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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • “regulation bad” appears to be just an american thing. everyone else is doing it… but it takes time and is not necessarily done well.

    these extreme voices get more head space online because that’s the only thing that can get any meaningful attention nowadays. you won’t see the vast majority of people stuck at “well, some of the things it does are kind of impressive but the practical results are not there for us, i’m not sure why and i don’t understand the impact and background entirely so i just don’t know”. you’ll only ever hear from people that are either “AI evangelists” and are backed up by a huge amount of marketing money and propped by the algorithm or from the people who sound like they are about to fire bomb a data center.

    there are many people who are much more sober about these things. look at this video for an example: https://youtu.be/xwXM2pHj0g4

    IMO the real problem is that both regulation and the so called “free market” are susceptible to being taken over by players that just don’t play fair. we all know that LLMs and many other tech “improvements” would not be viable if they had to play by the same rules as everyone else (e.g. source training data, resources and energy in a moral way and charge a fair price for the actual measured contribution they provide). but that’s kind of their game, right? they find a way to be more efficient… not necessarily by improving a product but sometimes simply by finding a hole in the rules. and then they haul in the money and use it to put out any competition and poke more holes in the rules.








  • i gave the example with data deletion. deleting someone’s data means also deleting or altering data products derived from it - like statistics, machine learning models etc. which are, in turn, used to create different data products and so on. which are shared, stored and processed beyond the company with different partners (called processors, which may have processors of their own that not even the original data controller needs to be aware of). and you as the primary data controller are technically reaponsible for all of it everywhere. and erasure or withdrawal of consent is the easy case… data subject can, in principle, withdraw consent only for specific purpose or specific processor.


  • i disagree on a technicality.

    i also think the idea of gdpr is good in principle but if a legislation is unenforced and/or unimplementable then it is effectively useless. and gdpr is a case of mostly unenforced because it is practically unimplementable.

    for example no company can reasonably implement the right to delete users data (one pf the core principles) when requested… at least not in the extent as it is defined in gdpr (i work as a data engineering manager and trust me, we tried, in every company i worked for…). it is a similar task in scope as if an author of a typesetting font suddenly had the right to revoke your permission to use random letters from their font… and when they did it you would be expected not only to stop using it immediately, but somehow remove it from all of your existing documents including printed copies and copies you sent out to your clients and suppliers (dear supplier, could you, please, replace the invoice we sent you last year with this attached copy add shred the one we sent you originally? we replaced all instances of letter “a” with different font…).


  • this number is so far off that it makes me doubt your whole story…

    quick estimate: if we assume your teacher had a rather new car with good fuel economy (6l/100km) and was using only the least polluting fuel (e85 with 15% ethanol that produces some 1.6kg of co2 per liter) we would have to assume it was a really heavy car made entirely out of the stainless steel (1500kg of the most poluting steel that produces over 6kg of co2 per kg of steel, other materials have comparatively small contribution) to come anywhere close… about 10 tons of co2 from car production and from burning the fuel.

    from these crazy assumptions you can easily see that most normal vehicles under normal circumstances will produce way more (like order of magnitude more) of co2 by driving than is produced by making them. for example a smaller car made from 600kg of normal steel (1.8kg of co2 per kg of steel) and fuel efficiency of 8l/100km (still very good) will produce more co2 than was produced in its own production after roughly 5000 miles of driving and is just adding after that…