Caveat emptor, the saying goes. If people don't have an appetite for privacy, don't expect them to take a principled stance based on outrageous headlines.
It's not a coincidence that federally backdoored spyware like Windows is the most popular operating system in the world. I too remember the shocked headlines of the Snowden revelations, and ten-plus years later I work shoulder to shoulder with people that couldn't possibly care less. There is no expectation of privacy, HN too quickly extrapolates it's own virtue signalling to normal people that enjoy using spyware like TikTok, Facebook and Windows.
But also, today, a lot of lawsuits about Facebook knowingly getting people addicted, and governments changing the laws to resist the general category.
But not, as you say, for Windows (and others*) spyware.
* I'm 95% sure the slow-walking of one very easy bug I (and others) reported to Ubuntu was there by government mandate, though obviously I couldn't guess which government.
Both the ISOs and the SHA256 hashes themselves were served insecurely until… my email archive says I reported in 2015 and it was closed in 2022.
I don’t think there is any consistency in behavior. People react viscerally to the unproven belief that the Facebook app records conversations. They’ll also happily buy big TVs despite the fact they’re very much listening to you and we have solid evidence that it’s for ads or residential proxying. Most people have no idea how ads “follow” you, or how companies can figure out what you talked about by connecting the dots from other user metadata.
I think the problem is less "AI agents are ruining the internet" and more that nobody wants to receive a thousand automated requests from other people's agents. The internet was already full of spam, this just makes it cheap to produce a lot more of it
The 370 years thing is doing a lot of work in the headline imo. If people had already figured out it was probably a book cipher, this is impressive, but it's not quite the same as solving something that hundreds of experts had been actively working on
I'm struggling to see the upside of replacing working coreutils when the replacement still has bugs that the old implementation doesn't. Rust being safer is nice, but that doesn't help much if the new rm segfaults
The thing that bothers me here is less that the model cheated and more that it found a way to improve the score that the people running the test didn't intend. That's a pretty nasty failure once you start giving these things more control
I must say I am becoming a huge fan of Deepseek. They keep putting out capable models and actually tell people a lot about how they built them. Even if I don't understand every part of it, I'd rather see companies show their work than give us a few benchmark charts and call it a day
What I find interesting is how AI has changed the cost of maintaining two native apps enough that a decision that made no sense a few years ago is worth revisiting now
People have very different "expectations" of privacy when they're having a conversation with an AI VS when they're browsing something like Facebook
Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription
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