I did my thesis on using medioni's tensor voting framework to reconstruct noisy, blurry, low-res and the like images. It was sponsored by USGS on a data set that I thought was a bit of a bizarre use case. The approach worked pretty well, with some reasonable success at doing "COMPUTER ENHANCE" type computer vision magic. Later on talking with my advisor about the bizarrely mundane and uninteresting data sets we were working on from the grant he quipped that "You built a reasonable way of unblurring and enhancing unreadable images, the military doesn't care about this mundane use case." It then occurred that i'd been wildly ignorant to what I just spent 2 years of my life on.
How does this differ from what Github Copilot does when writing its .github/copilot-instructions.md? That doesn't keep the transcript or prompts, but it does keep quite a bit of the context and a declarative state of the decisions/design considerations made so another AI bot can pickup and have enough context to understand the rationale. I'm also not really convinced that any AI agent wouldn't still parse the code to understand more about the context vs. just using the checkpoint.
Don't forget stand-ins, much of this hasn't discussed that credit card networks do a lot of "stand-ins" when the issuer is unreachable (bank goes down, latency too high, etc). It's a bit unclear how things like Wero would operate when a network issue hits as Wero and EU rails won't just assume the liability for the transaction and hope it clears later as it does on Visa/Mastercard.
Believe it or not clippy the Microsoft helper for word was a huge interest and feature for all of about 2-3 weeks before everyone realized its interactions were just “on top” of actually doing something. Once the cost of clippy, and its failure to actually be helpful sunk in it was relegated to jokes and eventually down the line memes.
It’s hard to actually create something that is a personal assistant. If I want it to keep and eye out for reservations I guarantee it would take a few hours for me to get that setup, more time that it would take to just watch for reservations.
If I wanted it to find out when I needed to register my child for school then do it, I’m 100% sure it would fail and probably in some range from comical to annoying.
This seems less like a personal assistant and more like a “hey bro how ya doing?”. It lacks the ability to inquire and ask questions and deduce.
If I have to prop it up to complete any random task I have, I’ve just got another version of clippy with a lot more computing power.
Credit card companies have been doing stand-ins to support offline transactions for ages. Mainly the reason why you pay a high interest rate on your credit card.
Before anyone goes with pitchforks at Mastercard or Visa it's worth remembering that just because something isn't criminal it can still be quite a civil issue.
Visa and Mastercard take on quite a bit of risk by allowing payment transactions to companies who wade into murky businesses that while not illegal may have a lot of risk.
The amount of lawsuits that these processors get co-named in for providing payment rails is probably enormous and without laws protecting them I don't see how they don't have a choice in actively censoring.
So we're supposed to capitulate to censors because it's hard to do business? If it's too hard, don't do it. I think Visa/Mastercard get more than enough business to justify the inevitbale costs/abuse of the system.
>The amount of lawsuits that these processors get co-named in for providing payment rails is probably enormous
yes, that's called being a billion dollar business. Literally any billion dollar business is facing dozens of lawsuits on the daily. They have dedicated lawyers on hand for this ineviability.
It’s still a very large considerably risk. They don’t have the equivalent of a net neutrality law to shield them. Money transferred on their network is their liability.
If so many other cases didn't end the other way in the US, there may have been a point. Websites aren't accountable for user content published on their servers. Gun manufacturers aren't accountable for school shootings, fast food isn't accountable for the obesity crisis. Police aren't accountable for shooting black people.
There's a lot that needs to change, but I don't see these businesses bothering. So forgive my lack of sympathy.
Websites aren't accountable for user content because of the DCMA and Safe harbor laws protecting them from the risk of what users post [1]. Gun manufacturers are protected from liability by the PLCAA [2]. Police aren't held accountable because of qualified immunity [3].
What i'm saying is no such protections exist for financial transaction that occur on a network. Infact, the opposite exists, laws exist (called Know Your Customer [4]) that specifically hold financial networks (like Visa and Mastercard) liable for allowing transactions related to fraud, money laundering or other high risk transactions like gambling and adult entertainment.
I might disagree a bit with this, I've had all three titles and from my experience:
A manager is executing on plans, managing the work, aligning people on teams and enforcing policy & process.
A director is creating the plans to solve problems, intaking work, aligning teams and creating good processes from policy.
A VP is about defining the problem teams need to solve, managing capacity/budget for work, aligning on a strategy across a company and creating good policy.
> by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous.
Isn't it impossible to determine the internal motivations of others? And even if they were doing it to make themselves feel more virtuous they can still be turn out to be right on the issue, can't they? Or it's possible that there's a combination of both moral outrage and ending up feeling virtuous.