linkregister (u/linkregister)

linkregister commented on Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/geox

FpUser · 9 days ago

>" Just another clear example of how, for some reason, we in the West keep tolerating if not indirectly supporting this kind of behavior."

Live by the sword, die by the sword. It is the West that first turned patents into the weapon for big corps to fuck the rest of the world. Well now they're tasting it themselves

linkregister · 9 days ago

The monolithic West, comprised of only bad actors, none good. Even the previous poster's example of the open source parts is invalid because the organization was part of the West.

linkregister commented on Have I Been Pwned 2.0 troyhunt.com/have-i-been-... · Posted by u/LorenDB

neilv · 3 months ago

He should partner with a law firm, for class action lawsuits, for every breach due to negligence (which is probably all of them).

Tie in to a banking service, so you can do direct deposits to many millions of people, every time there's new settlements paid, and you'll be a folk hero.

Get lawyers who want negligent companies to actually regret the breaches, with judgements that hurt. (Rather than a small settlement that gets lawyers paid, but is only a small cost of doing business, which is preferable to doing business responsibly.)

Optional: Sell data of imminent lawsuits, to an investment firm.

Though, ideally, investors won't need this data, since everyone will know that a breach means a stock should take a hit. Isn't that how it should be.

linkregister · 3 months ago

Usually a breach results in a brief dip in a company's stock price, followed by a rally. Look at what happened after the Coinbase incident.

linkregister commented on Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android holdtherobot.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/mikenew

throwaway314155 · 3 months ago

I mean if you couldn't stand using the device long enough to test it (not that you should have to - i agree on that), maybe the problem was that the device simply wasn't in anyone kind of ready state to be shipped as a revolutionary new way of interfacing with computers. Like christ, it would overheat after 25 minutes?

linkregister · 3 months ago

Being one of the 3rd party developers to create apps for a nascent platform is a great position for your business to be in. It just so happened that Google Glass didn't work out. But imagine being an early developer for Android or iOS.

linkregister commented on GOP sneaks decade-long AI regulation ban into spending bill arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0... · Posted by u/Jtsummers

AuryGlenz · 3 months ago

Right, but you might want to look at the regulations their lawmakers have been proposing. If put in place it would put a stop to that pretty much immediately.

linkregister · 3 months ago

It is trivial to find examples of market-destroying bills introduced to legislatures in any time period in history. What makes bills newsworthy is when they have meaningful support.

linkregister commented on GOP sneaks decade-long AI regulation ban into spending bill arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0... · Posted by u/Jtsummers

AuryGlenz · 3 months ago

This is far too sweeping, but when you have California seemingly intent on smothering our AI industry in its crib it makes sense that they’re scared.

That said, I think it’d be smarter of the GOP to let California do just that. It’s a chance to move that tech money out of California and into another more regulation friendly state.

linkregister · 3 months ago

Waymo seems to be operating smoothly in San Francisco. OpenAI's headquarters are also there. Many AI startups are also based in San Francisco, California.

linkregister commented on US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf] storage.courtlistener.com... · Posted by u/dave1629

animal_spirits · 4 months ago

I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off the back of the free and ad-subsidized services Google provided for us. The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, the consumer would have paid the price.

linkregister · 4 months ago

Nearly all the services mentioned here were acquisitions or had strong competitors at the time of their launches. It is undeniable that Google has made these into quality products and led to their dominant position in their fields. However, Google's existence was necessary for none of these classes of products.

linkregister commented on Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China apnews.com/article/tiktok... · Posted by u/Alifatisk

ta1243 · 4 months ago

So a company should be free to break as many laws as it wants and never have any risk to its owners?

linkregister · 4 months ago

> Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue.

That's financial risk.

For criminal risk, a change to existing laws would have to be made; they currently carry only civil penalties to the organizations involved. I think that those laws would be popular. They would have to be carefully crafted to narrowly target behavior without unacceptably impairing capital investment and business formation. That would negatively impact the quality of life of the countries' residents.

linkregister commented on Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with €530M fine over data transfers to China apnews.com/article/tiktok... · Posted by u/Alifatisk

observationist · 4 months ago

This is wrong, and even revenue isn't sufficient - you want to fine a sizeable fraction of the total value of all assets of the company based on the scope, duration, and severity of the violation.

Companies don't protect user data. They store, silo, and secure user data for as little cost as possible. No meaningful consequences means they will continue to harvest and disperse user data at an increasing rate until we get serious about requiring responsible practices and accountability.

The risk of being bankrupted is what will keep a corporation behaving well.

Penalties should be fatal to a corporation. If Microsoft or some random new startup had to follow the same regulations and protect user data to some bare minimum standard, and we apply the same degree of penalty, rather than some arbitrarily large fine which the mega corps are happy to pay, we can affect behavior.

The big companies have teams of lawyers who effectively (and sometimes explicitly) collude with the beancounters and MBAs to enshittify their products and services and milk every last drop of revenue, even exploiting the data of non-customers who just happened to encounter some peripheral surveillance apparatus.

We need to protect individual data privacy and restrict anything except informed consensual tracking. We need to mandate ephemerality and basic security standards. We need to make violations of these regulations lethal to a company, and impose mandatory minimum jail time for c-suite offenders.

Anything short of this results in overt, blatant, repeated violations of the laws by the big companies because they're happy to pay $5m or even $50m if it means they extract $500m more revenue and lock out any potential disruptive competition.

This would effectively mean that giant platforms which cannot responsibly store and manage user data would not be able to continue operation at the scale they're at. It would mean fragmentation and decentralization of various services, disincentivizing monopoly, improving market health, driving product and service progress.

Without harsh and extreme consequences that are as meaningfully painful to FAANG sized megacorps as they are to a one man startup, the problems won't ever be resolved. FAANG and tech outpaced regulation, resulting in effectively the total pwnage of data for more or less every living human on the planet. This is unacceptable, and the only way it changes is for the US to drop the hammer on the exploitive and irresponsible practices that led us here.

Let these asshats go bankrupt. We don't need Meta or Alphabet or Amazon. They're not entitled to screw the world for profit. If they can't operate ethically and responsibly, then they shouldn't be allowed to operate at all.

linkregister · 4 months ago

This is an incomplete understanding of the stakeholders in these rulings.

1. The goal of the fines is to act as a deterrent and to encourage companies to get back into compliance.

2. The arbiters aren't operating in a vacuum. Bankrupting services that the citizens of a country rely on is unpopular and not in service of goal #1.

3. We know that this is the case because Uber and other ride sharing services were able to violate the law and convince voters to have the law changed to permit these services.

4. Fines impacting net revenue are dealt with seriously by companies when they are adequately large, e.g. 10% of net revenue. Compliance departments are not funded as a job creation or charity exercise. When companies report earnings, these fines frequently determine whether earnings guidance is achieved. This impacts company officers' compensation.

tl;dr, you passionately believe in these views, but it is not one held by the majority. Your minority view should not be the basis of public policy.

linkregister commented on Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment waymo.com/blog/2025/04/wa... · Posted by u/ra7

jes5199 · 4 months ago

Toyota has been way, way behind on electrification. I suspect they’ve been Innovator’s Dilemma’d are are in a death spiral that they haven’t even noticed yet

linkregister · 4 months ago

The electric Toyota bZ4X is marketed in Japan, Australia, US, Canada, Europe, and China as the Subaru Solterra.

linkregister commented on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen theverge.com/electric-car... · Posted by u/kwindla

seanalltogether · 4 months ago

Hand crank windows is a weird choice, are the locks manual as well?

linkregister · 4 months ago

In a 2-door vehicle, you can just lean over and roll up the window and toggle the lock on the other door. If you've ever had an old car then you'll know the annoyance of a broken electrical motor.