A much better news piece

The actual freaking images

Enjoy.

False. The correct term is lose less money. Zero of these AI companies are in the black.

So, your new goalpost for AGI/ASI is being able to "make money"? Thank you for the clarification! By the way, have you ever heard the term "fundamental research"? Many if not the vast majority of things that you now take for granted have their roots in it.

Secondly, many companies that use OpenAI and Anthropic AI are profitable.

It's all quite confusing to me but whatever.

If a person dedicated a few months of research to that, I'd applaud it as an example of human ingenuity and endurance.

Yeah, right, except some of the solved problems are 70-80 years old.

But, it's nor a problem anyone needed to solve. It wasn't something keeping anyone up at night.

You're excellent at moving the goalposts.

why haven't they yet figured out optimizations that'd allow the companies making them actually make money?

The problem is you don't follow AI companies closely and both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced that their latest models have optimized their own code to run faster and more efficiently, which means that LLMs have already allowed them to make more money by reducing the amount of computing power required. And that's just one example of many. A billion-dollar company has already been created by a single person using LLMs. How's that for making money with LLMs? Look up Medvi by Matthew Gallagher.

I too want to believe I'm a special kind of meat bag. But sadly, it looks like LLMs have essentially surpassed 99% of living people on Earth.

There's nothing wrong with being a Luddite. But for some reason for some people, it takes a lot of courage to admit it.

except: why produce anything of value if AI is simply going to suck it up and reserve it to people?

If what you create/publish can be presented as a three-line AI summary, it may not be worthy content.

Recently, the search traffic to my website has decreased by roughly 10 to 20 times, and my well-researched original articles, which have not been published anywhere else, range from three to ten full pages, so Gemini cannot even summarize them properly. Some articles have been translated into multiple languages.

In the meantime Google removed me from the AdSense publisher program a couple of years ago, as they did with most Russian publishers. And they refuse to accept me back, even with a different account from a different country to which I've relocated, so I've not earned a single cent in the past two years.

So go ahead and blame me for creating something with no value.

Everyone's acting like Google stole something uniquely valuable.

The uncomfortable reality is that for most searches, people don't need your version of the answer. They need an answer. And that answer has already been written thousands of times by thousands of websites.

LLMs compress those thousands of near-identical explanations into one response. That's not a bug -- it's exactly what they're good at.

The SEO era rewarded being the 500th person to explain "What is X?" The AI era won't.

If your business depends on repackaging information that's already everywhere, your problem isn't AI. It's that your content was always a commodity.

Going forward, publishers will have to work much harder: produce something an LLM can't cheaply reconstruct -- original reporting, proprietary data, real expertise, or genuinely distinctive analysis -- and build an audience that comes back because it values you, not just the answer to a Google query.

And what if you didn't post photos of your face?

What will you verify in this case? And why? I don't understand you. Did you read the news piece?

To me, they are overstated. If you have already published your profile photos on such platforms, would you really care if Facebook saw a short clip of your face? You lost your privacy ages ago when you uploaded the photos in the first place.

A hastily thought-up solution would be to let Google crawl headlines and the bare minimum of information. This way, Google won't be able to provide all the information, so people who are really interested will actually visit your website.

Cutting Google off entirely will destroy most of your leads.

I stopped posting on social media and left it entirely around 2020. It's a fucking cesspool of stupid jokes, endless reposts, and almost no real information or genuinely interesting new knowledge.

I still have accounts on X, Facebook, and Instagram, but only because they require a valid account to read comments on posts. I sometimes do that because I'm curious to know what people are thinking.

I had a VK account (the Russian equivalent of Facebook), but I quit after Durov sold it to people aligned with the Kremlin. I despise our entire absolutely corrupt government, so I can't imagine using anything they can get their hands on.

And what did I post? Things that made people question, think, and analyze. Eventually I realized that it simply didn't work on people who were either incapable of or unwilling to do that, so I was basically preaching to the choir.

Built-in blobs are "OK", updateable blobs are "bad".

BTW, both are black boxes.

I wonder if this fear mongering is profitable or something, because I've long lost the plot.

You now only own a license that can be revoked at any time.

And, of course, you won't be able to play anything if your internet connection goes down.

PC gaming has never looked so attractive. That is if you buy your games on GOG.

This seems potentially fixable at the browser level: adding timing jitter/noise to OPFS disk reads, reducing timer precision, or rate-limiting storage access could make these contention measurements much less reliable. Of course, all of those have some performance cost.

As a user-side mitigation, disabling browser disk cache may also reduce the signal somewhat (I've done that for years), although OPFS itself would still generate storage I/O, so it probably wouldn't eliminate the side channel entirely.

Given modern page caching and buffered I/O, I'm highly skeptical that real-world browsing workloads generate enough direct SSD/NVMe contention to support robust cross-browser fingerprinting outside controlled conditions.

I've NOT read the paper though, this comment is based on the ArsTechnica article.

Researchers Blame Reduced Testing and Social Media

I don't think that's the only reason, or even the main reason.

I've noticed that modern parents have become far too lenient and overprotective with their children, to the extent that teachers are being assaulted because they require children to actually learn something.

And to get things words, we have the likes of ChatGPT, where you can abandon thinking altogether.

TBO I have no clue how to handle this. Perhaps homework should be abandoned completely, and learning should only take place within the walls of the educational facility, where children cannot use their smartphones or other "smart" devices.

And from what I've heard that's where education has been headed recently. Probably the class schedule needs to be completely overhauled as well.

I have a Kindle from 2015. In one of the 'recent' updates â" I think it was released a year or two ago â" they made it impossible to read imported ebooks.

You connect the Kindle to a PC, copy ePub files and then disconnect it. The files (books) are there. Check the reader a few hours later and all the books will have vanished. If you attach the reader again, the files are deleted. Fuck you, Amazon!