Sorry to be "that guy", because I don't know the details of how WhatsApp does E2EE, but in any proper (as in secure and private) implementation the only thing that should matter is whether the client follows the spec? You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?
The only thing that matter is whether you trust the app or not.
- If it is proprietary, you just have to blindly trust it (as is the case with WhatsApp currently: they say it is end-to-end encrypted, but you can't verify).
- If it is open source, then some people will want to understand how it works before they trust it. Other will either blindly trust (like for proprietary software) or trust that persons they trust understood how it works and were convinced.
> You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?
Well, exactly. I am interested in how the WhatsApp interop works just as I am interested in how HTTPS works.
I think the suspicion is based on this app being offered in a region whose government is hostile to privacy and this implementation being connected with the strong nativist bent in Europe.
The "spec" is not relevant in any way because we have no idea what else is going on. Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU? Everyone is just complying with the global spec...but the app provider must be in Europe...okay.
> Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU
The integration is only possible because the EU forced Meta's hand. The law only applies to massive digital empires with gatekeeper levels of control.
I don't think the EU would mind at all if Meta would permit American companies to interoperate with them. Meta won't just permit it, they have to protect their WhatsApp Business money machine of course.
That's also why the feature is only available to EU numbers. Not because BirdyChat hates Australians, but because WhatsApp won't permit them to send messages to numbers from those countries.
It isn't an "economic confederation". It has a parliament, an executive, a judiciary, and a civil service. I would read the wiki page on the European Union.
The EU parliament can't propose laws, unlike any parliament in the world.
The executive is formed out of national government heads of state, which can veto everything.
Its judiciary and actually all 3 branches are strictly limited in their powers to powers delegated to them (which are weaker than the US Articles of Confederation).
The civil service is covered by the comments above.
In technical terms it is a government, in real life is is strictly limited, albeit growing. No country could operate with the "government" the EU has. France has several million government employees for about 70 million people while the EU has at most 50 000 workers for 450 million citizens).
This is a very complicated topic and I don't really apreciate the condescension inherent in sending me to Wikipedia.
Call it what you want but the fact remains that they can write a lot of laws the member countries must follow, for better or worse. GDPR, Chat Control, etc.
1- The client isn't the only thing that matters (There's servers)
2- The client doesn't follow a spec in WhatsApp, there is no spec as it's a private non-interoperable system.
3- Browsers and HTTPS work with an entirely different encryption model, TLS is asymmetric, certificate based and domain based. TLS may be used in Whatsapp to some extent, but it's not the main encryption tool.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. If an app does real E2EE (not "marketing E2EE"), then the servers should have no control over the encryption. Otherwise it's not end-to-end, by definition. Regarding the "private non-interoperable system", the whole point of TFA is that EU made them open it up. See https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess... Your last "point" is irrelevant because I never claimed anything about the similarity between encryption models. Have you ever heard of a "simile"?
Well, yes. But one could think of a world in which WhatsApp has its own internal protocol and to bolt on third-party support they just decide to represent third party clients as “virtual clients” on the server side, which would be the easiest way to make it work while not having E2EE support. Especially since the feature only exists for legal compliance purposes.
I couldn't work out what the hell the app is from the website, as the home page tells you it's a "New Home for Work Chat" and mentions "Still using personal chat apps for work conversations?" - so I'm guessing it's supposed to have some business focus, but the app name makes it sound like something you'd install for your kids. I can't imagine ever saying to someone "we need to discuss contract details, let's talk on BirdyChat".
It looks like it's focused on business but its name sounds childish. If I mentioned that in a corporate meeting people would just laugh at me, I don't think it helps their case.
Specially if you go to the homepage and they're trying to market it as a work too.. If I went to my boss and tried to make the case that we should move all of our encrypted communication from Whatsapp to something called BirdyChat they would laugh at me and dismiss the idea.
Because a pun on "What's Up?" and "App" is so professional? Maybe I'm old but I remember a time when I though WhatsApp was an extremely silly name for a SMS replacement.
Actually, the linked university page [1] does claim that the "cash rent equivalent" is $274 per acre. Surprising, but I suppose farmland isn't that expensive. But unfortunately their total budget per acre is $960, 90% higher than in the AI's "budget". Assuming that it can do everything as efficiently and cheaply as an experienced human farmer, such as harvesting all 5 acres in 14 hours of labor.
I don't know anything about farming, but the budget seems extremely dubious.
1370 on the lease, 350 on "IoT sensors" and "soil testing" (why?), but only 800 on "Custom Operator", which I'm assuming is supposed to be the labor, for seven months (apr-oct). So that's an average budget of 114 dollars on labor per month. For minimum wage that buys you 15 hours of work. Is this all a big trolling attempt aimed at HN users?
I mean, it's probably worse to pretend to be an actual customer, rather than sending some random message. The AI's obviously never going to actually lease any land, so all its doing is convincingly wasting their time. At least landlords are often quite unsympathetic, so it's probably fine to waste their time a bit.
I mean, it hasn't even "decided" whether it's going for "Iowa, Texas or Cordoba, Argentina". Just look at the files in the repo, it's looking an awful lot like those AI transcripts where somebody's "discovered a new kind of physics".
https://github.com/brightseth/proof-of-corn/blob/main/proof-...
> That 20ms is a smoking gun - it lines up perfectly with the mysterious pattern we saw earlier!
Speaking of smoking guns, anybody else reckon Claude overuses that term a lot? Seems anytime I give it some debugging question, it'll claim some random thing like a version number or whatever, is a "smoking gun"
Yes! While this post was written entirely by me, I wouldn't be surprised if I had "smoking gun" ready to go because I spent so much time debugging with Claude last night.
Serious question though, since AI seems to be so all capable and intelligent. Why wouldn't it be able to tell you the exact reason that I could tell you just by reading the title of this post on HN? It is failing even at the one thing it could probably do decently, is being a search engine.
I've had gemini tell me "We are debugging this problem here in İstanbul" and talking about an istanbul evening, trying to give uplifting or familiar vibes while being creepy.
I think there was a setting about time and location which finally got rid of that behavior.
It's not just a coincidence, it's the emergence of spurious statistical correlations when observations happen across sessions rather than within sessions.
Or the "Eureka! That's not just a smoking gun, it's a classic case of LLMspeak."
Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude all have these tics, and even the pro versions will use their signature phrases multiple times in an answer. I have to wonder if it's deliberate, to make detecting AI easier?
Without knowing how LLM's personality tuning works, I'd just hazard a guess that the excitability (tendency to use excided phrases) is turned up. "smoking gun" must be highly rated as a term of excitability. This should apply to other phrases like "outstanding!" or "good find!" "You're right!" etc.
smoking gun, you're absolutely right, good question, em dash, "it isn't just foo, it's also bar", real honest truth, brutal truth, underscores the issue, delves into, more em dashes, <20 different hr/corporate/cringe phrases>.
Maybe we need a real AI which creates new phrases and teaches the poor LLMs?
Looking back we already had similar problems, when we had to ask our colleagues, students, whomever "Did you get your proposed solution from the answers part or the questions part of a stackoverflow article?" :-0
That's the point though, it doesn't reflect human usage of the word. If
delve were so commonly used by humans too, we wouldn't be discussing
how it's overused by LLMs.
You might see certain phrases and mdashes ;-) rather often, because … these programs are trained on data written by people (or Microsoft's spelling correction) which overused them in the last n years? So what should these poor LLMs generate instead?
They love clichés, and hate repeating the same words for something (repetition penalty) so they'll say something like "cause" then it's a "smoking gun" then it's something else
