You know what they'll say in their defense. "This is an extremely complicated systems, and we apologize that a technical solution was broken in an intricate way. [Insert boilerplate about taking privacy seriously here]"
The fact that most people in the western world have two terrible companies to choose between in order to have normal life conveniences is outrageous. (Here in Europe we actually have no choices that operate under our laws!)
We need laws mandating open and interoperable interfaces and standards for all the things a modern life takes for granted: public transit, banking, digital ID, etc.
Once that's in place, we can start talking about what people are "choosing". Because currently our "choice" is at best between a rock and a hard place (or as we say in my native tongue: between plague and cholera).
Because only people who aren't actually sorry spend their time saying sorry instead of doing the one thing that would actually help people – provide detailed information on what the hell is going on.
You are either very confused about timescales, or very dismissive of "just" a generation of suffering while unemployment and birthrates somewhat maybe compensate for eachother.
This feels a bit like saying "global warming is bad and particulate pollution is bad, but the latter will cancel out some warming effect, so no worries!" Please make an effort before spouting theories like this.
We could mandate that any platform beyond a certain (huge) size must provide open interoperability APIs.
Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.
It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!
This is the correct approach. If these American companies want to operate in our countries, and maintain their positions as our primary information channels, then they need to obey laws.
We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.
This is more or less the approach that the EU is taking with the DMA. As with most EU regulatory projects, it proceeds, ah, _slowly_ (Twitter isn't yet subject to it, for instance, apparently largely because historically it didn't have a high enough market cap, though the new entity where it's been tacked onto a rocket launch company and a racist LLM presumably now qualifies...)
> BTW: with today’s LLMs, there’s really no excuse for badly-documented, or badly-formatted code. You can write a thousand lines of commercial-grade spaghetti, and tell the LLM to format and document it.
And how do you know that the documentation is correct? Because if it's not, it's worse than being absent. The verification work sounds close to as hard as writing it in the first place.
This is what I never grasp when people suggest LLMs for anything precise (outside of cases where the LLM output is in a machine-verifiable language).
This has been a nice thing about using doctests in elixir. doc examples are compiled and run so they can’t drift. The prose around the examples can still drift of course
> At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me).
Hard disagree. We absolutely cannot assume that. You can posit it, and we can have an informed debate about it. This is what irks me the most about LLM fans: they constantly try to reframe the debate to have their worldview as the agreed-upon starting point.
These companies need to burn.
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