The problem is that they also need to be big enough not to be rolled by aggressive behaviour such as lawsuits, pressure from politicians, etc. I mean, some of my domains are at a tiny company run by geeks, but I wouldn't really blame them for caving if someone really put the heat on them.
There's a certain threshold above which you want to use the "law firm with in-house domain registry" type. I think the threshold is pretty high though, definitely "call us for a quote" territory. But you will notice that big companies like Amazon and Google that have their own registry, don't use it for their critical domains - such as Google.com or Amazon.com.
In the UK, the old common law
rule does not apply to land that has been registered centrally, that is then the legal definition of who owns the property. However there are still properties that are not registered and for those, the rule you describe is still applicable; the holder of the deeds is the owner.
Registration is now compulsory on sales, but that only came in in 1990.
As to what I mean by binned, I mean literally binned, thrown away.
The UK used to have a distributed system - everyone had to have a solicitor store "deeds" of their property, which were a sort of paper blockchain of all the transactions the land had been in since - I don't know, since records began I guess. Since we got a centralised land registry cheaper solicitors have binned these, but some properties still have them as a historical record.
I understand the frustration, but it's justifiable for the public to be concerned about AI in general because the novelty of the technology means that boundaries between beneficial and problematic usage is not yet stable and well defined. For existing technologies consensus on that has usually been reached, although it changes over time. In many cases we may not yet have enough information to decide.
Nor is this a trivial decision. AI has the potential to change society and economic relations as profoundly as the industrial revolution, or the invention of the printing press.
These boundaries are also contested, as interests which benefit from a particular application are different from those whose interests are harmed. Society needs to identify which usages have a net benefit.
It also needs to define which usages cause "absolute" harms which is will consider unacceptable regardless of benefits to some parties. Such as, potentially, reductions in personal autonomy, increased leverage or dominance by government or private interests.
Not only that, but data and models which were collected/ built for one purpose can easily be adapted for others.
This is also basically now happening all at once in many domains.
In short, you can expect there to be tension over these boundaries for some time. It's not realistic to expect that others will agree with your personal perception of which applications are "obviously" unproblematic.
The problem with this line of thinking is that the more humanity succeeds at becoming efficient at providing for its essential goods and services, the more the economy rests on unnecessary ones. Should we really accept that the more successful we are, the less individuals can expect to be valued?
Yeah that happens all the time. Anyone/thing with popular public releases has fans/journeys scraping the website looking for unreleased material or scoops.
In the early days one of the high profile soaps in the UK published their "catch up" summaries for the week ahead which you could get just by editing the date in the URL. But back then not so many people were looking, so they were doing it for months...
In the semiconductor industry this role is called Field Application Engineer. They do serious work, not just slideware, as your chip probably ships with drivers that were designed months or years before you could get significant time from the customers engineers (which generally only happens after you manufacture, but you need software to prove it works well before that). So these guys are the ones who adapt it, and their feedback is valuable as they are the ones who build understanding of the customer.
However, at my old employer they didn't get commit rights to the main software repos. They had to carry around a bunch of patches which were gradually cleaned up and integrated. As I didn't directly work with them, I don't know if this says more about them or the guys managing the internal development.
It's a role that fits a different personality to that typical among software engineers. If you're bored as a dev it may suit. Pointless to try to shoehorn people into the role that don't suit it though.
An anecdote, but some reason to think that overworking part of your brain is a bad idea:
I had an Aunt who had dementia. This is obviously a terrible outlook. But her and my Uncle seemed to be doing okay. My Uncle was an ultra-competent guy, highly stable, the person you could rely on; and had been his whole adult life. So it was shocking when he had a mental breakdown and became manic. There was probably something physical going on, but what was also going on was that he had wanted my aunt to be able to live normally for as long as possible, so had been covering everything - for a year or more he'd had to be alert 7 days a week in case my aunt tried to cook on the gas stove or something like that, at which she was no longer safe. So the risk-alert part of his brain had been constantly overworked.
I appreciate that this is scientific research, but there are definitely companies out there that will try to row-hammer everyone's brain if this sort of thing is not heavily controlled.
Historically, vehicles actually did have completely interchangable motive components. They were called horses.
It would have been difficult given the state of other technology at the time for the inventors of the internal combustion engine to have supplied it as a drop-in horse replacement for your carriage, but you could kind of imagine that working with current technology.
It eventually worked for you - great. That doesn't prove that it will eventually work for everyone.
At some point, when something is not working, you have to write off the sunk cost. In many cases, there's no obvious threshold as to when you make that decision, and it's easy to think that maybe, if you'd just held out a little longer, been a bit more determined, you could have made it work. But you have to make a call, without knowing for certain either way. And it can be the right call, even if, with perfect information, you'd have made the other choice.
So, while I'm sure lots of the people saying "you should just have tried harder" are doing so with complete good will, it's not helpful. You don't know, for another random person on the internet:
* how much work they put in
* what other burdens they were carrying
* what other needs and responsibilities they could use that time and energy on
* how their mind is different to your mind
etc, etc. In short, you don't have most of the information needed to make that decision for them, and you don't have any call to judge them for it.
This isn't the worst article, and it's triggered a decent amount of discussion (despite being very short). However, I really dislike "What you're doing wrong/failing to do" titles. They are intended to trigger anxiety, which is manipulative and (in this case) precisely contradicts the concern the author is purporting to have for the rest of us.
On the subject: some people find meditation very helpful, others find it a net negative, or useless, or impossible to do. So a categorical "you should do this" isn't correct or particularly helpful. Try it, if it works for you, great; but don't put it about that people who aren't doing it are being negligent in some way.
This does violate the principle of least surprise. But,if you look through their other github issues, it becomes fairly clear that Anthropic are not interested in building an effective sandbox. It's a feelgood sandbox. To be fair, they must have a better focus on Claude not doing stupid things, or they would have crashed and burned by now. Nevertheless, if you want guaranteed limits, then they have to be enforced by external means.
Indeed. I wonder if it falls foul of labour law. Blacklisting is illegal and whitelisting (certification) is normally done with multiple competing third party certifiers.
Even if you're not a good photographer, wide angle lenses make rooms look enormous, by exaggerating the size difference between close and far objects. Before AI most estate agents used that.
In this case, this is probably not the only stereographic tattletale.
Had a competitor pull something like this with a previous employer. They were supposed to be interoperating with a standard, but they had a secret steganographic handshake, which they used to pretend that competitors products were unreliable (they had a first mover position in a smaller national market with specific requirements, so this wasn't shooting themselves in the foot). Our guys figured out the handshake and just silently implemented it. In this case, the competitor wasn't big enough to waste engineering time on multiple such hacks, but Anthropic have time (or Claude does).
That's interesting, because it's not my experience. A lot of the technical debt I see is that someone half-assed something thinking it would be easy to improve later, but the layer violations and inadequate tests make doing so a massive project, once it's become load-bearing.