If you send data to a remote service... regardless of the guarantees given... you have to assume that that remote service had, processed and most likely stored your data in some fashion.

Literally things like the data protection acts and GDPR just assume this to be the case. If you gave data to a third party - that data is still your responsibility. If they have the potential to access it, you have to assume that they are/could be accessing it. If you give them permission to process it, they are required to process it in accordance with the law, which includes giving things up to legal requests.

Why anyone would EVER think that the data they lob or the chat they have with an AI bot, of all things, would remain anonymous, private, confidential and NEVER be presented in court? I can't even begin to fathom.

Now factor in that if you've been using AI and it processes your data in a foreign country - you could well be screwed from a data protection viewpoint.

People are discovering that laws established long prior to the invention of this particular round of AI apply regardless of what AI companies think or tell you. Same for Whatsapp's push that "even they don't know what you said" on Whatsapp... it's absolute nonsense. If a court requires them to intercept communications and produce records and not inform you or arouse your suspicion - in jurisdictions around the world - that's what Whatsapp has to do. As does any other service.

I don't understand why anyone with a brain would ever think any different.

This is common in all English (he says, as a Brit).

It's called a five-speed gearbox. But you often apply that to the whole car.

Don't just trust me. Jeremy Clarkson (famed UK "car-expert") and team say it all the time on Top Gear if you want to go look.

"If you're cooking lamb, make sure it's 5-speed, preferably 6-speed"

So where's your offline airgapped backup?

And I mean... it's being developed via git, right? So you have all your local copies of all your repos including full history. So you haven't lost ANY code, right?

The AWS data that's critical to the operation of the app would obviously be being backed up elsewhere occasionally, right?

There's a reason that I buy my parents tech to occupy them and make them think and encourage them to do things.

They've basically never read a book. But they love puzzles. They hate tech, but love casual video games (anything more complex is too much for them as they can't strategise, plan, learn, etc.).

I don't want to be dealing with their dementia, and the best way to do that is to keep their minds active.

It's to do with screen time too.

Keeping your mind busy is important to prevent dementia.

Dumbly starting at a TV screen for 8 hours every night and letting it wash over you is awful for your brain (and your opinions!).

But if you're actively doing something, researching, clicking around, seeking out specific content, etc. then it turns from just consuming media to interacting with it.

If you're switching to a game, watching a video, reading an article, going down a link-clicking rabbit-hole, shopping, browsing, talking to friends, multitasking and doing all that for a long (collective) time, then the interaction is actually positive for your mental cognivity.

Sure, you can go too far and just watching YouTube is the same as just watching TV, but I would strongly suggest that being able to have international, 24 hour social interactions, lessons, entertainment, and reading material right there, all the time - that's likely to show benefits not present in generations that eschew such things.

Everything in moderation, obviously, but my life is lived out through my phone and laptop, and I'm always using it to learn all the time.

And I don't have a TV and if I do watch TV/movies, it's literally turn it on, watch exactly what I intended to (no ads) and then turn it off and go do something else.

Part of this is, undoubtedly, a generation like my parents rotting away watching 24 hours news channels, contrived soap operas and the like, who detest technology and can barely answer a text, versus a generation that are messaging each other from bed even in different countries to discuss the gossip / topics of the day that they learned about online, and delving into whatever part of that interests them in an independent manner, and interacting with people with disparate social backgrounds, languages, opinions, politics, etc.

We talk about echo chambers and walled gardens.... and it's the older generations that have confined themselves to those, mostly.

Hint to Microsoft:

The more you insist that Edge is better and that I must use it, even interfering in searches for Chrome on a fresh Windows machine telling me and other users that I "don't need it"... the more I will use any non-Edge browser purely out of spite forever, and deploy, by default, a non-Edge browser for every one of the thousands of users I deal with, including encoding that into our policies.

Windows already has / had EU versions without IE etc. (N?), versions especially for Korea with crippled encryption (K?) etc.

Ironically N was because they were legally required to after a lawsuit about the browser-choice function, and the IE bundled with Windows, and they were forced to offer it.

It seems 20+ years later we're doing the same damn thing again and they've been getting away with it because it's *technically* not immediately illegal for them to just badger the hell out of the user until most ordinary people go "Fine, whatever, I'm sick of clicking the same dialog and redoing the defaults every time".

As it is, many Microsoft Admin functions still only work in Edge (e.g. downloading email reports from Exchange Online, etc.).

To the edge of.... the Earth.

While technically that's an "edge" of what we call space, they don't get to space and it's certainly not the edge of space.

We took them to the edge of the cliff on which they happily survive easily by just being human. Had them peer over it a bit.
  And then brought them home.

It's really quite pathetic that after a ridiculous amount of time, we consider "going up in a plane" something akin to this generation's Apollo missions, and have absolutely NOTHING even close to what our grandparent's generation watched happen live on TV.

This is the same with everything online.

I like BlueSky because, unlike Twitter, it allows me to literally put in "Musk" as a blocked term and then I don't see content with that term in it. I have absolutely zero interest in watching sport, ever. So why even bother wasting bits trying to show me any if I know that and tell you that?

But nothing online really works like that. Even on BlueSky, I want it to OCR the images and apply my keywords there too, because people just post images of text headlines and that obviously never gets filtered by a keyword search (and I bet if they did do that OCR, people would start CAPTCHA-ing their text so that I still ended up reading things about twat-face that I have no interest in).

Video sites are the same. I really, really, really don't care about your "Content Like This". Honestly. I don't. I certainly don't care about random stuff you throw at me "to try something different". I know what I want to watch, which is why I'm searching for that content specifically. Sure, recommend "this actor was also in" or "this was the sequel" or even "this movie is substantially similar to this other one". But beyond that, it's just trying to link absolutely random monetised content to the monetised content I'm watching and pretend it's related.

I want a "minus" filter on everything. On BBC News. On Slashdot. On Bluesky. On YouTube. Absolutely everything. But that would kill their advertising and monetisation, so they won't let me. Even Amazon doesn't support minus-filters. I search for something, get something entirely unrelated that uses the same term and there's no way for me to say "No, I mean a window mesh, not a garden mesh", all minus-filters are ignored on their search, and once you're two pages into the search results all the products start to blend together randomly so you have to dig through everything yourself. What's the point of a search if I have to do the searching?

Even iPlayer and YouTube and other places are guilty of this. I know the kinds of things I want to watch. I know exactly the kinds of things I want to watch. I could even express them in a computer-readable manner very easily. But there's nowhere for me to do that. Meanwhile the services that I would have to PAY for a service don't have a clue what I want to watch. Not one clue. Not even close. I literally know that I don't like certain actors, types of movies, ages of movies, etc. and I can't just filter to that reliably. It's almost like they think that if I just watched every single Adam Sandler movie that eventually I'll start to love him... I won't. Ever. Well, then if you don't like Adam Sandler, maybe you'll like Jack Black. NO! I won't. That's literally not my kind of actor / genre / movie at all. Stop it.

It's one of the reasons that I've just instead built my own personal "Netflix". It's got all the movies I like. All the TV series I like. I even went to the extent of removing the episodes I hate or stopping at the series just before it became pants. I don't even bother to store those series... why would I? I don't like them at all, so I don't want them there, and I never want them to pop up in search.

Even there, Plex has taken to showing me content from their free libraries whenever I search and though you're supposed to be able to turn it off, it still pops up in places. I DON'T WANT IT. It keeps trying to lead me to other movies that I have no interest in. I'm happy in my self-curated little walled garden and all I want you to do is index that and let me find that episode I KNOW is there without you trying to leap out onto the Internet to download something I have no interest in at all.

Honestly, there is no point waiting for a company to do this. They won't offer that simple functionality ever again. It will be part of my getting old that I'll say "I remember when you could tell Google to limit searches to the UK and remove any pages from results with a given minus keyword". They've all just jumped on AI, which if anything makes the problem worse. Now a dumb statistical bot trained on a billion other users tries to second-guess what I want to watch or what Internet page I want to look at and gets it EVEN MORE WRONG.

I'd kill for even a BBC News where I could just turn off the sports and celebrity sections. Honestly. Do they not remember that when people had newspapers you would often give the sports section to the sports-fanatic, the puzzle section to the puzzle fanatic, the TV listings to the TV fanatic, the finance section to the investment-fanatic and so on? There's a reason they were in sections, because that's what families did with the paper.

Now they're just firing every single piece of junk in existence at your eyeballs constantly and hoping something, anything, anywhere will stick with you.

I stopped buying computer magazines a long while ago.

For a time, my brother and I had a dedicated bookshelf to our PC Pro's, PC Magazines and others. I still have entire runs of ZX Spectrum magazines and the like.

But they changed. First, they started getting thicker and thicker with mail order ads. It didn't matter, because the content was much the same as ever. The coverdiscs were invaluable. The reviews were in-depth. The technical articles did not shy from complex topics. There was all kinds of editorial in that about the direction of the industry and new and old technology and it wasn't just a industry journal, it was a tutorial, a textbook, etc. too.

Then they started getting thinner and thinner and more and more expensive. The ads took over. The content was rehash after rehash. They lost most of their big-name columnists and I didn't know who anyone was any more or if I could trust what I was reading when they told me about the "next big thing".

The reviews became shallow and worthless. 20 years later they were still "comparing the best inkjets" almost every issue. The content got dumbed down and what used to be 5-10 pages of in-depth Perl coding was a couple of short lines of PHP spread across one page and the rest wasn't even on the coverdisk any more (what are those?!) but someone on the Internet that disappeared a year later.

Nothing in there was ever referred back to again. I now read an article, move on. There was nothing there to keep, even for posteriety (Am I going to type in a ZX Spectrum BASIC listing ever again? No. But I kept them all because I loved how the article was written and it taught me something every time). Our old PC Pros were always referred back to as a reference for years and year after they were written.

Then they started getting silly - the prices skyrocketed, the magazines became more like a flyer, the useful content dropped to zero, and everything inside was a rehash of earlier stuff. Even the reviews had dropped from, say, 20 pages of the same types of products facing-off with one page dedicated to each product in depth, to 1 page with sometimes individual products getting maybe a paragraph or so. I'm hoping you'll review the product in-depth and save me some money by highlighting the flaws etc. or where I could buy better... now I might as well read an Amazon review because it's more in-depth.

They used to have Q&A sections which are actually really interesting, and now every question is trivial and every answer is pathetic and without explanations. They used to have letters pages where you could see a long-running discussion brought out and summarised.

I'm not paying GBP7.99 for about 30 pages, many with adverts, of bare content, no disc, no exclusive online content/software (that's how they weaned us off discs, but they don't even do that any more) and no reason to keep an issue once you've read it.

I stopped buying a long time ago and moved onto Readly free trials and the like to occasionally check into them for recent years (because they've all moved to that kind of distribution). They've got worse, if anything. Often their online content is just a scanned PDF, not even searchable (presumably for fear someone will index it? I don't know), in horrible interfaces that make reading difficult, and the price has gone up even more. I can skim an entire issue in about a minute or two and the last dozen or so times I've done so... there's been nothing of interest in there, nothing I even click and think "Oh, that looks interesting, I'll read up on that online".

Linux Format isn't alone. Most of those magazines are made by the same few publishers and they've all been dying off for decades now. Even when I'm in an airport lounge and there's something there I would spend stupid money on for me to read on the plane... I don't any more. For a few years, that was the only reason I bought computer magazines. I've even stopped doing that. There's just not enough in them to justify it.

I'd honestly rather pick up a PC Pro from the 1990's and know that it'd take me a good couple of hours to get through just the bits I find interesting in it.

Computer magazines killed themselves, as far as I'm concerned. The dearth and shallowness of content, the pricing, etc. It's not even like there's not a raft of OTHER content out there they could be pointing you at. If I found someone like me and went through their bookmarks, I'd find DOZENS of things I consider extremely interesting and had never seen online before, guaranteed. But they don't even function in that way.

And, honestly, there is no replacement (thus no competition as such). It's not that I've "gone online" and found everything I was looking for in that regard. There's still a massive piece missing of good editorial content wrapping up complex issues, projects, etc. that isn't filled by any one place, or even a combination of places, and the legwork I have to do myself nowadays to collate together reading material for any topic of interest is enormous and wasteful and woefully incomplete. Even tutorials on new tech, people have totally lost the art of being able to write something engaging now, even the same companies that MADE that tech and are trying to sell it to us, and - no - a YouTube video is no substitute at all.

We've lost something there. A few months back my brother finally scrapped the last of his 90/00's PC Pro's, which were still taking up enormous shelf space and causing our bookshelves to bow under the weight. We haven't replaced them with anything at all.

Here we go again.

When they realise that they can't sell anything with an iOS that isn't dated "this year", they'll revert back to some other weird naming scheme like "Millenium" (then realise it has the same problem, "XP" (and produce half a dozen spinoffs with different monikers), "Vista" (then realise that name is tainted forever), then go back to some numerical sequence starting at a random number ("10").

Oh, did the "AI" plateau and stop delivering results when the things you want it to do become statistically irrelevant in its base training data?

Oh, my, what a shock. Never happened before. Gosh, how novel and unprecedented this is.

These things are statistical boxes. That's all they are. No smarter than your Bayesian spam filter on your inbox. And while initial results will appear impressive, past a certain point, no matter how much you train it, it will degrade and plateau and never reach any lofty heights of perfection.

Because the statistics starts to bottom out and - especially for a deployed-en-masse service to millions of users - you start to fall into the percentages that it can't adequately deal with more often that you would ever like to happen.

And unless you want to train one individually for each user (where it will get better for that individual, but not THAT much better) it will be nothing more than a glorified spam filter. Are you telling me that spam has never got into your inbox and your spam folder has never contained a legitimate email? Then I call you a liar.

And imagine the cost of having to train a model on not just "everything on the Internet" but particularly towards "what this individual user wants to see"... the cost would skyrocket by orders of magnitude. With a spam filter, or a web filter, or an ad blocker, we were all able to run our own one on our own system and it wouldn't be a drain on resources and would tune to our desires. With AI? Not a chance. Everyone running a full model for half a dozen purposes just to find out where you dropped your file, or what that site was you found last week?

It's comical that people are now shocked that an AI plateaued... again... orders of magnitude away from anything intelligent, and showing no signs of actually being able to learn. Clearly they haven't been paying attention to every AI model ever, since the 50's/60's.

The only difference today? You simply do not have the excuse any longer that you "just need a bit more computing power", "more training data" (the entire Internet!), or even "more funds" (countless hundreds of billions thrown at it).

The only good thing to come out of this current AI fad might be that everyone has to actually go back to the drawing board and think about what they're doing rather than just launching a bunch of data at a model and hoping it somehow turns magically intelligent and able ot learn in perpetuity if you keep doing that enough.

Proper, official Cockney, mate. Which is quite hard to be nowadays, technically.

Is it 2005 again already?

You ain't gonna get it until people stop throwing their money at regurgigated shite.

This is why I stopped going to the cinema, and stopped watching "new release" movies. I refuse to fund them to just produce yet-another in every franchise known to man.

Hell, I've probably seen about 1% of the "superhero" movies out there, and never paid to watch any of them, because... why would I?

We need to break people's fingers from giving their credit card to Hollywood, until then nothing will change.