> The Service’s mandate allows it the wide-ranging ability to enter any government agency and access its software or technical systems with the goal of helping to streamline or reform existing systems.
That’s actually cool they have that ability. I’ve always been a huge fan of USDS, I think they just got massively supercharged, and look forward to watching them achieve this mission.
Tell me you haven’t used the latest models, without telling me you haven’t used the latest models?
They do hallucinate at times, but you’re missing a lot of real utility by claiming they are basically bullshit engines.
They can now use tools, and maintain internal consistency over long context windows (with both text and video). They can iterate fully autonomously on software development by building, testing, and bug fixing on real world problems producing usable & functioning code.
There’s a reason Microsoft is putting $80 billion dollars on the line to run LLMs. It’s not because they are full of shit!
Maybe by the time it’s doing a trillion dollars a year of useful work (less than 10 years out) people will call it intelligent… but still probably not.
That doesn’t mean the first phone is waste! There’s nothing wrong with wanting to buy a new phone.
The law won’t reduce smartphone ewaste. It will just satisfy the people who want removable batteries over sleaker design.
The battery is serviceable and it can be done quite easily and cheaply. In fact it’s done billions of times over.
Really just nanny state regulation, which as typical, will not bring any benefit and impose tremendous compliance costs and actually make some products worse.
I don’t even use iCloud Photos and this was on by default. Very bad move by Apple to ship my photos off my device, without my permission, in any shape or form, I don’t care.
It’s even worse to proscribe liability when the “flaw” is not even an actual operating failure, but the ability for a bad actor to break the software maliciously.
Software is only as insecure as the user’s willingness to expose it to untrusted inputs, combined with the user’s willingness to give the software unfettered access to sensitive data.
“Don’t let hackers control the input stream” is literally the end of any and all security issues.
If this actually becomes law, it instantly makes it too dangerous to bother for me to ever ship software into the EU again.
Under this law, consumers can claim compensation for damages caused by defective products without having to prove the vendor was negligent or irresponsible. In addition to personal injury or property damages, for software products, damages may be awarded for the loss or destruction of data. Rather than define a minimum software development standard, the directive sets what we regard as the highest possible bar. Software makers can avoid liability if they prove a defect was not discoverable given the “objective state of scientific and technical knowledge” at the time the product was put on the market.
Look the the liability standard they are pushing! Not willful negligence, not reasonable care, but rather it sounds more akin to “could the bug have even theoretically been prevented given perfect information and unlimited funds”.
Yeah, no thanks, I’m human, so I won’t be accepting that level of liability for words I write into a text editor any time soon.
And kinda mind boggling that anyone who knows anything about how software actually works wouldn’t see this as completely batshit insane.
A more reasonable standard (malicious intent or reckless disregard for human safety would be a good starting point) would go a long way toward fixing this.
This current standard would get any developer sued out of existence by armies of AI lawyers long before you can ship a patch when someone complains that your software divide by zero bug caused them “damages”.
And get a load of this;
Burden of proof: When the injured consumer is faced with excessive difficulties to prove the defectiveness of the product or the causal link between its defectiveness and the damage, a court may decide that the claimant is only required to prove the likelihood that the product was defective or that its defectiveness is a likely cause of the damage.
There’s a reason why EU GDP has completed stagnated versus the US, and the EU tech sector is a virtual rounding error in the world… and this trash mentality is a big part of it.
But wait, it gets worse…
Circular economy: When a product is repaired and upgraded outside the original manufacturer’s control, the company or person that modified the product should be held liable.
Bye bye downstream distro patches! And knowing the EU, they’ll say that “import Foo from Bar as MyFoo” is a “modification” and try to make anyone with cash in their pocket liable for any bug in any dependency they link to…
Online platforms can be held liable for a defective product sold on their platform just like any other economic operators if they act like one.
Bye bye app stores! Of course some will probably cheer this blindly ignoring or not comprehending the extraordinary value creation app stores are responsible for.