Mobile Dev Memo: “Europe’s misguided hostility towards Pay or Okay”

Pay or Okay has already been scrutinized by the EU privacy machinery and deemed compliant with the GDPR. As we discuss in the Pay or Okay episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, the Pay or Okay model is widely used throughout the EU in compliance with the GDPR, primarily by news publishers like Der Spiegel, Bild, and Zeit. The model has been interrogated under the restrictions of the GDPR and deemed permissible. The EC’s objection to Meta’s use of Pay or Okay hints at a vague interpretation of the DMA that proscribes the “accumulation of personal data by gatekeepers” that is absent in the text. Further, that nebulous aspiration orbits the regulatory influence of privacy, not competition, which is the DMA’s purview. By the same token: the EDPB, which enforces the GDPR, will issue guidance on Meta’s use of the Pay or Okay model imminently. Why would the EC need to investigate the model separately under the guise of competition concerns?

Eric Seufert

This article is highly misleading, all in the name of defending Meta’s advertising business and tracking practices. ‘Pay or Okay’ being adopted by some publishers does not mean it’s ‘widely’ used (notice how the only examples given are German newspapers, revealing that it’s not in fact that common throughout Europe); moreover, doing something in practice doesn’t make it compliant overnight – see how Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb regularly skirted local regulations to grow their platforms riding on the power imbalance between VC-backed US corporations and urban authorities.

The New Yorker: “Jake Sullivan’s Trial by Combat”

Biden and his national-security team have often been portrayed, with some justification, as a sort of second coming of the Obama Administration, a reunion of the old gang, albeit with younger aides, such as Blinken and Sullivan, moving into principal positions. When Sullivan got married, in 2015, to Maggie Goodlander, who would go on to serve as counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland, attendees at the wedding, which was held on Yale’s campus, included not only Clinton, who read a Bible verse in the ceremony, but also Blinken and William Burns, Biden’s future C.I.A. director. (During Obama’s Presidency, Sullivan and Burns, at that time the Deputy Secretary of State, were secretly dispatched to Oman to begin talks with Iran, which ultimately produced the Iran nuclear deal.) Tom Sullivan, the groom’s younger brother, is now Blinken’s deputy chief of staff.

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Sullivan’s methodical, hyperanalytical style fits with Biden’s career-long tendency to hold on to a decision, to wait and test the angles and find a way to the political center of gravity. But the downside of that approach is evident, too. There’s a real tendency to paralysis by analysis, Eric Edelman, a former Under-Secretary of Defense in the Bush Administration, said. Jake likes to look at every facet of a problem and wants to understand everything. That’s the tragedy of government—you have to make decisions behind a veil of irreducible ignorance.

Susan B. Glasser

This profile of US national-security adviser Jake Sullivan became infamous in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel this past October because it contained a quote – later removed – saying that the Middle East […] is quieter than it has been for decades. I wouldn’t hold this against him that much; after all he’s only human with finite capacity to deal with everything constantly happening all over the world.

The New Yorker: “Dune and the Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages”

Although Peterson’s version of the Fremen language retains a vaguely Arabic sound, almost all other traces of the language have been expunged from Villeneuve’s “Dune” films. Peterson claims that this is in the name of believability. The time depth of the Dune books makes the amount of recognizable Arabic that survived completely (and I mean COMPLETELY) impossible, he wrote on Reddit. When a user asked him to explain, he pointed to “Beowulf”, which was written around a thousand years ago and is uninterpretable to most modern English speakers. And we’re talking about twenty thousand years?! Not a single shred of the language should be recognizable. Key terms like shai-hulud and Lisan al-Gaib have made it into the films, but they’re treated in Peterson’s conlang as fortuitous convergences, not ancient holdovers, as if English were to one day lose the word “sandwich” only to serendipitously re-create it thousands of years later from new etymological building blocks.

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The second omission is evident in that powerful moment from the trailer, Paul Atreides’ call to his fighters. From what we’ve seen, Paul speaks Peterson’s fictional language. Without a subtitle, he would be unintelligible. In the book, however, the phrase Long live the fighters is written as Ya hya chouhada, a reference to a celebratory chant from the Algerian war of independence, which Herbert renders in Frenchified Arabic. This line, more than any other, connects the Fremen’s struggle to recent independence movements, turning them from outer-space sand people into portraits of anti-imperialism. The scholar Khaldoun Khelil, drawing on his Palestinian Algerian heritage, has described the whitewashing of these characters as an effect of Western media’s tendency to portray Arabs as bad guys—fanatics with unreasonable demands and a strange religion. Because Arabs can’t be heroes, Khelil writes, we must be erased.

Manvir Singh

The way language evolves over time has always fascinated me, how some words travel across the world reflecting ancient commercial ties between nations, a myriad of tiny, repeated interactions that coalesce into what we call ‘language’. While we can trace some of that back in time, it feels like predicting the future course of language would be just as difficult as predicting biological evolution.

Gizmodo: “Amazon ditches ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkouts at its Grocery Stores”

Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

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Just Walk Out was first introduced in 2016, presenting Amazon’s biggest and boldest innovation in grocery shopping. The technology seemed incredible, but there were some stumbles. It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is also incredibly expensive.

According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.

Maxwell Zeff

A thousand plus people reviewing checkouts in some 30 stores (according to Wikipedia, Amazon Fresh had 38 locations in the US and 17 locations in London, UK in 2022, of which half were equipped with Just Walk Out) doesn’t sound that bad honestly. The bigger issue here though is that the reliability of the technology was far lower than projected, and wasn’t improving anywhere as fast as initially expected – it’s almost 8 years old at this point. Coupled with the excessive costs of the in-store video hardware, the cost-to-benefits ratio was likely deemed too poor to continue investing in this.

The Atlantic: “The End of Foreign-Language Education”

Within a few years, AI translation may become so commonplace and frictionless that billions of people take for granted the fact that the emails they receive, videos they watch, and albums they listen to were originally produced in a language other than their native one. Something enormous will be lost in exchange for that convenience. Studies have suggested that language shapes the way people interpret reality. Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world—experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think. No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.

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Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, told me that part of the problem with machine-translation programs is that they’re often falsely perceived as being neutral, rather than bringing their own perspective upon how to move text from one language to another. The truth is that there is no single right or correct way to transpose a sentence from French to Russian or any other language—it’s an art rather than a science. Students will ask, How do you say this in Spanish? and I’ll say, You just don’t say it the same way in Spanish; the way you would approach it is different, Deborah Cohn, a Spanish- and Portuguese-language professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has written about the importance of language learning for bolstering U.S. national security, told me.

Louise Matsakis

This article reminded me of a hilarious translation fail I recently encountered in Google Translate: it converted ‘waxing crescent’ – a relatively common expression – to Romanian as ‘Semilună în curs de epilare’, which back in English would mean something like ‘Moon getting waxed’. That translation has been corrected in the meantime, but the Romanian to English version is still out there, and the translation of ‘waxing crescent’ into Romanian remains comically bad.

New York Magazine: “Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Extremely Hardcore’ Twitter”

On Musk’s first full day in charge, October 28, the executive assistants sent Twitter engineers a Slack message at the behest of the Goons: The boss wanted to see their code. Employees were instructed to print out 50 pages of code you’ve done in the last 30 days and get ready to show it to Musk in person. Panicked engineers started hunting around the office for printers. Many of the devices weren’t functional, having sat unused for two years during the pandemic. Eventually, a group of executive assistants offered to print some engineers’ code for them if they would send the file as a PDF.

Within a couple of hours, the Goons’ assistants sent out a new missive to the team: UPDATE: Stop printing, it read. Please be ready to show your recent code (within last 30-60 preferably) on your computer. If you have already printed, please shred in the bins on SF-Tenth. Thank you!

Zoë Schiffer, Casey Newton, Alex Heath

So much has happened since Elon Musk begrudgingly took over Twitter that one could almost draft a novel just by citing story headlines. I had intended to compile a list of them as a blog post, but I gave up as they kept piling on with no end in sight. Even as the agitation settled down somewhat after six months or so, the stream of failures and foolish ideas from Musk never stopped. Instead, I will focus on my two main conclusions from this utterly pointless and fully preventable fiasco – though I’m not certain these count as separate, as they both relate to the prevailing narratives in the media and how they distort perceptions and ultimately cloud underlying facts.

Engadget: “Jon Stewart says Apple asked him not to host FTC Chair Lina Khan”

I wanted to have you on a podcast and Apple asked us not to do it, Stewart told Khan. They literally said, Please don’t talk to her.

In fact, the entire episode appeared to have a “things Apple would let us do” theme. Ahead of the Khan interview, Stewart did a segment on artificial intelligence he called the false promise of AI, effectively debunking altruistic claims of AI leaders and positing that it was strictly designed to replace human employees.

They wouldn’t let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act on AI, he told Khan. Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?

I think it just shows the danger of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision making in a small number of companies, Khan replied.

Steve Dent

I haven’t been terribly convinced by Lina Khan’s lines of attack against Amazon, but it’s good to have someone actively challenging Big Tech’s relentless accumulation of power nevertheless. That Apple would try to censor her, a government official, is both unsurprising and concerning for the state of American democracy. Naturally – because the tech press is endlessly enamored with Apple and everyone loves to hate on the federal government – this attracted far less attention online than musicians removing their catalogs from Spotify, ostensibly in protest against Joe Rogan’s podcast two years ago.