We're talking about content where the primary motivation for creating it is displaying ads in between in order to make revenue. For instance: I'm watching some video about repairing an old car, and suddenly there is a sponsor segment where the mechanic talks about branded supplements for 5 minutes. Why would I take health advice from a car mechanic? I think this is dishonest advertising and I would actually prefer to skip these videos altogether, but yt doesn't offer that in a search filter. So i use Sponsorblock.
For comparison: say you're getting a haircut. And halfway they stop cutting to promote their new book, for 5 minutes straight. Telling you they would not be able to provide you with the haircut if they cannot promote the book.
At this point, best to just keep it disconnected. Just use an apple tv or similar. They sold us a spying device masqueraded as a smart TV.
If internet is really required, I'd personally flood such an LG tv with fake data - add a raspberry pi to provide it with looped audio streams for the microphone, fake bluetooth devices, and so on. But it's still probably a drop in a bucket.
Do companies in the US really have the right to do that? I would think that kind of investigation is reserved for law enforcement only. If the design was made over email, would the piano company be able to subpoena Google for someone's private gmail messages?
Try refreshing Firefox. On opening it shows two recommendations for Google; a large "VPN" button in the address bar; a toast asking me for my weather location; the address bar tries to cross sell me three Mozilla products: "Monitor, Relay and VPN".
I'm not sure how the new AI stuff works as I never enabled it, but apparently that's there, too.
I'm always wondering how hard it would be to just remove the hardware for spying. Just keep enough hardware to make it a dumb panel, remove the webos logic boards, wifi antenna, etc.
This can be very useful for urban planning. you could have an agent investigate the optimal spot for a new datacenter, examine solar power installations, and so on.
I have the same sentiment. Who assures me this video isn't sent to the manufacturer for "quality control" reasons? Can it be used in court in case of an accident? Will my insurance ask access to monitor my driving? Can it be used for detecting phone use?
Therefore, these cameras get a sticker, or a small printout of my head, looking alert, put in front of the camera. These systems only cause extra distraction, they do not reduce it - it feels like having a constant driving exam.
That would put full blame on the tech staff and let the C-suite get away. The success of a software product is measured by sales and user base, so the more successful their sales and marketing are, the higher the damages will be for the tech staff.
I am of the opinion that companies and their management should be personally liable for damages caused by bad software, not their employees. They created the structure, hired everyone (and perhaps didn't hire QA), and invested in it to make a huge profit.
I don't think they'll let the chain of managers above you handle the llm directly. That is just too much risk of incompetence. Instead, there will be micro teams (1 dev, 1 sre, 1 product owner) that are meta manageed by a LLM. And their llm reports directly to a higher up's llm. And software will diversify to prevent all these supply chain attacks we've seen lately.
The first time I pasted a screenshot of a PR review thread, adding just "I had some review comments, fix them" - and it perfectly solved everything, made small commits, and pushed it upstream - this was such a shock.
I now try to keep pushing the boundaries and see where it stops understanding my intention. Give it impossible tasks, gigantic projects, complex architectures. Last result: I wrote a complete OS including MPI, TCP/IP, and a GUI from scratch in only a week, while investing just a few hours a day in it. It even runs Doom!. Coding as a profession is over, but there's such a difference between the result if you approach this with a professional mindset, that I think the software engineering discipline can still provide massive value.
I now foresee a future where law firms have models trained on all the transcriptions of individual judges, lawyers and prosecutors, and run agents against them to decide on the optimal strategy for a case.
I doubt everyone will still be carrying phones as we know them in a decade, so we might indeed be headed for a future where governments keep giant databases of biometric information. Works OK if you trust your government to handle that properly and not abuse it in the future. The real headache is crossing borders, where your details end up in the hands of a foreign state.
Grok is quite good for explaining tweets, summarizing meme videos and chatting about celebrities. But chat and image inference only, it was performing really poor in agentic work the last time I tried.
I made something similar to this project, and tested it against a few 3B and 8B models (Qwen and Ministral, both the instruction and the reasoning variants). I was pleasantly surprised by how fast and accurate these small models have become. I can ask it things like "check out this repo and build it", and with a Ralph strategy eventually it will succeed, despite the small context size.
I tried to sign up for Gemini this weekend but gave up after an hour. I got stuck comparing their offerings, looking for product pages, proper signup, etc. Their product offering and naming is just a mess. Cloud console. AI studio, I was completely lost at some point.
I love these thought experiments. Looking at the code size, it would have been possible for someone to come up with this back in the days, similar to the idea of a million monkeys on a typewriter eventually producing Shakespeare.
I always start in the Claude CLI. Once I hit the token limit, I can do two things: either use Copilot Claude to finish the job, or pick up something completely different, and let the other task wait until the token limit resets. Most importantly, I'm never blocked waiting for the cap.
I actually get more mileage out of Claude using a Github Copilot subscription. The regular Claude Pro will give me an hour or up to 90 minutes max, before it reaches the cap. The Github version has a monthly limit for the Claude requests (100 "premium requests") which I find much easier to manage. I was about to switch to the max plan but this setup (both Claude pro and Github Copilot, costing 30 a month together) was just enough for my needs. With a bonus that I can try some of the other model offerings as well.
So you buy a new TV, unpack and install it, and then when the whole family is gathered around, you suddenly get this confirmation on the TV if you agree with their T&C. Are you supposed to reject them and return the TV at this point? T&C should be part of the purchase agreement, instead of being forced upon the user while using the product after purchase. Any one-sided change of T&C after purchase should be invalid and punishable.
Not everyone feels like that. Yesterday the app of my tv provider on my Samsung TV home screen suddenly shows a Prime icon in its place, prompting to install the app if you use muscle memory to control the TV. I am unable to remove this annoying ad. I really really hate ads and will go to great lengths to avoid seeing any in my private home. So I see this as an invasion of my privacy. Not buying Samsung anymore.
I've been thinking about this as well - make a small device that in real time detects ads and turns off audio an video while it's playing. I'd rather see a blank screen than an ad. That way, the whole ad pyramid scheme stays intact while the conversion rates plummet.