Mathematically speaking, because compilation is a surjective function. Context, organizational, as well as personal knowledge - that information simply is lost in the process of compilation.
It can be restored to some extent by making educated guesses, but it'll never be exactly as readable as the original, which in some cases probably isn't that bad, because the original source code might not have been particularly readable to begin with.
I have used Simon Martinelli's AI Unified Process quite extensively and successfully: https://unifiedprocess.ai
The accompanying tooling allows you to generate requirements for existing projects (brownfield, legacy) as a foundation to either build upon or reimplement existing behaviour.
The singularity is just a bookshelf and love can act as space-time GPS amirite? Slap it on a Möbius strip on and make it a flashy wearable, then you basically have the last Avengers movie too.
> “I have to now use an app to operate my washing machine. Why?!”
Frankly, that's asinine. However, I'd very much like my washing machine or tumble dryer to notify me when they're done (with those appliances sitting in the basement of my house).
I even remember a dorm at uni (TU Dortmund, back in the late 90s) having a website for their washers that'd retrieve and display a status via TCP/IP. IIRC, some guys at the local computer science department jerry-rigged some custom board into standard washing machines available at that time.
> However, I'd very much like my washing machine or tumble dryer to notify me when they're done (with those appliances sitting in the basement of my house).
Every one I've used has an alarm that goes off when it's done, and a timer so you generally know when it should be done anyway. This isn't something you need an app or an internet connection for at all.
Eh, just set a timer on your phone that matches what the display on the machine shows. It may not be an exact match, but it will get the job done for free.
> We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights
That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.
It's certainly a good question. On the idealistic side it's the right choice, people should have the right to have a say in their own data since it's implicitly copyrighted. GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.
In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such. Most corporations seem all to eager to make deals with OAI or Anthropic here anyway, and if not that it'll be Chinese ones.
There is a question of "representation", like if a model cannot be trained on the data of one specific country with a specific language, then it does not learn it and the people of that country are now at a disadvantage when trying to leverage the result. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, depending on the perspective of how the model is being applied relative to the average person. If it's something that makes their job easier then it's a negative, if it's used by the government to automate scanning all chats then it would be beneficial for it to suck. For widespread languages that doesn't apply of course, so the UK and Spain might as well be exempt.
In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it. Even if that means missing out on potential early upsides too. An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
> GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.
Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.
> In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.
Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?
> In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.
Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.
> An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.
That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).
Hmm well the practical point of GDPR is twofold from where I see it: the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard), and the deletion requests where I can send anyone holding my data an email saying they have to delete it all. I do it sometimes, maybe it's just a placebo and half I secretly hope it is because once someone inevitably whistleblows it, they'll be appropriately fined in the billions like Google gets regularly.
> If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours
Yeah if that were actually the case. Seems like the plan is to just automate everything we can in broad strokes, then wait if anything happens to turns up to occupy that portion of the workforce. Nobody seems to have any idea what to do with vast amounts of unemployed people who aren't qualified to do anything anymore.
I think the very possible end result is that there won't be any immediate new jobs in a meaningful volume in the time span when they're needed. As you say, the timeline can be very short, and in the US it certainly will be. The idealistic future is that UBI gets implemented, automation gets taxed and redistributed, so the economy continues to work. But that's a fantasy with the current ring wing wave across the world where any kind of social service is seen as communist money burning for some reason, pocketing that extra wealth through corruption will be the priority. We've seen this again and again in countries where most of the income is dug from the ground in some form, which is economically the same as a few companies making it all through automation. The end result is usually not great for the population. With the AI Act being very anti-authoritarian, banning credits cores, facial recognition, etc. it's a step in the right direction to compensate.
The likely result is probably gonna be some kind of army service and an increase of international tensions to justify a draft when we realize there's only so many extra Wolt drivers a population needs, and then those will go to Starship too. With a war economy you can do pretty much anything to maintain stability, the numbers are made up and the protests don't matter.
If a delay in adoption can help bridge this intermediate gap without complete chaos, millions will suffer a lot less.
> the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard)
This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.
As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.
Pieter Levels famously runs Nomad List as vanilla PHP application on a single Linux server, while people keeps insisting you need a fault-tolerant, multi-region cloud setup and the modern stack-du-jour to provide such an application.
> I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).
How would the EU replace US tech? There simply are no equivalent providers of such technology in the EU, regardless of pipe dreams in that respect EU representatives regularly conjure up (privacy industry, "European Google", "European Facebook", you name it ..,).
Maybe, however, such a move would actually be consistent with dominant EU policy. The EU seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant, after all.
The primary European failure here has been to allow the hollowing out of the EU tech space. There have been plenty of web tech players in the EU; the US policy over the last 30 years has been to absorb them into US companies or buy them off using US capital, and the EU strategy has been to very much encourage that.
But it is complete fantasy to use the current landscape as evidence of capability. It would be equally shortsighted to say "How would the US replace Chinese manufacturing? There simply are no equivalent supply chains in the US, regardless of pipe dreams that pedophile sycophants regularly conjure up. The US seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant".
It never ceases to amaze me how people scramble to defend the EU's failed policies over the last three decades. The EU managed to regulate itself out of all relevant markets and it only has itself to blame.
The EU lost its manufacturing capacity to countries with cheaper labour, just like the US. The US has only succeeded in IT, everywhere else it struggles against Asia.
The ‘American dream’ attracted a lot of talent (look at how many tech leaders were immigrants), and once the network effects (both IT and social) kicked in it was hard to stop. This is a story that has unfolded many times throughout history. Talent moves to where talent is. And it will move if conditions change.
You’re missing their point, they’re not defending EU policy and in fact agree that current capability is poor. They’re saying that it can change and that the US is also self sabotaging in other ways.
Therein lies the rub for the EU. They think they can just regulate such alternatives into existence, yet have time and time again failed to provide such alternatives.
Linux is no EU project, but very much global. It just happens that its originator (who, quite tellingly, has been living and working in the US since the mid-90s) is Finnish.
It's really not that bad of an idea. At least the adblocking part is justifiable considering considering how many times I see people (older/less tech savvy) getting caught with scareware from ads.
I suppose some people just want to see the world burn.
I'm by no means a supporter of copyright and copyright laws, but unilaterally terminating such agreements is a recipe for disaster. How do you think the US would react to such a move?
The us got those agreements in the first place in exchange for 0% tarrifs for international trade. Now that the US has dropped free trade, there's very little incentive for other countries to hold to their side of the deal. If europe wanted to, they could really go to 25 year on US copyright with a plan to go to 0 if there was retaliation
It is never too late for the Great Wall of Europe.
Like in each ones lives, sometimes hard decisions are only possible because they are forced upon us without alternatives.
Recent example, Ukraine would never gotten advanced drone technology, if it wasn't for the price they are being forced to pay to keep their country.
If unfortunately we're faced with similar hard decisions on who to depend on, they will have to be done, regardless of their cost to the local industry.
While advancements in drone technology in Ukraine certainly have been accelerated by the war, the country was by no means unprepared. They have been preparing for a large-scale war ever since the Russian occupation of Crimea (and the dismal international reaction to that).
The EU isn't even capable of ramping up its own defence capabilities when being faced with the very real threat of a Russian incursion in the next few years, which has me wonder what would be required for them to finally wake up.
> The EU isn't even capable of ramping up its own defence capabilities when being faced with the very real threat of a Russian incursion in the next few years, which has me wonder what would be required for them to finally wake up.
It is because EU is not a single state, and member states have very different perspectives not only on Russia threat, but also on "digital sovereignty".
Everyone saying "EU should do something" is just blind towards political reality.
Yet they keep yapping on about the EU being about tighter integration between its member states. If not in the area of defence, where else? So far, this has been an abject failure (recently, see: FCAS).
A failure of each country protecting their own industry, unfortunately stuff that happens since Roman Empire downfall, yet eventually things came together, and falled apart multiple times.
I can't tell anymore if this satire or not, because there are more than few people who actually believe isolationism and red tape such as the AI Act or GDPR is beneficial to the EU's economic welfare.
A few years ago, I saw a talk that made a point about how prosthetics that mimic original human body parts are often designed from an able-bodied point of view. They look inoffensive and are designed for the wearer to blend into what's considered normal.
However, these prosthetics frequently are not all that useful. Once one starts to rethink from first principles in terms of function and efficiency rather than aesthetics this opens up an entirely new space of solutions that might be much more efficient than the original "solutions" they replace - the most famous example probably being Oscar Pistorius' running blades.
The same applies to digital transformation - and by extension AI and robotics. We don't need faster horses. We need to rethink and replace existing processes entirely.
It can be restored to some extent by making educated guesses, but it'll never be exactly as readable as the original, which in some cases probably isn't that bad, because the original source code might not have been particularly readable to begin with.