The data wasn't "scraped." Here's the part you left out describing what really happened:
> Aleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of SCL Group, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylized as "thisisyourdigitallife").[15][16] Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.[15][17] However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents' Facebook friends.[15] In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.[15]
> (public profile), [private] page likes, [possibly private] birthday and [possibly private] current city
?
(I've put in my best understanding of the other elements. AIUI, you can make the latter two public, but if I recall the scandal, that wasn't what occurred.)
This is a shitty article. It doesn’t mention that the ban on social ads in the EU is due to their anti-free speech rules rather than a Meta specific policy. Meta is in favor of social activism ads in general but restricts them in the EU: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral...
As per Meta's own guidelines, they simply require increased authenticity and transparency to run social issue ads that seek to influence public opinion through discussion, debate or advocacy for or against important topics, like health and civil and social rights.
Meta literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - on Slide 6 as eligible to run in the EU.
Too bad this important comment and reference ended up so low in the discussion thread and it makes a hugely important point that should be right under the current top post in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49789116
I mean, flipping back and forth between Mollweide and Equal-Earth (what they went with), I see only minor differences, with distortion seemingly favouring Equal-Earth. What's the rationale for having such a strong preference, especially as either is such an improvement over the current map (which has it's principle advantage being for sailing between continents, which isn't exactly the most common use-case)?
Note that San Mateo closed off the street to all traffic and turned it into a pedestrian walking/eating area. So it's used for events. Market Street still allows traffic so people can't wander around in it.
The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" in the United States. Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see "Lake America," those in Canada will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names. These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.
Google is taking the heat for this because they have a fast engineering team that reacted within 48 hours. Based on the "Gulf of America, née Mexico" debacle, the other companies will follow suit when their engineering teams finish the code reviews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14172#Technolo...
They're also taking the heat because it's a decision, and decisions carry moral weight. They're following their policy, but it's a policy they've chosen, not one that's legally compelled. It has implications, and they are free to reexamine and refine it. Not doing so is also a choice.
It has been obvious since Google pulled from China and got replaced by even more censored alternatives that corporations have close to zero weight against the arm of the state, and taking the moral high ground against an established government accomplishes close to nothing.
There's no "moral weight" to throw around. Until Google spins up a well-regulated militia, they do what the guys with guns tell them to do.
No, they're taking the heat because they VERY selectively acted on this as quickly as possible while other issues they are more than happy to sit on. Don't confuse this for anything other than kissing the ring.
In particular, their claim that they do this for all bodies of water with disputed names is a lie. They do it for some, but the Heilong River is called simply the "Amur River" on my map with no notice whatsoever of the longstanding Chinese name.
Perhaps they should not have reacted so quickly? The only US state which borders Lake Ontario rejects the name change, and US states are sovereign, so it’s not so obvious to me that the name change is official. But now it’s too late. Moving fast to comply with authoritarian mandates lends them a lot of power by undercutting anyone’s efforts to object.
You kind of need to be more specific about what you mean by sovereign. Federal pre-emption exists[0]. There are lots of ways in which the federal government can enforce their will (constitutionally!) on states.
But it's super complicated, and in this particular case does the state have some special right to name the body of water it's adjacent to that pre-empts the federal government? I dont know. Probably not, but I think the argument would need to be more explicit about what that right is rather than just claiming states are sovereign.
Agreed! It's a complicated argument that would have required detailed discussion. But Google found it more politically convenient to bow to Trump and make it a fait accompli. Thus Trump makes an incremental step further towards his dreams of dictatorship. What will Google do when Trump tells them to rename a city, I wonder?
Actually, that by itself isn't as stupid as it seems. Half of Lake Ontario is in the USA. Suppose that the USA actually had a legitimate, long-standing, respected name for the lake, different from Lake Ontario. It would be a good idea to include that name in maps. It's not simply a USA-centric exonym for a foreign lake; the lake is in the USA! The users of a map deserve to know that the lake is called something else by people on the southern shore.
But Munich, Nuremberg, the Baltic Sea etc... are not shown with both their English vs local names either when setting the Google Maps language to English despite the German names being completely different (and the Baltic Sea would need at least three names: it is also called the 'Eastern Sea' and the 'Western Sea'), and in the Sorbian minority region of Germany, the place names are also not printed in both German and Sorbian.
The issue is not one of showing a native name plus an English-language exonym. For the time being, the lake has two native, English-language names. Neither name is an exonym. Lake Ontario is not a Canadian lake being called by a different name by the USA.
Now suppose Tramp decreed that The Great Bear Lake in Canada should be called Star-Spangled Lake, effectively making that the USA's exonym for a place in Canada. And then suppose Google showed that name to visitors outside the USA, along side The Great Bear Lake. That would then be like (or even worse than) showing English-languge exonyms for German places to someone whose language is not indicated as English.
Vectorization of line art and sketches is an important problem in computer graphics and remains an active area of research. In this paper, we leverage several recent advances in the field to introduce a new state-of-the-art method for line art vectorization. First, we show that it is possible to go beyond heuristics to extract a meaningful set of strokes from a raster image. We leverage both depth prediction and semantic feature extraction models to propose a more principled approach to split the skeleton graph of the sketch into subgraphs to initialize a set of strokes, producing results that better align with artistic intent. Second, we model strokes as Bézier curves with both geometric and appearance components, and employ 2D Gaussian splatting for fast, di erentiable rendering. This formulation enables e cient tting of strokes to the input while jointly optimizing control points and brush texture.We further demonstrate promising results on video by incorporating temporal tracking and adaptive keyframe introduction. Our evaluation shows that we achieve state-of-the-art results for image reconstruction, while being fast and producing strokes of high quality. More importantly, the tting is highly compatible with user input, through the correction of the splines and the selection of optimization parameters.
> You can't have 24hour sunlight AND low altitude, low-latency orbits.
The key issue is "low-latency". The DCs in space are about getting ~10x the energy/day compared to ground DCs. Moving from 300km to 1400km doesn't increase latency that much since those DCs aren't meant to have realtime connections to users. I think the criticism is confusing something like Starlink which gets low latency by having a ton of routers that are only ~300km away from the user with these DCs which will by design have to transmit from polar orbit to wherever the ground control is. 300km or 1400km won't be a big deal compared to the tramission time from polar orbit to the urban or tech hubs.
Gemini's math about median RTT from these DCs to a random spot on Earth suggests the altitude change only adds 15ms of latency:
The median surface distance between any two arbitrary points on Earth is 90deg along the globe, or 10,008km. Scaled up to the respective orbital radii (6,671 km vs. 7,971km), the median one-way vacuum ISL path length is ~10,480km at 300 km altitude and ~12,520km at 1,600 km altitude...When factoring in realistic ground-to-space uplinks/downlinks, atmospheric delay, and optical switching overhead, the median global RTT increases to approximately 85-100ms for a 300 km constellation compared to 100-115ms for a 1,600 km constellation.
Starlink sats have been described as having a low Kessler Syndrome risk due to low altitudes. What happens to that risk at 1400km as the rings of DCs scale up?
> I'd quite like a tool (running entirely locally on my own hardware, with no cloud service and no copyright-thieving grifters making bank on it via subscription fees) that digests a manuscript and derives a scene-by-scene timeline, that I could then query interactively and use to plan my next round of edits. Being able to map out where and when each protagonist and minor character shows up, and see a frequency distribution heat map of names in the manuscript, would be useful.
Interestingly enough, I do this with various books I'm reading. E.g, I'm currently rereading Accelerando and had Claude generate a wiki-like timeline of key events, characters, and salient plot points. That makes it easier to jump around when I want to re-read a section and grok a plot thread that is scattered across chapters. Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.
You could build a tool like that and on a MBP with 48+ GB of RAM all of that can happen locally in terms of keeping your content locally. I am sort of an outliner and planner and I heavily use AI when writing documents for work. I don't see why fiction / prose would be any different? Indexing your content with a vector RAG and having a little 27B model locally could do everything he wants with some help from a big model to implement it all. It sounds like a weekend of coding for a functional prototype to me.
He doesn't want to use a model trained on someone else's text. So he would need to train a model from scratch. I don't know whether his own texts would provide enough data.
> Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.
That's not irony, or even cute. He's literally describing a tool he'd like to use to plan edits to his writing.
Yeah. Ironically, if he used an LLM to proofread his work, it would have told him that GAN's are generative not "generalized". That LLMs are primarily built on Transformers rather than GANs. And that they're more famous for image generation rather than image recognition.
In general probably not much of a stretch to get rid of convolutions or recurrence by replacing with attention and see if it works hence the title of the original transformers paper.
No, I simply think the person is not familiar with these concepts, which is not a crime, it's okay to be wrong, I didn't want to banish that person from here, just corrected the statement. But might have been also a brain fart. Happens. Just wanted to correct it in the interest of beginner reading this.
Once Musk said he believes in Transformers instead of diffusion (or the other way around). When actually diffusion transformers are very popular and mainstream. What he meant was autoregressive inference vs diffusion. People like to use buzzwords while not knowing them. Old issue, it was the same decades ago.
To make it even more confusing, there are also diffusion LLMs, which typically but not necessary, use transformers also.
And independently of diffusion and transformer and llm or image generator, you can optionally put a GAN discriminator adversarial loss on any of them.
While Stross is currently a neo-Luddite who doesn't believe in the Singularity, his book Accelerando is probably the best work of Singularitarian fiction ever written. It was written in the 2000s, starts in the 2010s, and covers the various decades of this century. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know how weird this century will be. It's also available for free online. [1]
It's one of my favorite books and the main reason I'm e/acc and many other pro-AI people love it because we view it as utopian sci-fi rather than the dystopian world Stross invented. This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme [2] in action.
> This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme in action.
At least the author seems to think[1] it is one, if in not so many words:
> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
1) Having met Stross, and briefly spoken to him way back when, he never actually believed in the singularity as a possible future.
2) Turns out it was the sci-fi author who was wrong all along! Fascinating to see someone confidently citing a meme, while actively evidencing the fallacy it exposes.
>he never actually believed in the singularity as a possible future.
I think my favorite moment in the book is when one of the characters (at the time, a digitized consciousness traveling at near light speed in a space ship the size of a coke can to explore an anomalous signal sent by alien life) argues that the singularity is a ridiculous concept and will never happen. I always thought that was a really clever observation on the part of Stross that our perspectives are so narrow and provincial, we often can’t see what’s happening in front of our own faces. Your comment does kind of recontextualize that for me and I sort of wonder if that was the author speaking directly to the audience?
You think accelerando is utopian sci fi!? Which characters perspective are you identifying with so strongly? They all have pretty severe societal challenges that makes me surprised to see the word Utopia.
Manfred and Amber’s lives don’t seem particularly dystopian. Human society, up until the Field Circus encounters the router and later returns home, seems pretty great. Chaotic and challenging, yes, sad for Microsoft shareholders, sure, but I would certainly rather live in a world with access to the technology they have than our own. Space exploration, extended life spans and rejuvenation, new methods of relating more closely with other human beings are all things I would love to experience.
The protagonist who believes that information should be free and that scarcity is mostly artificial due to bad economic models. And that it would be possible to implement proper pro-human capitalism or communism if we had enough compute to solve standard CS problems like filling knapsacks or maximizing flow through a graph.
Belief in the Singularity and belief in God strike me as extremely similar.
Both, I think, are extremely interesting ideas where very few theories, e.g. pro, anti, or anywhere in between, can be written off as ridiculous -- probably due to a lot of ambiguity and difficulty in defining proof.
For me, I find the Singularity very implausible due to the fact that we talk about "general intelligence" quite a bit, and the more we do, I'm finding that I don't think it exists. There are a set of low-level basic skills that I think -- if you don't have, you're not intelligent. And then there are higher level skills that vary wildly.
So, will we make AIs that can say and do very clever and amazing things; yes, this is happening. Will they be, like ascendant, or something? I would say -- yes, but perhaps not in the way we think? Like, humans made "The Bible." And that's obviously a big huge, impactful, maybe superhuman thing. But feels different from this idea of a "Singularity."
There's a reason the Singularty was called "the Rapture for nerds" before LLMs were even a thing.
You can find a lot of neo-religious behavior within the AI accelerationist community. Cults coming out of rationalism and fear of the wrath of an angry AI God, making the world right for AI's coming (and even killing the nonbelievers.) Evangelism. Promises of infinite plenty in a post-scarcity heaven. Even a persecution complex - "Luddites" are increasingly demonized, hated, accused of moral depravity for their doubt, and for not abandoning the world, taking up their prompt and following the AI.
How many people post about how AI seems to be draining them of meaning and purpose, that it doesn't live up to the hype, that keeping up with the rituals is exhausting, but feeling that the problem must be with them and not AI? That's a religious person having doubts about the nature of their faith, unable to accept that the God they believe in might not be real, and framing their issues as their own moral failing.
And all of this before the "Singularity" even shows up, and people upload their minds - I mean, meet God in the air.
It's religion, very specifically neo-Christian ideologically. Regardless of any arguments one might make about the practical benefits of using AI in any particular field, it is obviously also religion.
A large part of that goes via arguing about consciousness.
Starts of with a quite defensible:
First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely.
But the moment he hits that (parenthetical) paragraph about consciousness, he blends human capabilities with human-like consciousness.
If human-like capabilities required human-like consciousness, early models (like GPT-4) passing all those exams would suggest those models being "as conscious as" a university student. (My inner Douglas Adams wants to invert this, but the best I can do is "The Xarloxians did not consider university students to be conscious beings; their reasoning being…", which you may recognise as a riff on Babel fish and the non-existence of God).
> In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sh...
Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.
I don't find it to be utopian, but in trying to imagine how, it occurred to me that maybe the idea that we even survive to be entangled in the wider universal future, maybe that is utopian? To matter.
I think there are a lot of paths where we just rock ourselves back to a regressed agency societal state, and just never have the capacity to have any affect on the wider universe. Which is maybe good for the universe, as we are certainly not a role-model for certain forms of balance. But maybe the balanced view doesn't seek to dominate and influence and become ubiquitous, after all
> Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.
There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.
> there are certainly arguments that a society where most people are happy is pretty utopian
Sure, like a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics...and an AI life companion in their ear. What I can't understand is why they're still on a forum with humans when they can go have that today.
I'm almost 50, but I absolutely could see how someone younger could view it that way -- precisely because the present is much more similar to than novel than it used to be?
> There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.
I think that's likely to be all the sex and drugs? Though I'm basing that on the Wikipedia plot summary. I have no interest in darkening my day by actually reading any work that can be rightly described as "dystopian".
This information was limited to what was publicly accessible on the site rather than some private data as many outlets tend to claim.
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