaries defined by the EU privacy laws. they trip the line with anything and the regulators can make it much harder/costlier for Google to do business in EU.

Don't buy into marketing. If it's not in your own hands to judge for yourself, then it might as well be literally science fiction.

I do agree with you that competition is good and when massive companies compete it's us who win!

There is nothing in any of Google's claims that preclude the architecture being the same kind of composite system. Maybe with some additional blending in of multimodal training earlier in the process than has been published so far. And perhaps also unlike GPT-4V, they might have aligned a pretrained audio model to eliminate the need for a separate speech recognition layer and possibly solving for multi-speaker recognition by voice characteristics, but they didn't even demo that... Even this would not be groundbreaking though. ImageBind from Meta demonstrated the capacity align an audio model with an LLM in the same way images models have been aligned with LLMs. I would perhaps even argue that Google skipping the natural language intermediate step between LLM output and image generation is actually in support of the position that they may be using projection layers to create interfaces between these modalities. However, this direct image generation projection example was also a capability published by Meta with ImageBind.

What seems more likely, and not entirely unimpressive, is that they refined those existing techniques for building composite multimodal systems and created something that they plan to launch soon. However, they still have crucially not actually launched it here. Which puts them in a similar position to when GPT-4 was first announced with vision capabilities, but then did not offer them as a service for quite an extended time. Google has yet to ship it, and as a result fails to back up any of their interesting claims with evidence.

Most of Google's demos here are possible with a clever interface layer to GPT-4V + Whisper today. And while the demos 'feel' more natural, there is no claim being made that they are real-time demos, so we don't know how much practical improvement in the interface and user experience would actually be possible in their product when compared to what is possible with clever combinations of GPT-4V + Whisper today.

I think it's app only though

Google being more open here about what they do is in their favor.

Silicon Valley hates Canada.

Sounds like it's you that needs to calm down a bit. God forbid we get some competition.

At the end of the day, the employees have a much cushier life-work balance. You can argue (rightfully) that that's better for the people and society, but it also means it's harder for companies to succeed.

1. This stuff is available in like Angola and Thailand but not in Germany or France. Oh how the European giant has fallen.

2. ... but it's also not available in the UK. So the long shadow of EU nonsense affects us too :-(

The legal cost of dealing with a few _mistaken_ (or fake) GDPR complaints can wipe you out.

The bigger company will have inhouse or retainered lawyers who'll deal with it.

Almost all regulation acts as a barrier which protects bigger companies who can pay lawyer fees without blinking.

It's amazing how much of the HN crowd sides with the bureaucracies which are basically pals of the guys with deep pockets.

Googled "What was the website that showed two movie posters and you picked the one you liked more?" and I got links to reddit, lots to letterboxd, some quora, and a lot more, all irrelevant to my question.

Asked ChatGPT that same question verbatim and

> The website you're referring to is probably "Flickchart." It's a platform where users can compare and rank movies by choosing which one they like more between two movie posters or movie titles. Please note that my knowledge is up to date as of January 2022, and the availability and popularity of such websites may change over time.

Another time I was looking for the release dates of 8 and 16-bit consoles. With Google I had to search for each console individually, sometimes offered a card with the release date, sometimes didn't and I'd have to go do more digging.

So I asked ChatGPT and got a nice formatted list with dates

I had a question about adding new RAM to my computer, about what things I should take into account since the original brand no longer makes paired dimms that match my current spec. It gave me a big bullet list of all of the things I should compare between my current ram, my current motherboard and any new ram I would choose to buy to ensure compatibility.

Both of these are things I might have gone to Google (or even reddit) for previously but I believed I could get faster answers from ChatGPT. I was right in both cases. I didn't have to construct a complicated query, I didn't have to filter SEO spam. I just asked the question in natural language as it appeared in my mind and ChatGPT gave excellent answers with very little delay.

GPT4 has plugin support. One of the plugins is Internet access via Bing. It automatically chooses which plugins to call upon based on the context it infers from your question - you don't have to select anything.

Here's an example: https://chat.openai.com/share/be3821e7-1403-44fb-b833-1c73f3...

It correctly finds a texture atlas example by discovering it nested inside of Bevy's github.

Note that it didn't summarize when I didn't say to conditionally consider summarizing. I consider this poor behavior, but I'm confident it would elaborate if I followed up. The initial seed prompt by OpenAI encourages concise answers (likely as cost saving measure but also for brevity)

I realize this is just a glorified "I'm Feeling Lucky" search, but I find it to be a much better UX, so I default to it over Googling. It's nice to be able to seamlessly transition from "search" to "brainstorm/discuss" without losing context.

In the same way google/search made it possible to answer a question in real-time in a group of friends, ChatGPT does that but better in most cases. Yes, you have to deal with hallucinations and while they happen less often they do happen but you have to deal with crap in web searches as well.

Search is a super-power (most people suck at searching) and being able to grab information via ChatGPT feels very similar.

Prior to ChatGPT, the majority of my Google searches ended up on either Wikipedia (for direct information), Reddit (for opinions/advice), or StackOverflow (for programming questions).

Now all those use cases can be done by ChatGPT, and it’s faster, especially because it requires less skimming to find useful data.

Here’s a humorous example from a recent GPT-mediated search: https://chat.openai.com/share/ec874cd5-7314-4abc-b169-607601...

2. Most quick general purpose questions like "What is 4-month sleep regression in babies?" go to GPT-3.5

3. If I want to deep dive on a topic, I find myself either using one of the custom GPTs (Grimoire is great for coding), or increasingly, talking to it via voice chat. It's particularly great if I'm walking around the house doing chores and want to learn something I would otherwise turn to Wikipedia for (say, the successors to Genghis Khan and the various Khanates).

Granted I use ChatGPT-4 with subscription but if later the online RAG browsing feature is opened for free to the public I can see more people abandoning Google for casual searching (i.e most of the Internet users). They keyword here is 'casual' and what LLM provided us is the intuitive nature of searching using it even with miss spellings or missing words.

I think Google is realizing this and before this exodus really happened it needs to do something otherwise the adage of "nothing last forever" will come true sooner or later for Google. The main thing for Google now is how to monetize this technology assuming that they have similar product because all this while they are struggling with Deepmind to generate income and, voila ChatGPT just shows them how to do it. Now it seems they are taking a page from Apple (highest ranked company by market value) by providing tiers of service Ultra, Pro and Nano, and me think the Ultra will be most probably subscription based.

"What is that annoying thing where I have to click on on all the websites. Because of cookies and Europe"

Google: Links to things full of SEO and ads and maybe answer the question eventually.

ChatGPT: The "annoying accept" button you often have to click on websites, particularly in Europe, is related to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area. It also addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas.

Websites are required to get your consent before they can store or retrieve any information on your device, such as cookies. Cookies are small data files used to remember your preferences, login information, and browsing history. The GDPR mandates that websites must inform users about the cookies they use and obtain their consent before placing these cookies on their devices.

This is why you see those cookie consent notices – websites are legally obligated to ask for your permission to use cookies, and you must actively agree to it, usually by clicking an "Accept" button. This process aims to protect your privacy and give you more control over your personal data online.

Whatever you call it, this thing is the closest to a human that a machine has ever been. Talking to chatGPT is quite close to talking to a human being that has the knowledge of all of google inside his brain.

If you're a developer and you're not paying for chatGPT or copilot you are literally operating at a disadvantage. Not a joke.

In this case, it's just directing to the service you would have best fit with.

This can be highly profitable, because you are solving the problem for the customer with the products you are suggesting based on what they are looking to solve.

My guess is the delay is due to GDPR or other regulatory challenges.