lich_king

I am really tired of this kind of moralizing. The reality is that every time geeks come up with some utopian ideal, such as that we should publish all our software under free licenses or make all human knowledge freely accessible to anyone, the same geeks later show up and build extractive industries on top of this. Be a part of the open source revolution... so that you do unpaid labor for Facebook. Make a quirky homepage... so that we can bootstrap global-scale face recognition tech. Help us build the modern-day library of Alexandria... so that OpenAI and Anthropic can sell it back to you in a convenient squeezable tube.

Maybe it's time to admit that the techie community has a pretty bad moral compass and that we're not good stewards of the world's knowledge. We turn lofty ideals into amoral money-making schemes whenever we can. I'm not sure that the EFF's role in this is all that positive. They come from a good place, but they ultimately aid a morally bankrupt industry. I don't want archive.org to retain a copy of everyone's online footprint because I know it be used the same way it always is: to make money off other people's labor and to and erode privacy.

> The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done.

Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.

We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.

And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.

I don't even think if singling out Dell is useful. Most US companies have long decided that providing good customer support is a drag on revenue and that you can get away with not providing it if the product is problem-free for 99% of your users.

Have you tried calling UPS with an atypical problem? Bank of America? United? It's all the same, and the thing is, you don't find out until you actually have a problem with the service you purchased.

There are some exceptions to this rule, for example many brokerages have real customer support. Amazon stands out too - they're not prepared to handle anything unusual, but their model is to refund you almost no matter what.

But by and large, it's absolutely awful in the US and I'm often positively surprised when I need to interact with customer support in other countries, where you actually can reach a courier about your delivery, etc.

An article about the AI writing style, written using AI.

Disproportionately many geeks have very strong opinions about psychiatry, probably because we have a lot of people who consider themselves neurodivergent, as well as plenty of folks who experiment with drugs.

> He had some pretty awful views that he was pretty loud about, especially later in life. He also cheated on his wife at one point.

In 1961, in his early 20s. You get ~80 years on this planet to make mistakes and have views that some other people will dislike. If these are the worst things we can accuse him of, while acknowledging all his charitable work, I'd say he fared OK compared to many other role models we have.

Alternatively, there's money to be lost in the transition. The vast majority of "crypto investors" did not walk away from it any richer. Some folks have gotten lucky, but it's just that: their thesis about the future of money was evidently wrong, they just happened to get the timing right. Getting lucky for the wrong reasons is not a good investment strategy.

Meanwhile, the main category of people who have consistently gotten rich off the "crypto revolution" were various scammers and pump-and-dumpers who have since moved on to meme stocks, AI content farming, and so on.

But I wouldn't use crypto as a benchmark because AI has more substance. We can debate if it's going to change the world, but you can build some new types of businesses and services if you have near-perfect natural language comprehension on the cheap.

The comparison gets picked up as the headline; the admission does not. This is exploited quite often, e.g. in science reporting. I'm not saying this is what Waymo did - they don't seem to be bad actors - but absolutely, the pattern does occur.

Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. "We found a way to make illustrators, copyeditors, and paralegals, and several dozen other professions, somewhat obsolete" in no way justifies the valuations of OpenAI or Nvidia.

We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads.

Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-school competitors". Now that the competitors are gone, Netflix is doing ads, Amazon is doing ads... why wouldn't Spotify?

I hate it, but the reality is that we groan on online forums but don't actually leave.

So you're advocating for stronger and more invasive controls?...

I think this is a sensible compromise. It gives parents more control than before without relying on shady third-party software or without turning every platform into a cop. Yeah, it also aligns with Meta's interests, but so what?

The age attestation solutions pursued by the EU are far more invasive in this respect, even though they notionally protect identity. They mean that the "default" internet experience is going to be nerfed until you can present a cryptographic proof that you're worthy.

> Why not have 2000 hand curated directories instead?

It depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you want to have a personal feed of stories from interesting people, 50 is probably enough to give you some interesting daily reading. But if you want to build a "small web" search lens, you absolutely need to cover. For example, Kagi is billing a "small web" search filter, but it excludes a lot of the small web because they only allow actively-maintained blogs and only a subset of them.

I think it shows the limits of hand curation. It's a tiny, human-reviewed slice of the "small web", only allowing a subset of blogs... but if you select the "programming" category and click around for a short while, you get a fair amount of obvious AI slop.

I don't think it's Kagi's fault, but I guess it's depressing in a way. A lot of "small web" bloggers dream of being a part of the "big web", and when they get a cheat button, they have no second thoughts about mashing it.

This is not how corporate fraud usually happens. You don't tamper with the quarterly report, especially since it gets audited. You tamper with the input data close to the source. For example, you record revenue that hasn't happened yet or you delay the recording of losses.