nothing will stop the EU doing that. The sad part is it wouldn't even need blocking if not for spy companies pushing so hard for people to verify themselves online. The UK blocked a load of sites under the guise of protecting children whereas it seems to have just turned into a data farming exercise. Such a icky time for privacy of any form.

Only if you can't afford the fines. Fine = £5,000,000/ saved wages = £10,000,000 in first year. Hmmmm I wonder what they'll choose illegal or not.

The more you use and report feedback on its results the better it gets at replacing you. So they'll incentivise it any way they can. Your promotion will be to unemployment.

Why out of interest. Is it ease of use? Are you buying more that you used to?

Describes most HR teams! Seriously though it would be easy to say throw out anything generated by AI but in this case I can certainly see someone struggling to put into words what happened to them and why it's a problem. Perhaps they should aim for being concise though. Don't want to make HRs attention span work too hard now.

Amazon is now temu Amazon. It's 99% temu stuff with a markup. As for not being able to compete Walmart appears to pay their tax bills. Amazon "doesn't earn anything in the country" so appear to pay considerably less tax. They're also massively propped up by their cloud, advertising, video streaming, prime subscriptions that they can afford to out price Walmart and still make a considerable profit via quantity hence the outselling thing presumably. Sure there's a lot more to it that my tiny brain doesn't understand but tl:dr Walmart pays tax and has less avenues of income.

It seems more prone to error than its predecessor.

I fully appreciate that, a lot of sites annoy me with ads. If I have to peer between the ads to see the content or the content jumps around everywhere they get blocked. A non offensive ad or two that allows the site to stay up and running I am happy with. The alternatives are they start charging in which case it's unlikely I'm going to subscribe, they use affiliate links which means I can no longer trust their recommendations and inevitably leads to those annoying listicles or they go out of business/are bought up by the companies who are happy to have 95% ads. I don't know of another option for the smaller sites who aren't looking to burn out your eyeballs. If there is something you know that would work I'd be interested.

If you can replace programmers then surely AGI will happen then as it'll self improve. Besides once it gets to that level there won't be any white collar jobs left. "Write me a program to replace a lawyer. Make no mistake" boom end of the legal field... we will have much bigger problems long before that comes to pass.

Thank you for that. It's given me some reading. Seems they're not quite just another AI company.

This is the bit I don't get. Most people hate ads sure. Ask them why are it's generally security, privacy and performance reasons. "Ok let's fix that" and it's still not good enough. The internet is expensive. To run systems as big as slashdot you can't get away with running it on a home server for free. Inevitably it needs paying for. As sad as it is without ads the internet would be much more barren because people don't pay for things. Arguably some parts should die but not all deserves to.

Weird feeling. I respect their decision. Cynically I won't what their angle is.

If you want more effective ads there's only a few things you need to do. 1- make a standard that disallows any custom JavaScript. All must be preset functions. 2- Enforce user experience on websites. Ads must be less than 5% of the view. Over time less people will block ads leading to more real impressions mixed in with the fraud. More sales more fun. Ooor you could just add that latest 10mb JavaScript library that promises to prevent bots.

If there's isn't a monetary backlash it'll happen again because "it wasn't so bad, only people whinging". So I'm voting with my wallet. At the end of the day they are a company they're not listening to feelings as much as they are the bank balance.

This is the part that has annoyed me the most. I assumed I could trust content written by ars staff be to factual and written by them given their claims. I've cancelled my sub in protest. I'll resub at some point probably but I feel like a small protest needs to be made. I'm supporting ars and staff not paying to read bullshit from an AI model. I can get that for free.