So let's just take a moment to recall how we got here: Grok had the ability to create sexualized deep fake images of people. This was shown to not distinguish sufficiently between adults and children, creating sexualized deep fake images of children.
Unsurprisingly, outrage ensued across the political spectrum - anything associated with facilitating child abuse is politically toxic.
xAI responded by making this feature only accessible to paying accounts - leading to the response that they believe that producing sexualised images of children is ok provided that you pay for it.
It is absolutely unsurprising that the UK Gov is taking action. As far as I can tell, popular opinion is that Grok has crossed a line here - abstract free speech arguments don't work that well when people see it affecting their partners and daughters.
X could be banned from the UK, under the Online Safety Act - but that is the maximum sanction. Banning Grok is more likely. The OSA was brought in by the previous government (Conservative - centre right), and has broad political support.
There is fundamentally a difference of approach between the USA and Europe (inc the UK). In the US, you tend to weight free speech more highly, and consider harms resulting from non-protected speech (like inciting riots or murder) to be legally an individual matter. Over here we take a slightly different approach, focused more on the entire system that enables the harm. Hence under some circumstances we restrict the transmission of speech that facilitates the harm.
In this case, requiring a change from Grok to comply with the OSA not offer this facility in the UK seems appropriate, with appropriate sanctions if they fail to comply.
Interesting, but probably a bit out of date, as it is based on Ruby 2.0, and Ruby 4 has just been released. Also, we now have more concurrency primitives like Fibers and Ractors, as well as the Threads discussed in the article.
Pickaxe Book, Chapter 12 - but it is terser and aimed at someone with more experience. I think that the article is a good introduction to Threads, and once you understand how they work, then Fibers and Ractors start to become easier to understand.
I experimented with using an LLM to code the same problem in Ruby (Rails) and Python (Flask) about 10 months back. The LLM performance with Rails was much better - it handled the increasing complexity as features were added much better.
My hypothesis was that the strong emphasis on coding conventions in the Rails ecosystem made it easier for the LLM to cope with scaling complexity.
I don't see any mention of the impact of convention and codebase organisation in the article. And I think it is important (or was 10 months ago!)
IIRC one of the Scandinavian nations has solved this with property taxes: you self-declare the value of your property, but the state has the right to buy it at that price.
That only seems like a solution until the loophole-finders get on with their jobs.
Suppose you own a company and you have a trusted friend. The company, not the owner, enters into a contract with the friend that gives them the right to buy all the company's assets for 1% of their value, if the friend can satisfy a condition that they could only satisfy with the cooperation of the existing owner. Then the owner declares that the company is only worth 2% of its ordinary value -- which might even be an overestimate given the risk that the friend could execute the contract. If the government exercises the option to buy the company, they get a company bound to an obligation to sell all its assets to the friend, and then the previous owner cooperates in satisfying the condition in exchange for the friend giving them the assets back.
"We'll ban that", you say. But then they'll be more subtle about it, and the only way to really catch them is to have a good way of determining the true value of the company, which was the original problem.
You also run into trouble with that one because people can play that game the other way. You have an asset which on paper should be worth around a million dollars, but its value has already been hollowed out or de facto assigned to someone else without actually transferring the asset. Then the owner declares that it's worth $400,000 and the government pays them $400,000 thinking they're going to make $600,000, only to find out that it's actually worthless.
>No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it.
Not true in the UK. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee has been considering this issue (Apr 25): BBC News - Shops could be forced to accept cash in future,
The problem with big tech is that it is actively sucking resources and capital out of the world.
For example, if I use Uber, a significant fraction of the fare (let's say 25%) is taken by Uber. That takes it out of the local economy. And because Uber has good tax lawyers, they pay minimal taxes in my country, so it leaves my country's economy completely.
With an old style taxi firm, the boss took a cut - but then he spent most of it in local shops, or his wife bought clothes at a local boutique and a nice haircut - keeping money going round the local economy.
Now, every time you use a cloud service, you take money out of a local economy.And people wonder why we have huge social and economic problems.
Yes, it used to be common wisdom that you cannot have markets being run by private companies, that if such a situation develops it needs to be nationalized immediately. However, the last thing that happened to was the electricity grid.
Let's say, for argument's sake, that Uber takes 25% of the fare. But let's say that the alternative is old-style taxi companies, and they were protected from competition by the medallion system. They were not exactly lean-and-mean companies. What percent did they lose by inefficiency? Less than 25%, or more? And is losing it to inefficiency better than losing it to Uber, or worse?
Note well: I do not have answers for these questions. But I think the questions are interesting.
Define inefficiency, I'd much rather pay for local inefficiency which is still money changing hands in my local economy rather than paying a bit less for my money to be siphoned out of my local economy with increased efficiency.
Losing to Uber means my money is not being used in my economy, it goes away, it pays a few devs/local staff while it's stashed away in other financialised assets that do not help my neighbours (well, perhaps it helps the richest ones).
Most local produce initatives fail because they're not actually better than the global/international variants, especially considered from a price/quality pov.
It's certainly the case with energy. Many people can barely afford their electricity expenses and yet big tech wants to build data centres which will gobble up energy like no one's business. In fact it runs completely counter to the environmental rhetoric.
It costs a lot more than that where I live. They keep sending me info on how to save energy. I have a small home and use about as little as I can, and most of my bill consists of tax and standing charges! It is NOT cheap.
Gas is even more expensive. I had to have mine cut off.
How bad it is exactly? Resistive heating sounds cursed, when the houses are (I guess) not the fancy European newbuild.
I'm looking at something like 1000 kWh on a heat pump a year in a mild weather, where kWh is around 0.30 eurocents. I don't however own the pump, energy company leases it to me, so I pay about 150 a month the whole year (cold months are about 4 GJ, but it totals to 18-ish in a year). Then there is another 10-30 a month for normal in-house electricity consumption.
When I had actual district heating (powered by gas, when the gas was expensive af) and the house was "leakier", I looked at something like 50ish GJ a year and paid close to 350.
I live in Scotland. It costs me a lot more than the equivalent of thirty Euros. Nearly double that. I couldn't reduce my electricity bill much more if I tried. I don't watch TV, use my oven and don't heat my home most of the year (I haven't once this winter so far, even though I am cold some of the time.)
Not sure that the 3 big takeaways are self consistent. Redesigning proceses for digital is generally not consistent with focusing on pain points, as the pain points are usually single steps in a bigger process.
Unsurprisingly, outrage ensued across the political spectrum - anything associated with facilitating child abuse is politically toxic.
xAI responded by making this feature only accessible to paying accounts - leading to the response that they believe that producing sexualised images of children is ok provided that you pay for it.
It is absolutely unsurprising that the UK Gov is taking action. As far as I can tell, popular opinion is that Grok has crossed a line here - abstract free speech arguments don't work that well when people see it affecting their partners and daughters.
X could be banned from the UK, under the Online Safety Act - but that is the maximum sanction. Banning Grok is more likely. The OSA was brought in by the previous government (Conservative - centre right), and has broad political support.
There is fundamentally a difference of approach between the USA and Europe (inc the UK). In the US, you tend to weight free speech more highly, and consider harms resulting from non-protected speech (like inciting riots or murder) to be legally an individual matter. Over here we take a slightly different approach, focused more on the entire system that enables the harm. Hence under some circumstances we restrict the transmission of speech that facilitates the harm.
In this case, requiring a change from Grok to comply with the OSA not offer this facility in the UK seems appropriate, with appropriate sanctions if they fail to comply.
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