Nothing in the law requires the pop up. It definitely doesn’t require the obnoxious bullshit that most companies put up (aka the dark pattern to get you to agree to every unreasonable part of their terms just to read the page).
The alternative would be to just stop invasive tracking and add the cookie when it’s actually needed.
Yes, there's a lot of cargo culting in web development.
Many US based companies also do this for US visitors, which is absolutely not required by the GDPR and related regulations, because they don't apply there.
The law states:
> Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
Strictly necessary:
> These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies.
You don't need consent for MOST reasonable uses of cookies.
If compliance theatre wasn't such an industry the web would be a lot tidier and we could stop blaming the EU for implementing important privacy and data controls.
You’re shifting the goalposts somewhat, but the thing this misses is that the cookie banners are the least important aspect of EU data regulation. The principle of consent and of minimising data held has actually made a substantial different in European firms, mostly for the better.
The cookie popup also more often than not doesn't satisfy GDPR, since the option to remove consent disappears with the popup. These dark patterns emerged because the GDPR was used selectively as a club rather than properly enforced. That led to what another comment refers to as "compliance theatre" rather than actual corporate compliance.
Think of it this way, how would you turn a set into a vector in the first place? We solve this in programming a lot, for example, the "one-hot" encoding for neural networks. Here, a set turns into a vector that has a zero for every item that isn't in the set, a one for every item that is.
Now, there are a lot of things that |v| for a vector can mean. In the L1 distance you just add up the absolute value of each dimension. You could argue that that's a simpler sort of |v| than L2.
And there you go! |S| on a set actually means exactly the same thing as |x| on a vector, if you interpret sets as vectors in the right way.
"Falling behind schedule" doesn't really seem like the right term, for a sector of the economy that has been accelerating for the past few years.
You could easily describe this trend positively rather than negatively, like:
"Google has built an incredible amount of datacenters in the past few years, which makes sense since Google Cloud revenue has tripled since 2021. But they are trying to grow even faster and add more revenue."
Disagree. The idea of rapid data center buildout, to the tune of gigawatts, is a major factor in the valuation of a bunch of companies. Overpromising and underdelivering, when such huge stock valuations are built on those promises, is a genuine problem. The hyperscalars can be building, but if they're building slower than their investors expect, it's still a real problem which can be fairly described as "falling behind schedule"
I don't think it's nonsensical, it's just another name for the same thing. E.g. in the Haskell wiki it says, "the Error monad, also called the Exception monad".
I was unaware of "Exception monad" being an industry equivalent term for Either/Error. Given no other context, desiring an "Exception monad" could be interpreted as "a type which handles raising Exception types." Which is how I did.
At first I though the Apple one had a half-dozen departments actually coordinating on something, but then I took a closer look and realized it's just more micromanagement.
There’s an interview with someone talking about Steve having an extreme melt down rage about the header not being technically centered in one spot on the Apple page.
I want to see his reaction trying to type a message on the iPhone keyboard from anytime in the past 7 years.
Or navigate the random nonsensical grouping of stuff in settings that got so out of control they added a search bar or watch a pip video or really use anything. Every feature has some sloppy problem.
It used to be excusable as nobody else was trying and they’d be working to fix it. Now they just add a feature that’s sub par to things already out there, no innovation, and then it feels sloppy. Most things just don’t feel good to use down to the size and weight of phones now. Rather than fix the problem Apple just keeps copying the homework and claiming they can’t fix perfect.
Steve would be punching holes in the wall. Probably would stomp a hole through the floor to strangle the keyboard team
And that's just the iPhone keyboard. The physical keyboards on MacBookPros are still terrible. I've had two of them where some of the keys shorted out or stopped working. Eventually, thinness has diminishing returns. I'd rather have a thicker/heavier keyboard where the keys don't die.
My thought on this was always that micromanaging in this structure is rational and maybe even the best. It's not really a Jobs thing—though he's (right or wrong) probably the picture most people have in their head when they think of visionary CEO—it's just that if the leader has a vision then it is great if they're capable of having everything run through them. It's when there's no vision at the top and no leaders sitting across the silos pulling things together that it helps the company to have people below with increasing autonomy. Whether the autonomous people should be higher or lower depends on which other org structure you've chosen. Silos are fine when leaders have a vision. That said, I haven't seen many groups that placed power in the place where their chosen org structure is meant to place power.
This is 2011 though, a lot has changed since then. I doubt Facebook/Meta, for instance, is still as flat as it was then having read some ex-employee accounts
It's an especially awkward situation because Railway is a competitor of Google Cloud, with many third parties involved. So, I just think it will take them a little more time to figure out how to message things.
To me, what it sounds like is that a Google Cloud system identified Railway as a misbehaving customer. Spam, hackers, that sort of thing. Often this happens for "platform as a service" companies, because Railway themselves probably do host some spammers and hackers, and they have their own systems for dealing with it.
So, it's quite possible that according to the Google team, Railway violated the terms of something or other, and according to the Railway team, they did not, and now everyone has to argue about it.
But who knows, this is just me guessing based on some experience running a PaaS that itself was running on top of AWS.
Railway's system for dealing with hackers is a $5/mo fee gate.
Railway plays around vibecoding as they go along, and their tech practices don't inspire confidence either. Unlike other PaaS like Render or Heroku, I doubt Railway has adequate rate-limiting to stop bad apples.
Yeah, and rate-limiting is only one of the things a PaaS needs to handle, to avoid looking like a bad actor to the underlying platform. The trickiest thing to handle is people using your PaaS to host malware, because:
1. There may be no simple rule of thumb like "suddenly using tons of bandwidth"
2. Bad actors can open up so many accounts, you have to close them automatically
3. Malware can infect a good actor, who is unaware or struggling to deal with it
I didn't dig into what the actual repository was doing, but personally, I took some inspiration from the idea after reading about it and realizing that I might have been underestimating the ability of LLMs. I put a bit more work into a performance harness I was using locally and just set some agents to brainstorming and they did seem to find some great stuff. So I don't really have a stance one way or another on this specific repo, but the general idea seems like a really good one.
Could you elaborate in specifics how you had been underestimating models? Ypu mean just using more tighter harnessing to make them work in structured agentic eay or something else?
The specific code I was working on, I had a general idea of the sort of performance improvement that would be possible. I just thought that it would be too hard for the models to figure out without a lot of hand-holding.
But it ended up being not "too hard ever", but more like, in 1 out of every 5 tries, the model did in fact manage to get a large refactoring to the point where it improved performance. So once I set it up to try something, use the perf test, see if it worked, if not, throw it away, repeat. Then it started, slowly, finding some useful things.
Just remember that the will do clever but useless things to improve. Like changing the random seed as per autoresearch's hero image. lol! imo, out of the box thinking is needed.
“In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”
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