Nextgrid

The reasons behind the Chinese models’ refusals to talk about politically sensitive topics and western models’ “alignment” are different.

For China, the political restrictions are applied at the presentation/UI layer only to comply with the law. I’m pretty sure there is no law that restricts releasing open models that are capable of producing “wrongthink” output (in this case, an RNG would technically also be off limits since it could produce the wrong output given enough time). This can be effectively implemented by a “neutral” model with a smaller, “review” model being used to censor replies rather than “aligning” the initial model itself to be politically correct.

In contrast, Western labs’ “alignment” strategy is a PR move, meaning they want the refusals to be loud and clear (as opposed to being merely an inconvenient law they have to comply with), to support the idea that their models are so powerful and would mean doom if they weren’t “aligned”.

Although you can run SIP over TLS (for signalling) and use SRTP for media (key exchange done over the aforementioned signalling channel), in practice most SIP is over unencrypted UDP and media is unencrypted RTP.

If you control both endpoints and they support it you can configure them to use encryption, but even then implementation qualities vary widely (just because you enable SIP over TLS doesn’t mean they’ll actually verify the certificates for example - giving you at best opportunistic encryption), and I bet a lot of the implementations also have bugs/vulnerabilities.

If security is needed, it is often implemented by way of running the whole thing over private links (which can be secured with IPSec or any other VPN technology). In fact that’s presumably what’s happening, but misconfigured equipment making those ENUM lookups would allow the attacker to steer the traffic away from the secure link and towards an endpoint they control over the public internet.

Product pages don't engage in cloaking or selectively serving a different a different page to the search engine crawler from the one served to the visitor. They are ranked based on the content visible on the page. If that's the best match to my search query, so be it (it probably means I am indeed searching for said product page).

Paywalled news articles rank on their full content (potentially displacing other, free sources) yet do not allow me to see it without paying. That's a bit of a problem because if I don't intend or am unable to pay I would much prefer seeing the other source which is free.

(the ice cream example is disingenuous because clearly we do not yet have the technology for ice-cream-over-HTTP. And when we do get such technology, then absolutely give me the option to block paywalled ice cream).

The "/month" is the problem - I just don't read the same paper often enough to justify a recurring subscription even at the intro price, let alone the full price it'll eventually transition to.

I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.

The problem with paywalled news articles is that the ranking is done on the full article content, yet I am not allowed to see it. This often outranks the results I am allowed to see. Product pages don't have this problem.

Google even has/had a rule against cloaking (the practice of serving search engines a different version of the page from the one visitors get).

If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.

There is a regex replacement feature. You could build a list of known paywall domains to rewrite them to your desired paywall unblocker service.

You only need to have a business entity (which, to be fair, can be yourself, although liability concerns apply) once you're about to actually enter into a contract with someone.

Merely listing prices (without an associated automated payment form which could imply a contract was en force upon successful payment) doesn't actually force you to do business with anyone. It would however 1) deter requests for unpaid work by giving them an idea of what it would cost to get what they're looking for and 2) give you an idea of the demand for said services and could give you a warm lead which you can then choose to pursue formally by getting the necessary business structure, legal/business advice, etc.

> Stripe is "just" a payments platform

Counterpoint: you can't just go to Visa/Mastercard or a merchant acquirer out there and set up an account on the same terms that Stripe can.

On the other hand, you can sign up to any LLM provider and get API access on terms that are the same or better (since I'm sure they don't appreciate having a middleman and would benefit from incentivizing direct usage) than OpenRouter gets.

> I don't understand why there isn't a special USB-C protocol to recover bios over SDU/CC pins

Not enough of these cases happen under warranty for them to bother (and out of warranty cases are either neutral, or even beneficial to them if they drive sales of new hardware).

> after a while the investors start asking where their dividends are at

By then, a new fad will come in and you can just pivot to it.

We went from "engagement" (with no concrete plans to monetize said engagement), through a brief period of "blockchain" and now finally AI.

It ain't the cause, but is definitely an enabler, because foreign talent on work visas effectively depends on their job much more so than their domestic counterparts and are thus very unlikely to push back against unreasonable demands or workload.

Don't worry, they are also working hard at destroying those products too.

Not fucking with a thing that works as desired would put a large chunk of the tech industry out of a job.