This. The study is *bad*. Really bad.

Seriously, they say outright, the pay also maps directly to which AI assistant was perceived as more human. With a sample size of one each, to just declare that the male and female presenting avatar are equally believable, and it must be gender that's the cause is a . . . choice.

But I really can't see how they can possibly defend it short of, they like the result this way, it's a good headline.

But that's literally what they did. They tested about 100 people who with one set of assistants. The same people consistently said one was more lifelike than the other. They concluded, for reasons, that must be because of gender. Completely ridiculous. The only reason anyone should do anything other than ridicule this, is because they're scared of the politics of saying so. But it is bad.

I mean they even say so. This sounds mostly like the very welcome trend of finally undoing the agile consultant led hell of small 2-5 person teams with boatloads of "managers" everywhere.

Lots of companies are doing this right now, it's overdue.

"Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the lawsuit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services."

In this case it's in the article linked to in the linked article, but it's covered.

From your own Wikipedia article it says:

"The party is granted automatic standing by act of law.[2] For example, under some environmental laws in the United States, a party may sue someone causing pollution to certain waterways without a federal permit, even if the party suing is not harmed by the pollution being generated. The law allows the plaintiff to receive attorney's fees from the defendant if they substantially prevail in the action. In some U.S. states, a person who believes a book, film, or other work of art is obscene may sue in their own name to have the work banned directly without having to ask a district attorney to do so."

I believe that's what applies here, though I am not a lawyer. The law in question is the Clayton Act.

“Any person, firm, corporation, or association shall be entitled to sue for and have injunctive relief . . . against threatened loss or damage by a violation of the antitrust laws . . .”

https://www.govinfo.gov/conten...

Exactly. The idea that some meaningful number of users would install Brave, but not install uBlock in Firefox is just kind of silly.

But really, the GPU thing is just lying. I'd bet almost anything if they just used a one month newer version of Firefox on the same hardware, the numbers would look wildly different. They didn't pick that version by accident while comparing it to the newest Brave. I mean they spend all this time harping on CPU and power usage knowing full well what they're ignoring.

I'm so weirdly frustrated by this. You can't trust even the little independent tech companies anymore, everyone is just lying all the time.

I just never trust benchmarks at this point. They always seem to be lies.

They are using an almost year old version of Firefox, and testing on a Mac. I wonder why that could be?

Conveniently, somehow, they chose a version just before Firefox enabled a bunch of GPU acceleration on the M series Macs . . .

If they'd just left it at "here's how much data you save when having an ad blocker on by default" they'd have a find point. But beyond that the comparison seems really, really deceptive.

The real key thing here is that Tivo is already dead. They literally discontinued all DVRs I think it was earlier this year, maybe late last.

They are truly milking their last remaining subscribers for all they're worth.

Yeah. There's a whole rabbit hole here, this abandoned driver becoming this critical piece of Windows gamer's software is a fascinating story all on its own. The short of it is Windows didn't provide a good interface to access the SMBUS, and one guy's hack to make it work got reused again and again until it's basically infrastructure and won't go away. But because it's a low level driver it can crash everything. It wasn't just abandoned the original author was like "guys, this was a wild hack, I don't want to own this for life."

*But* it's important to clarify, it's not a matter of just users going and installing this "open source driver."

"Poorly written applications by both game developers and poorly written operating systems by Microsoft." is still pretty accurate really.

Tons of vendors selling this stuff, have been bundling it into their seemingly proprietary software for years now.

It hurts me in my soul how true this really is. Gotta keep those velocity numbers up.

There are plenty of those. Mac Minis were hard to get for a while because the shared memory architecture is really good for inferencing, for running a model like this.

nvidia calls theirs spark, AMD calls theirs the "Halo Developer Platform" but both are just a small box with a fair bit of CPU and 128 gigs of shared memory with the GPU.

The ideal scenario would be shutting down the Apple relationship but keeping the Mozilla.

Lots of laws only apply to entities of certain sizes, it wouldn't be impossible. Or they could frame it like a lot of the app store rules that have been passing, Apple is a platform/ecosystem provider, Mozilla is not.

Yes, but also, this is huge. People love to make these "well it's just the cost of doing business" comments so much that I don't think they really think about the individual case much. This is unprecedented, these legal rulings are in fact an existential threat to Meta. Zuck does not see this as a slap on the wrist. He's stupid, but he's not that stupid. They may be the first big tech company to literally go out of business, and it may be to legal damages.

New Mexico only has a population of just over two million people.

This is approximately $400 per person, a bit over.

Scale this nationally to just the US, and it's well over a trillion dollars. Meta's market cap, let alone their revenue, is about 1.5 trillion. Even half of that potential fine, from just the US, would more or less end them. If just Europe and Canada got in on the game, they are utterly destroyed several times over.

So yeah, you can argue that the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet, but this is a pretty wild ruling. Other states will certainly line up fast to do the same, states like money.

They didn't say 58,000 people are accused of cheating.

They said enough people cheated that the results of the first test are just useless, so anyone who still wants a shot at getting in (about 58,000 people) will have to retake the test.

"According to Gaceta UNAM, the school's official news publication, the university rector has apologized to honest applicants, since they will now have to prepare for and take the test again despite doing nothing wrong. Still, the control exam is "necessary to give certainty and guarantee equity in access," the rector added."

It's in the freaking summary, this isn't even a RTFA.

A lot of people, most loudly Ed Zitron have suggested for a while if this happens it should be taken as the sign the bubble is popping.

Not only is the supposed insatiable demand story not true, but the only buyers are Anthropic and OpenAI.

They do though.

The whole basis of the case was similar to tobacco, that's the simplest.

Monsanto wasn't gutted nearly this hard.

Plenty of people would argue fossil fuel companies have done at least as much damage, and known it, and they've been arguing it for decades.

Hell, Coca Cola has arguably done as much damage globally, and has also been caught knowing it. There was this scandal about five years ago when Coca Cola got caught funding dicey research minimizing how much ultra calorie dense things like Coke contribute to obesity. If Meta is on the hook for a trillion dollars for this, I'd say Coca Cola is truly at least as guilty.

We could do more. This would be a huge step, it's not just a matter of Meta being unprecedentedly guilty.

There is a fundamental crisis going on in colleges that has nothing to do with AI.

The professor wants a classroom full of students who actually care about what he has to teach. The administration wants those students, their paying customers, to keep paying.

Universities have had this crisis brewing for a long time:

We made a college degree necessary for most desirable jobs. Universities loved this, college degrees grew at a massive rate, the cost of them grew even more.

Then all at once they realize that hey, the students who are there, don't actually *want* to be there. They just want to buy their diplomas and get out, and act accordingly.

They can't have it both ways, this tension has been a thing for a long time.

Something fundamental has to give.