gdulli

They want fingerprinting to work for everyone because the more effective it is, the higher the value of the ad inventory they sell.

Replace AI with Microsoft Word and it makes sense. Lots of people use it and lots of people hate it.

The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.

If this is what winning a war looks like I hope we don't ever lose one.

Trading practice of primary skills for indirect skills like AI is like a writer deciding they should stop writing directly and get really good at Microsoft Word.

If McDonald's food was featured in sci fi movies about being able to end humanity through war, that's when this would apply and they'd cultivate fear of that nonsense to distract from their food being shitty and overpriced and unhealthy.

Not sure you're familiar with the different ways punctuation has evolved online?

There is still a point to making a choice. Inconvenient sideloading is still better than no sideloading.

In principle I could never reward Apple with my business for having originated and normalized this.

And pragmatically, I'd like to hold on for as long as I can to the next set of rights that Apple will take away five years before Google does.

We complain when good sites are acquired and shut down, but maybe it's even worse when they're acquired and kept running in a shitty state like IMDB or Twitter. Big enough to stave off competition and prevent progress.

Their absence supports that it's not an omnipresent American pattern after all.

It's still crucial to keep your hands on the wheel and be able to take over from a self driving car within seconds. But we know this isn't happening and won't happen. The nature of the invention nurtures the behavior to use it unsafely.

Don't forget how many people here (and elsewhere, but especially here) need you to think this stuff works better than it does because they're selling it or otherwise benefit from its success.

People who only see art as its surface content without all that other subtext are exposing themselves.

That's part of the Chesterton's Fence nature of why these markets are bad. We know insider trading is a bad thing for the stock market, so it's policed. These markets, being a post-regulation internet free for all, aren't.

I found the Rosetta Stone of Hacker News.

In hindsight, we could have listened to the people who warned about how the internet would make our lives worse. Can our society withstand another generation of worsening on par with the effects of social media etc?

Everyone wants to use AI to create work and no one wants to consume or be downstream of AI created work.

You're an ant to them. All that data they have tells them this action won't hurt them.

An incredibly important turning point of this era is that businesses have learned that they no longer need to fear acting hostile to consumers. Consumers don't practice agency.

How could you not know the argument that Apple has normalized selling devices that forbid the ability to run arbitrary code without their permission?

You're not required to agree that that's a bad thing, but how could you be unaware of the reasoning at a high level?

There's lots of comments here where people promote trading the freedom of installing arbitrary code for the security of the app store keeping them safe.

> I've been interested in understanding what would make people more amenable to data centers.

We've been slowly boiling alive in the reality that the tech industry has long been evolving to hurt us more and help us less each year. We'd be neutral or welcoming to data centers if we didn't know that storing and processing all that data was going to be used against us.

Inviting Apple or Google into my transactions is a security breach to start with.

You think his argument was that we should welcome the likes of Google controlling the direction of our cognition? The book was about the dangers of asserting our independence from those who control technology? Admittedly, I haven't read the sequels.

Also Frank Herbert: "Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

An aspect of AI that's really underdiscussed is just the basic switch from doing all your searches logged out to now being forced to be logged in somewhere. That much alone is disqualifying for me.

Not only did calculators not make the average person great at higher level math when they no longer had to do manual arithmetic, but it made them less capable in everyday situations when some basic mental arithmetic would still be helpful. The invention of calculators doesn't mean that people go to the trouble of pulling them out at the grocery store to keep from getting ripped off.

That sounds horrible. I'm so glad I saved enough money to retire early right before this madness started.

At least phone trees are deterministic and there's still (usually) an option to get to a person for matters that aren't covered by the multiple choice options. Talking to AI is a much worse experience and the hope of the industry is that there won't need to be a human as a fallback anymore because (they believe) the AI is intelligent enough to handle anything.

Was social media "done right"?

The enshittification we're bathing in every day is the lesson that matters.

We should absolutely use the lessons we learned about how the web unfolded to inform our predictions about AI.

Our naivete back in 1996 could be forgiven. Not applying the lessons since then and anticipating how subsequent technologies will be captured and used against us is irresponsible.