In this case GP probably knows that e.g. Italy has a life expectancy well above that of the US. Still, when he read that well-off people in the US have much better health coverage and it takes months to see a doctor in Italy, he believed it. How is it even possible to believe such a thing when you know the numbers?

For a vaccination I'll call several weeks in advance. If I want an appointment before/after work I'll call well in advance, if I want something tomorrow they may say "11:30, take it out leave it", which isn't great for my work.

Don't trust whoever wrote what you read there. FUD scaremongers.

I want back-and-forth, very approximately like when I do pair programming. The dividing line between what I do and what the AI does varies according to task and sometimes during the task, and is seldom clear at the start.

Then there's the work that wants a human to click buttons and decide whether something is a good and correct user experience. The AI does not have access to my display if I can avoid it.

Overall, the model you describe is one that's worked very well for me, but for some problems. An unsatisfyingly small set.

And you even write that $x makes hard things easy. Hope much did the US pay to lose against Iran? Winning against anyone for the same sum isn't easy.

(His employer explicitly ignored it. They used an ML algorithm to assess signals, but they overrode that particular assessment as soon as they discovered it.)

I don't follow this closely, just look at the pretty pictures. If there's demand for lifting much bigger/heavier things to orbit than presently possible, I would probably not know, for lack of pretty pictures. So please tell.

A small town where I've lived was very much like its neighbours, but one particular neigbour was different in two clearly visible ways: ① there were (still are) more rich people in that neighbour and ② it was much easier to get financing for starting and growing companies in that neighbour.

So at this point, I assume that Google uses more power than the Munich metro-area single-car commuters, even for the widest definition of metro area (the widest I've heard spans 6m people, four times Munich's own population).

Is this reasonable? Is it reasonable that a collection of services with >1B users uses more energy than the single-car commuters in a metro area like Munich? I rather think so. (But then I don't have a high opinion of the value of driving to work.)

I remember that for, uh, Key Quarterly Objectives, was that the name? Aeons ago.

Same shit new decade.

(I love working with AI though. It has many of the benefits of good pair programming.)

Claude is a paid service, not one of those freebies where you are the product and receive as little consideration as practically possible, while advertisers are the paying customers for whom the service is optimised.

This particular attack requires getting users to sideload apps that would be rejected by the play store, and most users don't have developer mode enabled. Therefore, the cost of persuading someone to enable developer mode matters. If the procedure to enable developer mode changes from "open settings, scroll down, tap, scroll down, tap seven times" to include e.g. a 96-hour wait for developer mode to be enabled, then the cost of the attack rises by whatever it costs to stay in close contact with the victim for 96 hours, close enough to react if the victim comes close to realising the truth.

This isn't a guarantee. You can still get phished even if the phisher has to spend 96 hours in intensive contact with you. Some victims are worth that effort, maybe you are, and maybe the phisher made a mistake and puts in the effort to phish you based on the mistaken assumption that you're a millionaire.

There are also other things like that. If Google can ban the keylogger you use quicker than you can deploy new builds, for example. Still no guarantee.

(They do something about other scams too. There was another thing they published recently, I didn't pay attention since no side effect of that concerned me, something to do with caller ID.)

I can see why your address is shown if you offer something for sale. Ads, that puzzles me.

The attack in question doesn't use apps on the store, or even any attempt to get them on the store. There are also other attacks, but the one that prompted this change uses social engineering to get people to tap the build number seven times, sideload something and get a keylogger that then picked up their banking details and used them. Several governments raised the issue, Google acted. (The actions are to slow down the tap-seven-times process, so it becomes harder for the scammers to keep their victims fooled until the keylogger is installed, and also to tweak the timings, so the scammers can't outrun the app-banning process.)

If you haven't had your bank account drained, the scammers you met were different ones. (And I'm sorry that you've been scammed.)

And perhaps because ten and twenty years ago, the sums stolen were small. Now they're in the billions.