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The homevoter hypothesis is mostly nonsense. There isn't a coordinated, conscious effort to restrict the supply of homes based on rational expectations of excess returns. People restrict the supply of homes due to misguided aesthetic reflexes, racism, nostalgia, and a bunch of other stuff, not because they are mustache-twirling capitalists.

Why? There are loads of people who can afford to rent a house but can't afford to rent a million dollars. I genuinely cannot understand where this hatred of people who rent out houses comes from.

People did think of many of these core concepts decades ago, but they did not have the resources to put them into practice.

You can't send high volume through new accounts. Usually when a gmail account is being used for real spamming, it's an established one that's been taken over and the spammers are just discharging the accumulated reputation of the account.

> Usually when a gmail account is being used for real spamming, it's an established one that's been taken over

My incident is unlikely to be a real account being taken over. The name format was "firstnamelastnameofficial@gmail.com" and I have a somewhat rare name ... probably well under 40 people worldwide with the exact spelling.


Showing the murder dog reading a gauge using $$$ worth of model time is kinda not an amazing demo. We already know how to read gauges with machine vision. We also know how to order digital gauges out of industrial catalogs for under $50.

I think that where this gets interesting is when you can just drop these robotic systems into an environment that wasn't necessarily set up specifically to handle them. The $50 for your gauge isn't really the cost: it's engineering time to go through the whole environment and set it up so that the robotic system can deal with each of the specific tasks, each of which will require some bespoke setup.

Agree. I'm unclear what's the highlight of this post. Is the multimodality of the model (that can replace computer vision), is it the reasoning part, is it the overall wrapper that makes it very easy to develop on top?

It's the fact that is not task specific.

Completely agree, I get that this is a stepping stone for future, more reliable robots but I found the demonstration underwhelming.

Heppner's argument was dumb but it opens a field of interesting questions. If I use a document processor (like Google Docs) to compose a message to my attorney, which message itself would be privileged, but I use some sidebar feature of Google Docs/Gemini to clean up a sentence that I thought was clunky, and elsewhere I have, for whatever reason, enabled features that permit Google to use inputs and outputs to train or refine their models, has that destroyed the privilege?

The brief linked above[0] was easy to read. IANAL but in it the author seems to say that online tools fail to meet the confidentiality "test" and explains the ruling in clear language.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779377


I don't know why you think I did not read it. My remark is an application of the 3-point test in the decision to another system.

Well, hrrm. I thought that because it seemed to start clearly in the document I linked that something like Google docs wasn't safe, regardless of spell checking feature use. However, following my link again, it seems that the referenced post has been edited or something because going to grab a quote, I found myself in a different document than I remember.

I think in hindsight I was remarking, effectively, these two claims (yours and the courts) don't seem to live in the same world. Not your responsibility to resolve my confusion and different parts of the court system can issue edicts that contradict to be later resolved at higher levels of the system so... Sorry I didn't respond within the full context you wrote.


What about email?

Yes, you lose the privilege if your attorney-client communications are not intended to be confidential. If you agree to share those communications with a third party, you don't intend them to be confidential.

But that communication is clearly intended to be confidential. Also isn't having one attorney on a multi-party communication marked confidential sufficient to create privilege?

When I worked at two different FAANG companies, both legal orientation sessions taught this specific scenario as an example of something that's not attorney-client privileged.

If you email your lawyer to ask legal questions, that's privileged communication.

If you just cc a lawyer on a thread while you talk to other people, adding the lawyer doesn't make the conversation privileged or protected.


That is an erosion of the social contract from the early days of SaaS.

The law in the US is based on the expectation of privacy. If companies and the US government repeatedly egregiously share private data in violation of terms of service and the law, then what expectation is there?

25 years ago, I'd say "Checking the 'do not train on my data' button in an Anthropic account would pretty clearly create an expectation of privacy." These days? OpenAI had to send all such data to the New York Times, the government has been illegally wiretapping the whole planet for decades, the US CLOUD Act exists, and companies retroactively change terms of service all the time.

Heck, Meta has been secretly capturing lewd bedroom videos and paying people to watch them, and it barely made the news, just like the allegations the WhatsApp content moderation team made where they claimed they have access to WhatsApp E2EE content (what other content could they be moderating?!?)


What constitutes "Sharing with a third party" though? Using a 3rd party email service like outlook or gmail? Using a third party docs service like google docs?

It doesn't seem right that google docs would be privileged, but if you use the fancy spellcheck button, it no longer is.


Right, exactly. It is also too much to expect that if a user enabled the "personalization" button in the Gemini app, for unrelated reasons, they now can't expect to compose a privileged email to their counsel. It's a minefield.

Well, at Google people get legal advice from in house lawyers via Gmail. Are they not sharing that with at least some of the Gmail team (who could read the email)?

Gmail users (correctly and reasonably) do not expect the "gmail team" to read their emails, except using glass-breaking incident response privileges that leave audit trails and trigger review. Users expect that email is private. Anyway, both Google's privacy policy and American jurisprudence segregate things like emails, voice calls, and video calls into a separate "communications" category, while Google's privacy policy treats Google Docs as "other content you create", even though the difference seems immaterial if you know how these systems work.

Google originally declared that they read all emails. That was semi-changed with the Workspace rollout but there is nothing preventing them from reverting to the old policy. They already do it anyway for reminders extracted from email.

To me, "read" means by a human. Humans read, computers process.

No normal person believes that systems delivering and classifying messages amounts to "gmail team reads my emails".

The onus is on the companies to make this clear, if they aren't willing to tell users the dangers of using their own tools that kinda tells you everything you need to know (they don't care about their customers, only $$$).

Be upset at Google for not taking privacy seriously, they never have and never will.


Right so calling my attorney is the same since I'm sharing the call with the phone company.

Nope. The wiretapping laws precedent is known as ‘minimization’; when a legal tap is obtained of your phone lines, the expectation is that every effort will be taken not to tap attorney-client calls, lest your entire evidence packet get thrown out for failure to do so. That precedent is not automatically transitive to AI just because one thinks it ought to be; telephone lines between human beings are protected both by extensive case law and also actual law; neither yet applies between one human and a third-party corporation offering an AI, especially when at least one major AI is contractually declared in shrinkwrap to be ‘for entertainment use only’.

maybe not the call itself but the voicemail for example. can it be "extracted"?

another point to make it safer would be sharing the "chat" with the lawyer, this way it becomes media of communication


I don't think that hot take will survive much contact with the near future, at least not without a good deal of controversy.

> The majority of views goes toward a relatively small number of mainstream content creators

By any precedent YouTube is radically decentralized. Yes, the view concentration follows a power law, and the power law beats the long tail, but you have to add up thousands of channels to get a majority of YouTube views. Think about how that compares to the overall media landscape. Any two TV channels would yield a majority of viewers. The diversity and decentralization on YouTube is much greater.


I would be more excited by this if there was a better permissions model for these things. For example I can think of a skill that would need access to a certain corpus of documents that I host on Google Drive, but, as far as I have been able to determine using Google's other AI products, there is no way for me to grant read-only access to that corpus without granting read-write access to all of my data on Google, which is simply too much access for my taste. There has to be something less binary than Personalization:on/off?

A person who says that Celeste did not need all of its levels to tell its story did not pay any attention to the story, or is not able to empathize with the character. Also if this person bounced off Celeste then they probably saw 5% of the content, not the 33% they suspected.

The claim is not that they play about 33% of every game but that they completely finish about 33% of all games they play.

I understand. But even people who get to the credits of Celeste might not be aware that they're maybe 20% of the way through the game.

I would just like to point out that this was one of the things that the AMP straightjacket prevented. The whole online news industry has conclusively demonstrated that it can't be trusted with javascript and must be hospitalized, but they refuse to acknowledge their own illness.

Is it news sites fault or is it the fault of web standards/browser developers for failing to build any viable mechanisms for monetizing content?

The issue is hardly isolated to news outlets. It's endemic to the web.


Yeah, and I think it's pretty much impossible to solve.

Look what happened with Netflix. They actually got it right, a reasonable price for a bunch of stuff which would end up appropriated based on demand (they needed to have the disk to rent.) And how you have a bunch of players trying to compete in the space, each with it's exclusive content to try to make you choose them.

And look what's happened with Google's "news". It's more and more and more clickbait. I used to think the answer was a small charge per article, run through some aggregator that tracked payment. But these days we see things designed to get you to open the page, not to actually provide value. Or look at the problems Amazon has had with it's Kindle Unlimited stuff--books designed to game the metrics, groups engaging in read each other's books behavior etc.


AMP sites listed on Android Assistant routinely messed with back button behavior to trap you.

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