VSerge

This is low on details and you have to dig through the decision, which itself redacts out crucial details on revenue of the companies being fined within the FNAC - Darty group. Tldr is Fnac saying: "sure we have a 2025 revenue in excess of 10 B€ but we're really not in great financial health so please don't fine us too much". Since a fine could be 2% of revenue, ie 200M€ max here, to walk away with a 7M€ fine is a very good outcome for FNAC. I am unsure how much value they derived from tracking this data, but it could well be in excess of the amount of the fine. So probably not very dissuasive all things considered.

Watching youtube with Firefox + ublock origins still gives you an experience free of the peppering of insufferable ad breaks

Gotta love that they picked sonnet as default for the CEO and most execs..

Former French president Jacques Chirac was famous for often adding an adverb like "naturely" to his sentences when he was lying.

^this. The person described here appears like a crook who pocketed millions and stiffed investors, so why just a contempt charge?

In any case, probably not a romantic explorer figure as the clickbaity title suggests.

Wouldn't you know whether a teacher is reliable or not? If reliable, they probably have this reputation also because they can also say when they don't know something. And if you found out a given teacher isn't reliable, you'd be careful about what they say next - or you would just ask someone else.

The problem here is for a child to be thinking this system is reliable when it is not. For now, the lack of reliability is obvious as chatGPT hallucinates on a very regular basis. However, this will become much harder to notice if/when chatGPT will be almost reliable while saying wrong things with complete confidence. Should such models be able to say reliably when they don't know something, this would be a big step for this specific objection I had, but it still wouldn't solve the other problems I mentioned.

On the topic of "24. A Sony Walkman-style device that you can give to children so they can ask questions to an LLM...", I would strongly caution against this:

- short of AGI, what a child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in there will be catastrophic for the learning journey because they will be believed blindly by the child.

- even if you had a perfect answering LLM who never makes a mistake, what's the end result? No need to talk to others to find out about something, ie reduced opportunities to learn about cooperating with others

- as a parent, one wishes sometimes for a moment of rest, but imagine that your kid just finds out there's another entity to ask questions from that will have ready answers all the time, instead of you saying sometimes that you don't know, and looking for an answer together. How many bonding moments will be lost? How cut off would your kid become from you? What value system would permeate through the answers?

A key assumption here for any parent equipping their child with such a system is that it would be aligned with their own worldview and value system. For parents on HN, this probably means a fairly science-mediated understanding of the world. But you can bet that in other places, this assistant would very convincingly deliver whatever cultural, political, or religious propaganda their environment requires. This would make for frighteningly powerful brainwashing tools.

Fair point in your case, but my experience across companies and industries is that people just don't read. It's true in any customer facing experience where tutorials etc are routinely unread and ignored, it's true for execs who are always short on time and want the exec summary in order no to read a whole memo (however misguided this may be in certain instances), it's true for seasoned professionals who prioritize and decide to ignore certain requests until they are clear enough / repeated enough, the list goes on.

Even people getting @mentionned on slack or in emails seem to find it acceptable to say routinely they didn't see/read whatever it was they were specifically asked to look at.

Can't help but notice that their reduced 4-days work week still is 36h long. 9h work days would be considered long in most European countries, where the norm is around 40h for a five-days work week. So they are not just cutting a day, they are also working 1 hour more than average on each other day. This probably explains a lot in terms of productivity.

On a different note, the increased ability of men to participate in family life and household chores sounds amazing. It might sound weird to younger professionals without kids, but as soon as you have a child, having one extra day to deal with everything household related makes a huge difference.

Qwant is infamous in France for having made big claims and failed repeatedly. It was for the longest time just a wrapper around Bing, while claiming otherwise.

Impossible, even in the current crazy atmosphere. An actual ban would mean an all-out commercial war and a very serious dent in globalization.

All families can't afford meat daily, let alone any type of meat they want. So, some families might favor chicken and certain processed meats here and there, but most cuts of beef and lamb for example might be out of the question, and so will daily meat consumption. The same applies for dairy, they might afford big blocks of tasteless cheese, but won't touch often cheese with taste, French or otherwise. There is no enforced rationing, but choice is reduced if not removed for a good fraction of the population, purely for economic reasons.