That's not actually a meaningful difference as far as antitrust law is concerned. With the possible exception of the monopoly being created by doing something illegal (which then becomes a separate violation on its own), it does not matter *how* a monopoly came to be, only that it is, and whether it causes harm to society, to customers, to other companies in the market, etc.

It's actually not. Any jacka** can buy a block of phone numbers and set up a trunk line. That's exactly why we have so much Caller ID fraud these days. I mean yes, ostensibly, but in practice, no.

Ah, but most phone companies these days don't even have a physical presence anywhere.

Entertainment monopolies have *lots* of government restraints. It really doesn't matter whether the company is an entertainment company or a toilet paper manufacturer. A monopoly is a monopoly, and subject to antitrust laws.

Except that email is surprisingly bad as a sharing medium, and 1000x as bad if you want to share large content like photos. But regardless, that's kind of moot.

Sure. None of that changes whether having basically one giant platform that almost everyone is on makes it difficult to impossible for any other company to meaningfully compete, though. And when your own platform buys another platform, that's where governments *do* start to have the right to deny a company from doing as it pleases.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

There's something called a natural monopoly. Social media is likely to be a natural monopoly, in much the same way that the phone company was a natural monopoly before it was forcibly broken up and forced to provide interconnections to other phone companies using shared standards, etc. There's not a whole lot of difference other than the phone company having a higher physical infrastructure barrier to entry.

Regardless, Facebook is not blameless. They bought Instagram, effectively consolidating the potential players in that space from two down to one. And antitrust law does sometimes break up natural monopolies. It isn't about fault or blame. It is about actions taken while in that state that harm competition, harm users, etc.

Doesn't matter. Antitrust law isn't just about the users being victims. It is also about other companies being the victims by being unable to compete because of unfair competition, collusion, excessive mergers, etc. User/purchaser harm is only one narrow aspect of a much larger body of law.

It's actually more than that. For a typical website, you would be right. The problem with social media is that it is inherently social. If your friends aren't on the same site, you can't share things with them. People don't join a site that doesn't already have a lot of users, and therefore, there's an almost insurmountable barrier to entry when you end up with one or two entrenched players, in spite of it theoretically being possible to create another site.

And because Facebook is not federated, hides even public content behind a login wall, and makes sharing with non-users generally impractical, they are directly contributing to a situation where even if another company came along and created something that is better, no one would use it, because their friends and family would not be there, because they are all already on Facebook.

In much the same way that the EU basically forced Apple to open up Messages to support RCS for inter-platform communication, the only way Facebook/Instagram will ever realistically stop being a monopoly is if a government forces them to federate with other social media platforms so that you can share with your friends on other platforms. A strong antitrust judgment against Facebook would be a necessary first step towards that.

Besides, Google+ *was* better than Facebook in a lot of ways, IMO. It wasn't enough, though. I created an account, but nobody I knew was on, so I didn't ever post anything, and because people didn't ever post anything, nobody came to use it, and it ended up being a ghost town. The fact that a head-to-head competitor for Facebook emerged, backed by one of the largest companies on the planet, with a significantly better, more capable product, a more flexible sharing model, etc. and still could not successfully compete with Facebook should tell you that no, building a better product will never work.

The only way other sites "compete" is by being entirely orthogonal to Facebook, targeting largely non-overlapping demographics and largely non-overlapping sets of features. But that's not really competing. That's coexisting. I would argue that Facebook has no actual competition, except perhaps in the vague, wishy-washy "competing for eyeball time" fashion, in which case everything online and offline is a competitor.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

Yeah, I'm having trouble wondering what's wrong with the universe if a judge thinks that Facebook hasn't basically obliterated all competition in social media.

YouTube is not really social media. YouTube shorts tries to be Tik Tok, and Facebook Reels tries to be Tik Tok, but they're fundamentally different things, because short-form video targets an entirely different category of people than social media and largely serves a different purpose — to entertain, not to inform.

Google/Alphabet's social media site was called Google+, and it died because everybody was on Facebook and Instagram, so nobody used it.

YouTube sharing is too public (and hard to use in any other way now that Google+ circles no longer exist), so it's not really a place to share pictures of your family and share stories with your friends. If it competes with anything in the pseudo-social space, it would be Twitter/X, which I would argue is a microblogging site, nota social media site. They have a fundamentally different kind of target audience.

Apple Messages isn't social media at all. It competes only with SMS. Same with WhatsApp. I can maybe understand a judge concluding that buying WhatsApp didn't meaningfully stifle competition, because no platform for basic point-to-point communication is ever going to prevent competition by apps that come on your phone (e.g. Messages).

But saying that Instagram didn't stifle competition is a cop out. Instagram (3 billion) and Facebook (3 billion) are the only two sites left standing that I would consider to be social media sites, with the sad exceptions of Truth Social (6.3 million), and Mastodon (1.8 million).

If you're in an industry where you have somewhere between three and six billion users and your next largest competitor has one fewer zeros in its user count, and all of the other competitors have three fewer zeros in their user count, you haven't just stifled competition. You've effectively eliminated it.

And Facebook/Instagram have incredible amounts of power when it comes to breaking the open web, hiding content behind a login wall that makes it basically impossible to share things with the public unless they are Facebook/Instagram users themselves, which makes it even harder for competitors to break into the space, because everyone has to be a FB/Insta user if they want to see the content that people create on those site. You can't just casually discover FB/Insta content. So that aspect also strongly leans towards Facebook/Instagram being a monopoly.

The only way you can realistically conclude that Facebook and Instagram aren't a monopoly is if you ignore all of the actual social use of social media and treat them as nothing more than a platform for influencers and bulls**t peddlers to make themselves seen by the whole world. And yes, for that narrow space, all of those platforms compete. But for social media itself — sharing of semi-private information with a close circle of friends and family — none of those other sites actually compete with Facebook and Instagram in any meaningful way, which makes this decision downright appallling.

But congratulations, Facebook, on amassing so much power that the government can't rein you in. I weep for the future of our world, because this really should have been open and shut, and Instagram should have been broken off years ago, the second Google+ proved that competing with that behemoth was infeasible.

But if that wasn't enough proof, the abject failure of Truth Social, where even Donald Trump's enormous influence wasn't enough to make a second traditional social media site become large enough to be viable, should be absolute inarguable proof that the Facebook/Instagram combination stifles competition. It does. Massively. Its very existence makes competition almost impossible, ensuring that the only even semi-social sites that can ever exist are those that focus on largely non-overlapping markets like microblogging.

And I really can't imagine how anyone could look at the evidence and conclude otherwise, because it is so incredibly obvious to me.

Valid point. The other issue is that for those of us with really long names, there's never enough space for it to fit.

Was about to say something like this. Though I was going to phrase it as "Nuke CoPilot and all AI 'features', and just leave a virtual radioactive crater in my system".

I mean maybe, in theory, but how often do prices actually drop on hotels? Prices are usually based on occupancy, so unless somebody cancels a block of a hundred rooms or something, this seems unlikely to make a meaningful difference in hotel revenue.

Meanwhile, if this had happened five years ago, it would have meant not going on trips for me, because traveling with my dad in his last couple of years had a decent risk of having to cancel.

There are people for whom being able to cancel a trip without significant penalty is the only thing that makes travel possible. And if hotels are more concerned with maybe losing a few bucks in rare circumstances than they are with whether the elderly and disabled get to have a vacation at all, then F**K those hotels. They aren't worth doing business with.

Yeah, I noticed this when I went back to school at age 60. Everyone else in the class was using their laptops. I had brought mine, but it wasn't worth it. I needed to have the info go through my brain to my arm and hand to help me retain the info.

Because it's impossible to write your signature legibly, while using your finger instead of a pen or stylus, on a phone sized device.

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.

Ideally, it should be a hair space (because em dashes in web fonts are borderline illegible without it), but Slashdot does not support Unicode, and   gets silently swallowed by Slashdot's HTML parser. Besides, we all know that AP style is the one true style, and it demands space.

No, an en dash is used for numerical ranges and certain compound hyphentions, not for parentheticals.