I personally know other people who have filed similar complaints, and the Norwegian Datatilsynet explicitly stated they acted based on many complaints. I don't think they care about a single person's voice in this, even if they "helped create the law".
It's a shame, but it probably says more about Datatilsynet's capacity. Frankly it would be great if you could simply say "this company did something dodgy", provide proof, and immediately get results. But that's not the world we live in.
Part of the problem is that even if you did a good job it doesn't really matter because the rest of the industry isn't, so no user wants to give you a chance
I just don't see the average consumer ever needing more than 10gbit. In fact, I can tell you right away most consumers wouldn't notice if they were running 500mbit vs 1gbit.
4G has been enough for a decade, 5G was mostly just an infrastructure and capacity improvement and most consumers could never tell you they notice a difference between the two. The human eye can only see so much resolution, we don't need 8k video. I don't think consumers will need more than what they already have. At least until some new novel media format that gulps down bandwidth comes around.
This isn't necessarily all bad news. There is still a push for higher bandwidth for datacenters etc, which will keep pushing technology forward, hopefully making consumer and ISP grade equipment cheaper.
If I built a house I'd probably run ethernet. Maybe play around with a 10gbe core network. But it wouldn't really give me any benefit, it's not like disks are that fast anyways.
That's good for you but the demand is so low SpaceX is leasing a considerable amount of its compute to Google and Anthropic to compensate. Regardless of whether it is useful, it is clearly not popular
Working with k8s myself I'm somewhere in between you and the article on opinion. I think k8s is good when you can afford to hire a person dedicated to managing it (or at least find someone with experience in running it that can make it part of their MO)
That is, k8s is probably best considered when you are beginning to consider having an infrastructure department, or if one of your early hires knows Kubernetes and is opinionated in a way that is less "throw cool and complex stuff at the wall"* and more "the 5 things I want in a k8s cluster that I don't want to spend much time on and should just work"
My understanding of the 2000s and 2010s was that there was a big focus on inventing self service deployment systems for developers, and k8s is that solution(!), for the same scale that would begin considering re-inventing the wheel internally anyways
Vibecoded website with poor UX. Loving that the website is both trying to be fancy by having a floating player you can drag around with a playlist, while also wiping everything if you click the wrong link. No human made this, or paid it any attention at least.
> No human made this, or paid it any attention at least.
I think we’ve got to get used to seeing those as the same thing. Paying attention to it is making it, in essence, the more attention you pay, the more you own the process, the more the result is ‘yours.’
This shouldn't be a surprise. But at this point it feels like if you don't completely avoid participating in digital society, your data will be used against you or groups/countries you support.
Sadly non technical people do not see future risk and any warning prediction is a slippery slope fallacy. Yet we now hear the echo of privacy advocates of the 2000s and 2010s saying "I told you so!"
Agreed. If it's "digital", it will be used for elite power plays, because it's too easy. How else could you mass control/analyse/manipulate millions of people instantly? Digital, digital, digital...
I found it very ironic that this article, which in practice is trying to solicit customers, is both talking about a fundamental weakness of LLM while also trying to sell AI consultation. In reality as many have said here you cannot have untrusted data in the context. There isn't that much more to say.
Prompt injection is XXS without possibility of sanitation. There is no absolute cure.
It is sad that it takes a Meta developer having some fun to realize they should open up ADB.
This isn't the repairability and reuseability of old devices mindset people have been begging for. This is some guy using internal privileges to having some fun, and deciding the rest of us should get a piece of the fun as well.
This is a "happy story" in the same way it is a "happy story" when some kid successfully fundraises a classmate's cancer treatment because the healthcare system neglects them.
> It is sad that it takes a Meta developer having some fun to realize they should open up ADB.
Former facebook research lab twat here. It wasn't one dev.
We asked when they shitcanned portal (which was a great product, badly managed) to open it up. Infact one of the kernel devs made a very direct plea to allow the community to adopt the hardware so that we could avoid Ewaste.
It was denied because there are keys on the device that would leak if meta opened it up. (I'm not an android dev so I don't know the ins and outs of that)
However, portal was a casualty of the dash to VR. They scaled up the team briefly, which meant that lots of weird stuff was tried, but the roadmap was diluted. The idea was that they portal would be the "portal" to horizon worlds. this meant that they pushed back the plan for thirdparty app stores that would have meant you had something to actually do on the device.
neglect and stupidity from zuck meant that the portal was killed, even though the next gen device was actually a really great media device (wireless, removable charging stand, excellent speakers, but nothing to run on it.)
> They scaled up the team briefly, which meant that lots of weird stuff was tried, but the roadmap was diluted.
Boz never cared for Portal, it wasn't his product. I was one of the original engineers on Portal. The VP running the research lap responsible for Portal was canned in a political coup, and her entire org moved under Boz, merging it with Oculus into the AR/VR team. There was some ham-fisted justification around why a smart home product should be part of AR/VR, but it never really made sense.
Portal had a bunch of other problems, including:
* Massively over-specced hardware, the SoC was the same SoC as the Quest, even though it had no reason to be. The BOM was something like $500. We were selling these units at a huge loss.
* Cambridge Analytica broke right in the middle of development, which completely tanked any remaining trust in the Facebook brand. Everyone knew the product was completely sunk at that point, but nobody wanted to come out and say it. At the last minute we had to stuff a plastic camera cover into the box as a result.
* Boz was convinced we could build a voice assistant for Portal and Quest that was better than Siri, but the Assistant team at FB was completely out of their depth. We ended up right before launch having to sign a deal with Amazon to ship Alexa on the product.
* So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.
> So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.
Hnnnnnn
yup, the empire building and land grabs. yup, I had forgotten about the early days before maui was actually universal and people needed different tools to flash different devices.
ar/vr, horizon, and boz ruined a bunch of great software products that people were actually using and enjoyed (i've seen the NPS) to shoehorn horizon worlds and ugly 3d avatars into that no one wanted.
We bought two portals for elderly relatives, predominantly for video calling, and I don't think there has been another product, then or since, that fitted that use case as well, especially with people who maybe aren't as familiar with smartphones.
So somewhat frustrating when it all started to wind down various bits of functionality disappeared a bit at a time, until finally you had something that would receive calls, but not be able to make them - and perhaps not even that any more.
(About the only downside I saw on it was the messenger vs whatsapp tussle caused a bit too much confusion).
But it was a solid bit of household tech for several years, so +1 for that!
I'd not seen that one, and it does look like it has some nice points - although needing its own special app is rather frustrating (vs leveraging apps that people are already using).
Seems not too disimilar from the echo show's video calling capabilities in that respect (i.e. only calls within the Amazon ecosystem).
i had a portal at home for work. great product for VC, i tried using one with my parents and my dad kept it in the trunk of his car outside because that's how negative the facebook brand equity was.
> It was denied because there are keys on the device that would leak if meta opened it up.
Many devices wipe such keys as part of unlocking the bootloader. The better ones restore access upon relocking with a stock OS but that's far from guaranteed.
> It was denied because there are keys on the device that would leak if meta opened it up. (I'm not an android dev so I don't know the ins and outs of that)
Any idea what changed?
> neglect and stupidity from zuck meant that the portal was killed
Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure? Is there really no way for teams to progress projects with value somewhat independently?
sadly, or fortunately I am not at facebook anymore, so I don't have the inside track on what changed.
> Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure?
Kinda. Zuck sets direction, and he has key interests. The thing that really makes him happy is cutting edge research and new features. The thing that passes him by completely is product experience. Oculus is a great example of that. The user experience was/is trash. the time to fun is/was too high and was for a long time. Carmak spent ages saying "we can't compete on hardware specs, we can compete on ecosystem and experience" he lost that argument.
Outside of zuck there are only a few areas that actually make decisions and communicate them properly, one is monetisation/advertising and the other is Infra planning. _Everything_ else relies on people churning initiatives and seeing what sticks. With loose coordination at the centre based on who know who and who manages to convince others that "this is a Zuck priority, or related to one"
It felt very much like having a Boy king. The Boy king liked playing with toys, and if you made a toy for the king you were in favour. The boring parts were handled by "evil advisors" who are there because they don;t threaten the king's power. Everyone around the boy king is there to gain favour.
> the time to fun is/was too high and was for a long time.
Yup - I got one for the other half as a present... like an hour and a half / two hours into setup/onboarding, they lost interest, it went back in the box and never came out again. :(
> Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure?
When I was there (pre-Covid) it was sort of a worst-of-all-worlds situation, compared to other firms.
On the one hand, Zuck maintains an absolute majority of voting shares, so what he say literally goes, with the board having no real authority to rein him in. If your project is something he takes a direct interest in, you are automatically subject to his whims.
On the other, Meta highly values the idea that they are a pretty flat org with no centralised command and control structure. So if your project is not under the baleful gaze of Zuck, there's a good chance that nobody in the executive suite has any fucking idea what is going on in your part of the company.
Contrast this to Bezos-era Amazon, where Bezos would sometimes directly intervene in pet projects like the FirePhone, but the entire company has a strong reporting hierarchy, and executives are expected to maintain direct command-and-control at all times over their reports (i.e. when Bezos sent one of the dreaded question-mark emails, the entire management chain damn well better be able to get their story straight top-to-bottom by the end of day)
To me, with experience of numerous organisations of different sizes outside tech, it is pretty surprising.
(I'm not arguing that this is right but) the typical progression of an organisation as it scales is to move away from the 'scrappy startup with a CEO-dictator' and towards something more mature. Obviously, there are reams of business literature written about growing pains and then stagnation in large companies, but the single-personality-driven model seems hugely flawed - look at Tesla, for example. And I'd certainly expect a public company of the size, resource, and maturity (in years, if not structure) of Meta to have developed beyond this point.
Honestly, that a number of people seem to not grok my questioning this, is possibly quite revealing about the monoculture of the tech world.
It's not that you want teams to be able to go rogue - you want teams to be able to work against a stable mission statement, that doesn't change every 5 minutes as the CEO changes mood
That's on the company owners[1], as represented by its board.
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[1] Companies like Meta actually has two types of ownership: ownership of the company's current assets (economic equity), which is not the same as ownership of control in the company's decision making (voting power). The owners I reference here are the second category of ownership.
In the example of Meta, a quick search suggests Zuckerberg holds about 61% of the voting power.
With enough encryption, obfuscation, and security-through-obscurity, you can make it extremely difficult to obtain those keys.
Companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony ship consoles that are the target of a very motivated black market/cheating industry, and it usually takes years before any serious leaks surface.
Well yeah but those are more hardened and also the keys alone is generally not enough because they are asymmetric. So the private part is kept somewhere on some HSM.
I was in the Oculus for Business (later AR/VR for Work) group, and we were well into taking Portal and making it compatible with corporate MDM policies, to sell along with Workplace as a general visual conferencing platform. Sadly all went up in smoke when they cancelled the main Portal program.
I totally believe you that people inside have asked. I think part of the problem is that the people actually making the decisions higher up do not care and aren't really invested in these issues.
To the point that some guy vibecoding for a bit and deciding it was fun had more effect on the company's ability to open up an abandoned product than an entire consumer movement that has been lurking in the zeitgeist for ages.
I always wondered how they messed portal up. It seemed so natural of a piece of hardware to fit into everything else they do. Tying it to horizon says all I need to know.
> It is sad that it takes a Meta developer having some fun to realize they should open up ADB.
I'm not even sure if the motivation is as positive as that - the video, blog, and dev docs read more like a sales pitch for meta's AI tools...
(I'm glad they did it, the portal is great hardware; but I don't expect that this will be a pattern of opening up old hardware unless it provides tangible benefits to the AI department)
Why is this sad? I’m having a hard time understanding the thought you are communicating. It seems cool that a CTO had fun and that motivated him to enable ADB for everyone?
Just that the default reality is the hardware you buy belonging to someone else, who only really sold you a license to use the hardware on limited terms until the manufacturer drops support
Because it could’ve just as easily never happened despite how simple of a feature it is to enable. That happens all the time. Tons of “useless” tech out there that can be made useful with 5min of effort but the incentives aren’t there, so they end up in landfills.
The default position should be trying to make devices useful as long as possible, even if they want to qualify it with “so long as it’s sufficiently reasonable to do so.”
Because the idea that something this obvious occurred to the CTO first is very, very unlikely. What is more probable was that leadership ignored people who disagreed until the CTO convinced himself it was a good idea and went ahead with it.
People within Meta have been campaigning for this for _years_; even people as high up as John Carmack were pushing for open bootloaders on deprecated hardware (and he achieved that on the Go headset, but not as a general policy)
Ideally the workers. But failing that, legislation would probably be a good thing to at least try to reduce e-waste from closed, discarded devices. Like, if a device line is at its end of line from the company, then they might as well make it open for the community. They're not supporting it anymore, after all, but someone might want to.
Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.
Who are these workers? Who should be listened to if there are opposite views?
What if recycle these devices causes more waste elsewhere? says the devices have to be heavier, using more materials. Also, more legislation mean more bureaucracy, less efficiency in general. Who is to say there is no waste in that?
I'm not against legislation when it makes sense. But "..Of course not, but it would be better"? It's always easy to speak from the comfort of HN.
I feel like this is reducing the problem to a simpler one. Of course you'd expert larger product decisions to be made by a technical leader. The problem here is that devices being locked down is something being fought against, repairability is a big topic for discussion, and some companies even try to play into it pretty hard, like Framework and seemingly Valve.
Yet, to this Meta CTO, this wasn't really a concern until he vibecoded something and decided everyone should be able to have this fun. It say's something about his (and probably other people in his position) awareness of public opinion and discussion.
It's a shame, but it probably says more about Datatilsynet's capacity. Frankly it would be great if you could simply say "this company did something dodgy", provide proof, and immediately get results. But that's not the world we live in.
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