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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Companies that don't invent the car get to go extinct.

This is the next great upset. Everyone's hair is on fire and it's anybody's ball game.

I wouldn't even count the hyperscalers as certain to emerge victorious. The unit economics of everything and how things are bought and sold might change.

We might have agents that scrub ads from everything and keep our inboxes clean. We might find content of all forms valued at zero, and have no need for social networking and search as they exist today.

And for better or worse, there might be zero moat around any of it.

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> agents that scrub ads from everything

This is called an ad blocker.

> keep our inboxes clean

This is called a spam filter.

The entire parent comment is just buzzword salad. In fact I am inclined to think it was written by an LLM itself.

That entire user's post history reads like the output of a very poorly trained LLM.

I mean, my post history was used to train ChatGPT since HN is one of the major training data sources and I have a decade and a half of comment history.

It'd be funny if you blamed me for emdashes or "delve", but it's a bit rude to suggest that it's the other way around.

You're not a normie and defaults matter. Most of the world doesn't even know what an ad blocker is let alone know how to install one.

There's really only two browsers and one search engine. It doesn't matter what you do, because the rest of society is ensnared and the economic activities that matter are held captive.

If generative models compress all of the useful activities (lowering the incumbency moat) and agents can perform actions on our behalf, then it reasons that we may have agents that act as personal assistants and have our best interests as top priority. Ads are clearly in violation of that.

It's so funny to be a contrarian on HN. I get quite a lot of predictions right, yet all I get in exchange is downvotes and claims that I'm an LLM. I'll have to write a retro one of these days if I ever find the free time.

> You're not a normie and defaults matter. Most of the world doesn't even know what an ad blocker is let alone know how to install one

These problems don't need LLMs to solve; they need something that also starts with 'L', but is a lot more boring—legislation. The online world is rampant with rubbish and misinformation not because LLMs aren't yet at our beck and call like a digital French maid, but because laws in most parts of the world haven't caught up and multi-national megacorps do whatever the heck they see fit. Especially so in 'capital-friendly' countries. One sees a lot less of this in the PRC, for instance.

I would love to see a GDPR-style set of legislation straight up addressing everything from privacy defaults on social media to aggressively blocking online ad networks.

> I get quite a lot of predictions right

Good for you, then.

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