> If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Cloud installed, otherwise the load fails, which they detect.
> They used to just hit http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png which connected to your Creative Cloud app directly, but then Chrome started blocking Local Network Access, so they had to do this hosts file hack instead.
This is clever in a way, but I wonder what the review process looks like on that team (I say that team because my experience at Adobe was that the company is very heterogeneous).
They’re still completely heterogeneous in my experience as someone who works with each of their teams. It’s like talking to completely different companies who have little idea what the others are doing.
Novel. A similar approach could be taken by other SaaS tools to comply with age verificaiton laws. Just write an entry to the client's hosts file that points to a subdomain corresponding to a particular birth year. Simple enough for legislative representatives to understand.
The underlying intent here (figure out if it's an existing customer of our locally installed apps when they visit our website) doesn't seem bad, but I certainly dislike both the hosts file and localhost detection options.
I dislike the intent too. A website should simply not be able to see which apps I've got installed. Imagine Facebook doing stuff like this in order to know what ads they should serve.
> These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. What the article describes should not be "what many devs would land on" naturally. What many devs should land on is "scanning the user's browser in order to try to fingerprint him without consent is wrong and we cannot do it."
I think using LinkedIn is pretty much agreeing to participate in “fingerprinting” (essentially identifying yourself) to that system. There might be a blurry line somewhere around “I was just visiting a page hosted on LinkedIn.com and was not myself browsing anyone else’s personal information”, but otherwise LinkedIn exists as a social network/credit bureau-type system. I’m not sure how we navigate this need to have our privacy while simultaneously needing to establish our priors to others, which requires sharing information about ourselves. The ethics here is not black and white.
If you voluntarily visit my website and my web server sends a response to your IP address, have I “taken” your IP address, or did you give it to me “voluntarily”? What if I log your IP address?
Edit: Newspapers have a long history of using headline editors who add “spin” otherwise reasonable stories handed in by journalists. This story was built by talking to a few entrepreneurs who offer line-sitting to see if they’d served any customers for airport security waits. Only one had.
I’m struggling to understand how the advice coming from an LLM is any more or less “good” than advice coming from a human. Or is this less about the “advice” part of LLMs and more about the “personable” part, i.e. you felt more at ease seeking and trusting this kind of advice form an LLM?
It is much easier to share personal feelings with an llm, i found. Also it tried to keep me happy to get the conversation going, but for me it feels mostly 'objective' or the most socially acceptable advice, e. g. keeping a good relationship is more important than trying a new one with someone else because you 'feel something' around them. For me it tried to find out together the sources or causes of that feeling, e.g. you recognize parts of yourself in someone else or in the past you had very good or very bad experiences around an encounter.
LLM is much better on average just for the fact that it was trained on a large corpus of human knowledge, including psychology, therapy and study material. Most of the humans in your vicinity only have some shallow knowledge of local cargo cults and religious teachings.
By that logic a Markov chain is better on average just for the fact that it was trained on a large corpus of human knowledge, including psychology, therapy and study material.
> We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs [of age verification]…
There is always a conversation, but it is often not the popular one and gets drown out by whatever everyone is excited about at the moment. You can find it if you seek it out.
Lawrence Lessig’s book “Code” (1999), for example, talks about how a completely unrelated internet is an anomaly, and that regulation will certainly be necessary, and advocates that it be done in a thoughtful manner.
Yeah, I think that flighty already aggregates various data sources to predict flight delays, I thought maybe they were expanding to include security wait times.
Can you elaborate? As a business owner in the U.S. I can opt to reinvest all revenue back into the business, thus would show zero net profit but (presumably) increase my company’s value. (And remember there are other taxes and fees paid to various governments, not just tax on income/profit, so it’s not typically like nothing gets paid.)
>As a business owner in the U.S. I can opt to reinvest all revenue back into the business,
Not entirely, no. Any of those reinvestments that count as capital expenditures aren't immediately deductible, but only on a throttled schedule, which is why the concept of depreciation exists in tax law:
This is why I asked for elaboration: The poster was unclear about how, say, making capital improvements (and getting taxed on those over time) would somehow look suspicious to the IRS, as it seems like this is an extremely common practice. I assume it’s not that then, but something else which I’d love for the poster to share.
Your comment made it sound like any re-investment back into the business would count as a cost that then cancels the profits that would be taxed. Even with your clarification, it still sounds like that. This is orthogonal to taxes that would be levied on things other than profit.
You can't reclassify profit as reinvestment to show zero net profit. (If you could every business would have an internal hedge fund or private equity business and would show zero net profit).
This is why many people make minimun wage - they get a salary but they use the business profits to live on. See your accountant for all the fine print before doing this.
By choice. Your friend is presumably wealthy enough that they could talk to a human instead, or completely delegate whatever they’re talking to AI about and never talk of it further.
> I found that in my hosts file the other day too, and I investigated to find why they're doing it at all.
> They're using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website.
> When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript: https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png
> If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Cloud installed, otherwise the load fails, which they detect.
> They used to just hit http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png which connected to your Creative Cloud app directly, but then Chrome started blocking Local Network Access, so they had to do this hosts file hack instead.
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