It's really an opinion question, is AI going to dramatically alter the web or not? No one knows the answer to that. All that we do know is that AI is disrupting a lot of things and the web may end up being one of them. So depending on how you feel about AI that day, your answer can differ.
I don't think that is correct. The FAB in AZ is their fallback position if Taiwan is lost.
I googled something like net worth of US billionaires and that was what came out on top. I was looking for the the $6.72T number, not the count of the billionaires, that count varies everyday be cause many up them are right at the $1B line. A strong up/down day in the market can change the number by 30.
My point is that even if you took every penny the billionaires have and passed it out to the general population you are only going to get a one time check for $17.920. And if they have to pay taxes first that one check will be closer to $14,000. Even though billionaires are extremely rich they are still nothing much when compared to the size of the overall US economy. The pandemic stimmie checks were of similar size and they weren't life changing.
People compare themselves one to one with a billionaire and feel very poor. But look at it collectively, if you confiscated everything the billionaires have they could only pay off the US deficit for about 18 months before they collectively went broke. And then we'd still have a giant deficit without anyone to tax. It's just a fantasy to think that taxing the billionaires can close the deficit or provide free healthcare for all. Use you brain and a calculator, it can't possibly work. Sure, make them pay more in taxes, but it isn't going to dramatically change things.
I just copied the quote and didn't edit it.
"According to Forbes, there were 868 U.S. billionaires as of 2025, holding a combined wealth of $6.72 trillion as of the end of 2024, a decrease from the 813 reported by Forbes in its April 2024 list but with increased overall wealth. The United States has the most billionaires globally, with these individuals concentrated in states like California, New York, Florida, and Texas."
$6.72T / 375 milllion (population of USA) == $17,920 per person.
Amazon has flooded DC with lobbyists trying to get De Minimus repealed. Analysts estimate ending De Minimus will increase Amazon sales by $22-25B. It is also generates instant profit for Amazon since Amazon charges a blanket 15% finder fee. It the a vendors pays $100 in tariffs Amazon adds their 15% right on top of that taking an addition $15 for doing absolutely nothing. Analyst estimate for that markup effect is an increase in $1.5B/yr in Amazon profits.
In the larger picture most economist are predicting a major substitution of goods purchases to service purchases which are not tariffed. In other words, a lot of people will simply stop buying these trinkets and instead travel, go to sports, concerts, etc.
This universal crawler would just copy everything verbatim and compress it with standard compression. It would then be up to the subscribers to process it into their own internal formats.
This is not a cheap thing to build, the central repository is going to need several billion dollars worth of storage. So the fees to join the group will be in the $250M range or more. But you'd have to spend that much on your own crawler so there's no loss.
Before you run off saying 'sign me up' note that each empty exabyte of storage costs about $100M to buy.
Consider how this would work for a new AI entrant. They'd pay to join the repository collective and then the repository will ship them an array of disks with exabytes of data to get them started. No need to crawl at all. Over time that exabyte array will be remotely updated with newly crawled content. Once they have the exabytes of data in their data center they can copy it out at very high speeds. A complete snapshot of the entire internet is zettabytes, I don't believe anyone has a complete snapshot.
A good way to solve this would be to use the Google antitrust trial to force the creation of a single crawler for the entire web which puts all of the results in to a single, central repository. Everyone can then use that central repository, while charging the users of the repository enough fees to break even on the costs. The antitrust settlement would require Google to construct this central repository. Once the repository exists, all crawling outside of this centralized crawling would be blocked by coordinated ISP action (ie, go use the central repository).
of course the helicopter parents screaming because they aren't tethered 24x7 to their child.
In Finland we've just started the first phone-free school year. Apparently, some parents are getting doctor's orders to allow their child to keep their phone, for situations such as anxiety attacks (article in Finnish). It's a miracle how such kids would have survived before mobile phones.
34 was my age when I quit my day job, thanks to Linux and the floodgates of open source software it opened for me.
Force them to call it rent if they reserve the right to yank it back
I think a long-term rental is called "leash" for this reason.
I hope these people don't waste a lot of their savings trying to fight this. It is a hopeless battle, AI dubbing cost 1% of what a human does. You can't fight the future, it always wins. Save your money and look for something new to do.
Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal--if you don't use your thumbs. -- Tom Lehrer
