A service that advertises itself as privacy focused refusing to update their privacy policy while adding features like this seems like a pretty big dead canary.
Did we read the same article?
You're complaining about an optional back-up service. No data is being "collected," you're giving it to them (in an encrypted form) to store on your behalf. How else would a backup service work?
If you don't want to use the cloud version, there's a feature to store backups locally on-device.
> You're complaining about an optional back-up service. No data is being "collected,"
Every app offering cloud-based backup is in fact designed to "collect and store" sensitive data. That at least is opt in. The app also collects your name, photo, phone number and worst of all a list of your contacts and permanently keeps that in the cloud and there is zero way to opt out of that data collection. No matter what excuses you want to make for them there is no getting around the fact that the device does collect and store sensitive data. Just like it can't be denied that they've added several new features none of which is reflected in their privacy policy because they've frozen it in time.
This is an app which is advertised to whistleblowers, activists, and others whose lives/freedom could depend on how well they understand the risks involved yet Signal outright lies to them about those same risks.
> Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong
Out of curiosity, why would you love to be wrong about that? What possible outcome could you see being a net positive for society if the vast majority of knowledge workers (and ultimately, as robotics progress, most workers in general) are replaced by AI?
I believe it was Blink-182 who said, "Work sucks". You have to pay people to do that stuff; they don't want to be there. And then you get into second order effects- costs plummet for anything labor intensive, including medical care, prepared food, cleaning, and private tutors. Then onto tertiary effects- if you can spin up a million genius researchers to attack a problem, you start seeing massive progress in every important area and it isn't tied to population growth.
I get that you might have a 'UBI/alternative general welfare is impossible' up your sleeve, but you've written this like it's somehow unfathomable that not forcing everybody to work just to survive would be a good thing. Of course it would be good! It's just a matter of dealing with the (huge) side effect of lost income.
In that scenario, AI would have to be a public utility, which it is not. Private corporations have no intention to provide services for public good. If they displace a billion jobs, they'll just throw up their hands and go "we're just an Ai company guyz"
> I believe it was Blink-182 who said, "Work sucks". You have to pay people to do that stuff; they don't want to be there.
Believe it or not, some people actually do enjoy their jobs and work they do.
> I get that you might have a 'UBI/alternative general welfare is impossible' up your sleeve, but you've written this like it's somehow unfathomable that not forcing everybody to work just to survive would be a good thing.
UBI absolutely is unfathomable here (US). The USG won't even give people health care. People go bankrupt to afford life saving care on a regular basis. Or just die... Even if those cases are a minority, just the fact that it happens says a lot. So I do think it is unfathomable that UBI would be implemented here. I don't think that's unreasonable to say.
I think a lot of the time when this debate occurs (which, at this point, literally every single day I see something about this) UBI is almost always the contention point but I feel like that's really not the end-all... Like, sure, say there's a miracle and we have UBI get instituted. I think that is maybe 25% of the solution. The other problem is now you're going to have an entire class of people basically living without a purpose. Yeah, I get it, they can go and "explore their passions" and focus on "creative works" or whatever BS people persuade themselves into thinking the vast majority of society would want to do, but realistically I think there would be a huge psychological breakdown in people now living without a fundamental purpose in society.
Somewhat related to that -- I was just this weekend watching a YouTube essay about PTSD in knights back in the medieval times, and the main point made in the video is that the psychological impacts incurred by the knights after battle were not just from seeing fucked up shit... the most apparent and serious cases of "PTSD" occurred when a knight was injured enough on the battle field resulting in them no longer able to be soldiers. Their entire purpose in the world got stripped away resulting in serious psychological stress. I think that same issue would apply to many people today (lawyers, engineers, investment bankers, etc) who would no longer be able to practice their craft. (This is the video for reference, was a good watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=849dmdc-Qf8)
I understand the counter argument to this is going to be some anti-capitalist rhetoric like "Well people shouldn't live to be workers and that's fucked up that they have live that way!" but IMO, some people like what they do and don't want to be made useless. (Not implying that is what you were insinuating, but just in a broad sense I that genera of argument doesn't make sense to me)
In a way, we are betraying something here. My reading is: solving the social problems of capitalism feels so impossible, that reducing the need for anyone to do work is a liability. In a way this sentiment should make extremists of us all?
Unfortunately the fact is that society has some massive imbalances around capitalism
It is not hard for me to imagine a world where if my bosses didn't need me, they would prefer me to be dead than to pay me some kind of permanent income to me. They would prefer to keep that power to themselves
These are already the sort of people who will happily lay you off into a recession, leave you without a way to pay your rent or for food if it improves their bottom line. They do not care if you starve. Or at least they care less than they do about their quarterly bonus
So no, I don't trust these fucks to continue playing nice if they view my value as going to zero
This is becoming less and less true unless you're specifically talking about usage of it outside of a work environment. Many work places are requiring people to use it and/or tracking usage. I don't know about in academic settings, but I'd imagine it's becoming heavily used there too?
Creatine doesn't need astroturfing.. It's not <frontier AI lab>'s newest model turbo boost max pro extreme rocket 5.9. It's just a supplement that some people take.
But what about navigating the code by the call stack? I didn't know that GitHub has a way to do that. Or maybe I'm probably coming across as being dumb enough to be talking about still trying to have a mental model of what calls what.
I've never used breakpoint debugging, was always a printf debugger. And now an agent can do that loop for me.
Prompt is usually something along the lines of:
>I would expect the behavior of this to be [X] - instead I'm observing [Y]
And the agent will form hypothesis, place printf statements, compile, and scrape logs on loop - each loop ruling out hypothesis or narrowing down what portion of the code is responsible for the unexpected behavior.
It has been able to pin-point the exact line(s) of code responsible every time I've reached for it so far.
For what it's worth, generally speaking I read all of the code and keep it in my brain - I have some uncommon assets in that regard like a high reading speed and great memory. `git grep` is the other tool I use often.
I rarely find that the call stack is the limiting factor, to me, and I suppose I do something similar to what you're talking about but just in my head - I know where a file is referenced via imports, what a function does, and what the flow of control is like.
> Do you not need to use the debugger sometimes? Or can cc debug by itself
A key feature of AI coding assistants and coding agents is troubleshooting. It turns out that LLMs excel at pattern matching, specially when coupled with feedback signals. It turns out that troubleshooting represents just that. A few years ago people searched the likes of stack overflow to fix problems, and it turns out LLMs can do the equivalent of that much faster.
But tests show you if a bug is happening, they don’t help you understand the underlying cause of the bug. In a decade, you haven’t hit a compiler codegen issue, a silicon erratum, a race condition, or anything that required actually spending effort understanding the causal path?
I don't know what to tell you besides that I've found more, better bugs using comprehensive testing than I ever found with a debugger.
The sole exception to that is that, back in the very early days, troubleshooting IE6 really required a debugger. But everything else, from memory leaks to thread hang issues to deadlocks, testing is better.
I've heard that. I hope that the people who are IDE-free are just better AI-wranglers than I am because my experience has been that if I can get an agent to one shot something, it's fine but if I can't, the agents tend to make an absolute mess of spaghetti that doesn't actually do what it was asked to do IME.
Maybe? We dont really know this right? People have been saying this for 5 years now and the models are still getting better. The companies running the frontier models have already scraped everything on the web, but the models are still getting better, even if it's only marginally better, with each release. Maybe eventually some company will actually achieve AGI/ASI, who knows..
this was true a year ago but not so much anymore. You still have to supervise the agents, but they can write maintainable code if you keep an eye on it.
I hadn't heard this before. Doesn't that kind of defeat the entire purpose of using the app?
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