tangeli

Try searching for ‘illusion of choice’. There are many articles on this theme.

You might find some of the Worse on Purpose articles interesting.

A condition of public funding should be that aggregate internal rate of return, exclusive of executive team remuneration, should be published and capped, verified by independent audit.

But the same technology reads as a catastrophe one field over. Ask an illustrator, a voice actor, or a screenwriter how AI is going and you won’t hear “more room to explore.” You’ll hear that the thing they spent a life learning to do was scraped to train the tool, and now the tool undercuts their rate and, in a growing number of jobs, replaces them.

Because the AI companies not only stole the training data but are also giving away their services for free or selling them far below cost: unsustainable either way. Predatory pricing is criminal but no one is stopping the AI companies. Rather, when the losses come home to roost, it will be the pension and index funds that lose. The companies and their billionaire owners will be bailed out by the governments.

Why only news sites?

Any bot that ignores robots.txt should be banned.

It’s not a problem. Those people won’t have a job by 2030. They won’t have money to buy water. Might as well let AI use it.

It would be bad enough if AI companies were profitable competitors but they’re not: they are giving away their services at far below cost to disrupt markets while consuming hundreds of billions of dollars per year of speculative investment.

Maybe help relieve loneliness as an adjunct to normal care but certainly not ‘cure’ it and an AI grandchild cannot replace care. Elderly people need all sorts of care beyond what a grandchild, AI or natural, can provide.

It sucks to be an outcast. It sucks even more that morality, consideration of social consequences and compassion are so unusual.

In my experience, LLM based systems often return false statements as if they were true. I see reports suggesting they do this between 5% to more than 50% of the time, depending on the model and the prompts. You say you are learning from AI. How do you know if what you are learning is true or false? Do you care?

Then there is the moral issue of the AI systems being trained without compensation to the authors of most of the training data. Related is the issue of AI developers crawling websites without the consent of the owners and often despite explicit indication of the owners that they should not, causing expense and performance problems for the owners of those sites.

Also, there is the risk they create for economies. Investment is disproportionate to revenue. Services are being given away at far below cost. The investment is so large that it puts even large economies at risk.

It would be better to put a 20% tariff on US online services sold in Canada and let (an appointed agency of) the government allocate the money to Canadian content producers. If it’s left to US streamers to decide what to fund, it will be thinly veiled US content and propaganda produced by some US company operating in Canada, charging exorbitant rates to achieve the required 15% and sending all profits back to the US.

Is the plan that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” or are they just going to bomb them “back to the Stone Ages where they belong”?

The server is overloaded at the moment.

Native speakers don’t deviate from the rules. The rules are simply wrong when they don’t describe how native speakers speak. Native speakers speak differently than their ancestors. That’s normal. It’s not deviant. The grammar pedants need to learn to be more flexible and describe the actual language - English as She is Spoke - 2026 edition.

I think they care about the attention it brings to their practices, particularly in jurisdictions outside the US where there may be more inclination to regulate them. Their anti-competitive practices in the context of their oligopoly are problematic. Their concession is what they have judged necessary to reduce the appearance of anti-competitive practices sufficiently to avoid regulatory action. Otherwise they would have gone full walled garden, as they initially intended. Not a ‘nothingburger’. Rather, an important skirmish in the ongoing struggle against their oligopoly.

Google’s latest concession makes the sideloading controversy a big nothingburger.

Nonsense. Google only conceded because of the bad publicity, and it’s still grudging.

It’s an interesting idea but making the network so public troubles me.

AI is more like dark matter than black holes. Black holes actually exist. There are impacts on society and the economy that can be explained by the existence of AI, but no one has observed any yet.

Careful. AI Slop is a strategic weapon. Criticizing it not only hurts Sleepy Joe’s feeling. It will put you on more lists than the Bing blacklist. It’s obviously an act of terrorism. Sleepy Joe might have a chat with his friend, the Commander in Chief, who might do something to stop you “just for fun”, because that’s they way he rolls.

The problem is cultural, not technical or legal. Most people are at best indifferent and more often supportive of the exploitation of others. Unless that changes, the exploitation will be relentless. AI is a new tool that facilitates a kind of exploitation. But the fundamental inclination to exploit with minimal appreciation and compensation is nothing new. Exploitation is not merely tolerated. It is broadly encouraged and venerated. The law is primarily a tool of the elite to protect themselves. It does little to protect the interests of a typical FOSS contributor and the state does even less. There have been a few cases fought and won but compared to the scale of the industry, the resources committed to defending FOSS are trivial. That’s no more the end of FOSS now than it was in the beginning. It will probably reduce revenue for a few companies that have been exploiting FOSS and FOSS producers for profit. The vast majority of contributors were never compensated. Of those that were, it was typically far less than the value of their contributions.

You can boot Linux from a USB flash drive if your main installation isn’t working. That might be better than searching for solutions from your phone. And a bootable USB flash drive is helpful when you can’t boot from the internal drive. I always have one around, just in case, though I don’t use it very often.

Booting from USB flash drive is a bit slow. A USB attached hard drive or SSD will be much faster or, if your internal drive is big enough, you can partition it to hold two Linux installations. Then, when one isn’t working you can switch to the other with just a reboot, as long as it’s not the boot loader that’s broken.