I much prefer to be sold targeted ads based on my chats than have product placement show up in the bot's responses or have it try to convince me to buy a particular brand directly

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

Many digital platforms have only ever been online. They supported their businesses on showing ads. But when you combine the amount of fraud involved in impression-driven and clickthrough models, (that don't include conversions,) they are essentially relying on a sort of consumer-friction. Now that consumers can bypass this friction it isn't 'stealing' from companies that built models on being digital billboards, it's just revealing that the information gap that required them scrolling through all this crap before was paying the bills, and thus, not really as valuable as they had originally supposed. It is a bad business model, and I hope it dies in a fire.

When users are writing their own code, they include secrets. Training on secrets in coding sessions is probably a terrible idea. Maybe they have some way to filter out secrets so they don't go in, but what if they miss something? This seems like a huge problem, at least, training on developer coding sessions. I don't really see a problem with doing it on the chats on the web.

I ran a dedupe on my drive and eliminated 8 redundant copies of the goatse guy.

#SaveWaterWithGoatse

If google had produced this video I could understand him being mad. but throwing down at google for not preventing the creation of this video by unaffiliated 3rd parties is an insane thing to sue over. But this is the equivalent of suing a newspaper for publishing a negative opinion piece about yourself. Where did they fail in their responsibility? How on earth could youtube possibly police the 'truth' of their content? It's impossible. This is asinine.

Might I suggest "Blind Lake" by Robert Charles Wilson. I read it when it first came out two decades ago, but it reads strangely similar to what we're seeing now, and the sinister edge is there, too.

Did you just 'whatabout' me?

It's like we're experiencing the Red Scare and the Satanic Panic both at the same time.

Since when do financial regulations happen at the stroke of the president's pen? This is ridiculous. Is this some kind of shitcoin pump and dump attempt?

Perhaps this will finally spell the end of ad-supported internet. when literally everyone has an ad-blocker installed by default (practically speaking) they're going to have to find new ways to support the business that doesn't involve spamming the crap out of internet real estate with ads. I know that would be deleterious for some of the existing businesses out there, but perhaps it will lead to a better model. Like pay a microtransaction to access content, every time. or have monthly subscriptions that you get 'credits' and each view spends those credits, even automated views. The existing monthly subscription paywalls don't solve this problem because you can't buy just one article and as such, people just avoid the sites entirely. But adding a microtransaction model that doesn't rake the user over the coals for transaction costs could solve it.

They didn't say it's ineligible for copyright protection. They're saying that the copyright violations involved in training AI on their media constitute Fair Use. There's a difference. Fair use is a 'legal' copyright violation.

fair use is universally applicable. it doesn't matter what kind of disclaimers you slap on the label.