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Today's Neural Networks Are The Machine Code
In a great new piece in Wired, Jason Tanz announces the end of coding. That might be a bit tendentious but it shows that machine learning that comes with neural networks has the effect of computers programming themselves, with us humans reduced to...
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WhatsApp Must Speak German Because
Legal journalism is no easy thing, especially if it is about foreign law or court judgments. All too easy, all those details making the difference, or just the legal context, don’t make it to a published article.
David Meyer’s coverage for Fortune of a recent German regional court of appeal decision in a legal case that WhatsApp is fighting against a local German consumer protection association:
WhatsApp Must Speak German to Germans
Yes, but. This is by no way a suprising decision. It is long established in German legal practice that foreign companies that actively target German consumers are subject to German law, including legal provisions regulating Internet commerce. It is easy to actively target German consumers, with e.g. a German language website (like whatsapp.de) being sufficient. If you want to avoid German regulation, don’t target German customers specifically.
The appellate court said that while many Germans can understand everyday English, few speak the English legalese in which terms of service are written. Therefore, it said, it was unreasonable to expect them to do so, and WhatsApp’s terms of service and privacy policy are essentially ineffective.
Yes, but. In its decision, the court stressed that it probably wouldn’t agree to any terms of service not being in German language: “Alltagsenglisch mag verbreitet sein, für [..] überhaupt kommerzielles Englisch [..] gilt das aber nicht.”, meaning that while everyday English might be found commonly in Germany, this isn’t true for any commercially relevant situation. This is also a common line of German courts. So, if you want to do business in Germany, you need to follow German law.
If the ruling is finalized
WhatsApp has a chance to lodge a kind of final appeal to the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof). However, as the recent appeal decision in this case is in line with the common sense of courts in Germany on the applicability of German law, I doubt very much that such a final appeal would have any chance to go through.
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Automation and Artificial Intelligence
Steven Cherry has written an essay about automation and artificial intelligence for the New Scientist. I took two insights from it:
Malone’s third law: “Every technology breakthrough takes twice as long as we expected and half as long as we are prepared for.”
So, let’s give real automation with artificial intelligence a few decades, from today.
In fact, all jobs are at risk, even the software programmer’s.
I agree that automation will target all employment sectors, but I would argue that the degree of risk will be divided very unevenly between different professions.
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Design Makeover
Time for a fresh new design for this site. I wanted to get rid of the shadows, the borders, the fuzzy different shades of grey colors and instead follow a clear, legible and more minimalistic design approach.
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Check if Mission Control is Active
Unfortunately, Apple has never provided a public API to programmatically check if Mission Control is active. There are not too many use cases for such a check, but I have encountered one.
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More Boardless Edison
A while ago I shared how I managed, with help from Fuzzing on Edison, to power my Intel Edison without breakout board. While soldering the two power connector wires to the Edison worked, it was not a good job, as the tiny solder joints tended to b...
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Boardless Edison
Intel Edison is a marvellous device, but the need to power it through a breakout board, either the mini breakout board or the bigger Arduino breakout board, annoys me. Following the advice in Fuzzing on Edison, I successfully got rid of all those ...
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Unboxing Intel Edison with Monty
I am more in the embedded devices field nowadays and after some tinkering with Raspberry Pi, I finally ordered some Intel Edison parts. The Edison is a very small computer with the main board having a size of only 35.5 x 25 x 3.9 mm. Its computing...
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Non-Published Publishing Tools
Nowadays, every indie publisher seem to develop his or her own custom publishing tools, be it a custom website and newsletter tool or some fancy iOS app generator. While most of these tools will never see the glaring light of the general public, s...
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Back to WordPress
Today, I’ve migrated my blog back to a WordPress installation, after having used Jekyll for a while. I really like the command-line approach of Jekyll, but mobile blogging has proved more difficult than expected, and static blog generation needed ...
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