Can that even be applied in this case? I mean... it's videogames. Nobody *has* to buy videogames. And except for consoles, the barrier to market entry is almost literally zero. I'm not sure it's even possible to have a monopoly in that industry.

I'd assume that in any antitrust case, they'd ask if the market power of the company is even relevant for the public at large, which for a videogame publisher I'd tend to always say no. It's a different thing for a company owning major hardware or distribution infrastructure platforms, such as Microsoft or Valve.

You may not have been paying attention, but this is how EA games have been for about 15 years now. Nothing is going to change. No amount of predatory monetisation can scare of those millions of players who are fine with the way EA games are today.

I was going to phrase this as an agreement, mirroring the example you gave, but I lost my context window.

The one used at my employer's internal helpdesk is pretty okay. But they only use it as sort of a triaging step to hand you off to the right person, which might be the golden middle ground. If I already have a ticket number I can now just dictate it to the bot when it picks up, which will connect me to the right person who will already have my case on the screen.

Quotes don't do it on DDG? Do you have some reproducible example?

I don't use verbatim search that often, but the few times I used quotes on DDG it behaved as I'd have expected it to (which, most of the time, will mean returning no results...).

I guess it's more of a self-preservation effort. He knows that the political winds can, and probably will soon, turn, and that any precedent now will be used by the other side. I think he said pretty directly that that's his concern.

I guess the rest of MAGA politicians are just banking on the hope that democracy will be sufficiently extinguished in time so that "the other side" won't be a concern.

So all models broke the agreements they made and didn't do what they said they were doing. To anyone who knows a little bit about the technology, that outcome is obvious. But it's the one lesson I'd like everybody else to learn when they make their workflows "agentic", and wave away concerns saying "but I instructed it to never do X and always be honest to me about Y."
But I know nobody will learn this lesson before millions and millions of catastrophic painful, expensive, and entirely predictable and preventable "mistakes".

"I think this is going to be an interesting blip that we're all going to look back to laugh at in a year."

Every sane person has been laughing at it from the first second.

Notably, those "eBay employees" included the CEO, the security chief, and multiple other high-ranking executives. At that point, I don't find it unreasonable to say that the company itself did the harassment. It came from the very top.

There was a judge involved, and the evidence was there. Just the link to the person on trial was faulty.

This was presented as evidence by the police, and the judge trusted it. In order to question whether the claimed link to the person is correct, there'd have to first be some reason to doubt it. Which is also probably not the job for the judge to check, but the lawyer and some technical expert. Requiring, again, an initial suspicion.

From what I read about this case elsewhere, not even the accused got the idea that police might have requested the wrong account but, since he didn't write those messages, argued his account must've been hacked, while of course not being able to show proof for that.

The police is who messed up bad here, presenting faulty evidence as reliable. After that, I'm not sure the justice system can be held responsible very much for not questioning and re-examining every piece of evidence the police claim is proof.

It feels to me like many sites already are, without making a big fuss of it.

I'm recently doing a lot of "deep searches", where one or two hits are the best you can ever hope for (obscure local history topics). I found a lot of good stuff, but did so only on DDG/Bing and Yandex. Almost all of the pages I found are not indexed by Google at all. These are high-quality original sources: the personal website of a graphic artist who did the programme guides of the event I'm researching, a newspaper biography of one of the organisers, the entry for the flyers held at a design museum. All of them absent from Google's index.

Then again, maybe it's more likely that these sites are too small to even care about AI scraping (although the design industry is hyper-vigilant about it) and it's just a sign of how much Google's index went down the shitter in general.

That hasn't been the case for a long time. There are book scanners that do NOT require taking apart the binding, and deliver amazing results even at low opening angles (often a hard requirement when scanning antique books).

The only thing destructive scanning is better at, is speed/price.

Destructive scanning is not the issue here. It's who does it, and what for. I guarantee you people wouldn't have this outrage if it was about institutions like the LoC or Internet Archive doing it for preservation and granting free access to the public. That's the opposite of what's being proposed here.

This about predatory and moral-free private enterprises doing destructive scanning for distilling the statistics of the original material into a garbage generator. The book will not be preserved and people won't get access to it. They will regurgitate unlimited variations of it as piles of utterly worthless vomit and trash that doesn't contribute anything to anything or anyone, and charge for the privilege of doing so.

But, of course, our ass-backwards legal systems are so that genuine preservational efforts with public access, such as Google Books or the IA, get sanctioned or shut down, while parasitic garbage for profit is A-OK.

It's a bot anyway. Nobody's at the other end of that line.

Ah, yes. The time he ended censorship of opinions he liked on one social platform, while continuing to censor the opinions he doesn't like. What a paragon of free speech! And it's true, he attempted to open such a peaceful dialogue with his Nazi salutes.