They shouldn't be able to collect it in the first place. The big companies have 10 page agreements that say they "value" your privacy and that they don't sell your data to third parties. They do value it, highly. And they don't sell it--they just hoard it, mine it, and sell increasingly accurate targeting. Why would they give it up? I mean, besides coughing it up with little objection to national security letters.
The problem is that this includes literally everything on a cloud service. My emails and documents on Gmail/Google Drive is my personal data. My email on Fastmail is my personal data, even if they’re privacy friendly. So that service would be illegal.
Even having an account at all, and being able to see that I have a subscription, or that I previously watched that video, is personal data they collected.
So the Privacy Policy is what you “agree” to let the company do with that data. How do you even begin to differentiate the superfluous stuff they track just for ads, on a technical level without workarounds?
And then think about banning “transferring personal data to a 3rd party.” Does that mean I can’t host account data on AWS, or use a hosted database, be causing I’m transferring data to a different company which can presumably also access it? That’s what the privacy policy has to allow, and why sites have so many “partner services”
Why does anyone trust any device? The surveillance capitalism is just sleepwalking towards disaster, but nobody cares because of the pretty screen and the goddamn brainrot content.
That 2% of performance we got for not having bounds checks on by default, resulting in an endless march of memory safety violations is looking a lot less appealing.
We're still in early stages, but in just 2 years AI has presented higher education with the single most disruptive change in decades. Now a computer can do your entire coursework for you, is available to converse on a broad range of topics, and can accomplish unaided huge open-ended problems.
> most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.
I think your timeline expectations are miscalibrated. The steam engine goes back centuries. Even in the mid 1700s to 1800s, advances in engine design were decades apart, and the logistics of building and deploying steam engines mandated an uptake in years, even in perfectly-fitted applications.
Like these applications where there were existing manual-labor solutions that not only fought the technology but were still competitive, AI and LLMs weren't born in a vacuum. In order to revolutionize, it must displace, and people are rightly finding ways to do their jobs in more productive ways that moderate adoption speed.
Can you name some other technologies that have exploded from 0 to billions of users in just 3 years?
Tech is the way it is because Big Tech wants it to be. Social media is engineered to be the most profitable for the big corporations who run the attention economy which incidentally is a surveillance and content exploitation economy hosting too many narcissists yammering for attention. The software world is several stages of enshittification deep, and yet we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes.
> we're awash in incredible hardware that would be mind-blowing if we weren't so constantly distracted with how much noise and bother the software makes.
This is the part of it that bums me out the most. I just wish aesthetics didn't drive so much of the current tech world. Everything has an absolutely beautiful interface now that is slow, buggy, can't be shared, etc. But I guess at least it's pretty and pays the bills.
He made the touch screen interface into a low latency, multi-touch musical instrument. I couldn't seem to find if he had made this program open source or otherwise available, but it looks pretty cool.
I am amazed at the displays, CPUs, memory, networks, storage, and not to mention GPUs of 2026. They are really incredible. Then I derp around on my tablet with these clunky ad-laden websites with extremely poor layout, janky scrolling, barely registering my fat finger flailings, alternating between hitting a one pixel button amongst a sea of mis-aligned text and a grid of six big stupid square things, two of which are ads, and all of which are algorithm-computed content that isn't really what I wanted to see...
Big Tech is nefarious, but not the only force to blame. I think that modern internet use would be inferior to the early millennium regardless, just because people's main interface these days is the smartphone with its small screen and keyboard, and that tends to discourage long-form text and nuance. If you look at libre corners of the internet, they have seen that decline nearly as much as corporate platforms.
that sounds horribly token inefficient, just create a tool call if you are all in on the agentic approach and hide memory retrieval behind an optimized api
They already have. The tool is called bash and optimized api is grep, the storage is the file system. We’ve been here many months.
What people are exploring are other options as far as I can tell.
What you are offering is “don’t do that, this already works”. Which I guess is fine, but apparently not everyone is fully satisfied with the current generation of tooling.
Yeah but probably the whole of the memories for any given project will likely fit into context, and the agent can’t extract whatever it wants for the given task. Grep only comes in if they choose to narrow down the candidate memory files, and they are usually searching many keywords and synonyms.
Of course a real search system with ranking and whatnot would be better, but you’re paying a different cost there.
I’m personally more interested in how the memory files get created and updated and generally managed, retrieving the correct ones doesn’t seem to be a big problem at the moment.
I primarily use gh copilot and they are by default hidden from the user. It’s also not great that they aren’t in the repo and every contributor has their own set of memories of different freshness, likely conflicting.
Nothing means anything without consequences. You can write all the amendments you want, but if they intentionally disable and dismantle all means of holding them accountable, the Constitution doesn't mean anything. They can't even follow the plain text of blatantly clear amendments like the 14th.
My proposal is that there is a punishment for blatantly ignoring the 14th amendment. That’s the point, become an executive of the government comes with an affirmative obligation to actually enforce the law and a judicial review and cause of action that citizens can bring for
Failure to comply with that commitment.
This comment vaguely blames immigrants for not having an escape plan. Millions of people immigrate to the US through all the right mechanisms and follow all the laws and have every intention of staying forever and becoming citizens. Scaring their pants off is an unnecessarily hostile and unwelcoming act that is unbecoming of this country.
> in order to keep housing prices lower for residents
And where do they live? They rent. So this jacks up rents for everyone, not just for immigrants, but for any who cannot afford to buy.
Basically everything you say and also imply makes life worse for immigrants and better for wealthy residents. It even makes life worse for poor residents.
I know, pretty much everyone on HN is a self-selected group that's pretty high up on the privilege/luck/wealth scale.
I immigrated to Germany from the US in 2013. My employer handled basically everything--even hired a personal assistant to accompany me to the immigration office and help with finding housing, which is pretty competitive in a major German city.
Honestly, immigration for highly skilled tech people is a walk in the park compared to basically everyone else. I used the term privileged because it's accurate--and I daresay it was a tad bit easier being white, having an advanced degree in tech, and even having some German roots. My experience was absolutely not what other people immigrating to Germany face, as they come from all over the place, there are far fewer slots, and there's a host of soft discrimination that even Eastern Europeans face trying to come to Germany. Like everywhere, there's xenophobia and isolationism, mistrust, and blame. Literally the exact same arguments, finger-pointing, suspicion. And that didn't fall on me.
I moved back to the US and handled the backend of that process, which honestly isn't too bad, but it was so much harder to deal with than one would expect--and that was just leaving. I have a bit of German language skills but legal German is a whole other matter.
When I read OP's comment it raised my hackles because it just sounds incredibly tone deaf. Lots of people want to come to America, and it isn't easy, even doing it right. Telling them they need to be prepared to get kicked out at the drop of a hat is a shitty welcome.
If we want to have reasonable controls on immigration and a better policy, I'm all for it, but let's focus on things that would work without screwing people over and treating them like subhuman garbage like this administration has. Limit the number of visas, handle visa overstays better. A ham-fisted, incompetent over-correction that has untrained meatheads shooting US citizens in the streets with no consequence isn't it.
I don't have a lot of patience for anyone carrying water for this administration. Not a thimble-full. If you think you have nuanced, smart-sounding take on immigration but is just victim-blaming, then it deserves to be challenged. I haven't got time for the leading edge of the Overton-window people who just can't confront their deep anti-immigrant biases and provide cover for the tragic and cruel things that are going down as we speak.
I have never had a silver spoon expat package. When I live abroad, I DIY: navigating immigration processes without employer or legal assistance.
I am extremely mindful that the visa that I am using is temporary. Perhaps as a white person in Asia, I'm reminded daily that I am a guest and that I don't accidentally fall into a mindset that misaligns with my visa status.
Its insane the hoops that I have to jump through that American Immigrants don't. For example, this week my landlord cut off my water and ended my lease due to me failing register an overnight guest with the local government. [0]
In the USA, its very expensive to find people that overstay, but in Vietnam b/c the government tracks everyone, they know exactly where you sleep every night.
I know that: "just because you have it bad, doesn't mean we have to have it bad." but the US system is much much more kind than any country I have lived in.
In the USA, we pay you to leave. In Thailand or Vietnam, they can toss you in jail if you can't pay the overstay fine.
The US economy provides a lot more resources for immigrants. In Vietnam, a 'good' salary is $850usd/mo. The lawyer I spoke to about assisting me said her hourly rate is $300/mo...
[0] - there is more to the story, for brevity ill just leave it short.
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