AlexandrB

Absolutely they will. It might be "innocent" at first - "oh we don't want ChatGPT to recommend scam products so we will train it to prefer "trusted" brands" and then inclusion in "trusted brands" will go up for sale with the final stage being outright paid-for recommendation bias for specific products.

The only question is how sales will work if there's some spin up time to do the post training. You can't do a real time auction like Google does, so it will be longer-term contracts I suspect.

Edit: AI is a great opportunity to run the same protection racket that's been run in various existing "marketplaces", where a brand has to buy ad placement for searches for their own name or their competitor will be able to displace them by buying it instead: "You would't want a user asking 'Which Cambells soup flavor is the healthiest?' to get a recommendation for Lipton's would you?"

eSIMs give a lot of control back to the carrier. My carrier does not allow transferring eSIMs between phones, but I can trivially move their physical SIM card.

A smaller closed size than current phones would be the main appeal for me. Phone bloat has gotten out of hand.

What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection

You're missing the fact that all ads are scammy and I don't want to see any of them. There's nothing that makes a Downy ad more honest or relevant to me than an ad for BigCoin Online Casino - it's all worthless trash that conveys zero genuine information about the product. At least the bottom tier ads are honest about what they are.

Apple Maps has Apple Ads and Apple Ads are awful.

Yes. Considering 90%+ of users will just connect their TV to their WiFi, shipping a cell modem with every TV to catch that last 10% seems like bad ROI.

I could however see this happening in the future in response to regulation. For example some "think of the children" rule that makes TV makers responsible for blocking mature content.

Interestingly, fiber signals can be split passively[1] (without a transducer), which should be extremely reliable. No idea what technology this kind of application would use though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_splitter

I would never use AI for shopping. The incentives to mess with the results for commercial gain are too great.

> As I grow older, I am feeling the need to stand up and try to protect my values.

I agree. I'm tired of repeated bad faith interpretations of anyone who shows even the slightest disagreement with the current political milieu. Opinions that were considered anodyne in 2010 are now "far right, "fascism", and "genocide". This whole approach is grossly undemocratic as it treats half the country as a problem to be solved or worked around. This is far more authoritarian than stuff supported by many of the supposed fascists.

I'm sorry, but you're not being honest. He both mentions specific problems that need to be addressed ("Cue the gypsies in Copenhagen, and their increasingly brazen behavior, after the city legalized overnight sleeping in parks and other green areas last year. Because "it shouldn't be illegal to be homeless", so the police refuses to act.") and links immigration policy to dealing with those who violate the law ("When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation."). Where is the racism? Is it just in the "noticing" that a lot of folks engaged in this activity come from the same communities?

Unless you get "grandfathered in"[1].

> Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

> Ezra Klein: Really?

> Bernie Sanders:Of course. That's a right wing proposal which says essentially there is no United States.

> Ezra Klein: But it would make ...

> Bernie Sanders: Excuse me ...

> Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?

> Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer, you're doing away with the concept of a nation state and I don't think there's any country in the world which believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right wing people in this country would love is an open border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for 2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0

People betting online just destroy their families and cast their children into poverty.

And gambling restrictions are hardly fascist. Online sports gambling wasn't legal a scant 10 years ago. Were we living under fascism at that time?

I'm sympathetic to this perspective, but the downstream negative externalities of sports gambling aren't just what happens to gambling addicts. The whole sport starts to revolve around the gambling - including strong incentives for players to "throw" games. I don't think integrity in sports can co-exist with a massive, legal gambling industry.

> You should not accept this as fact, nor should you tolerate this current regime.

Should folks who disagree with you politically tolerate the Obama or Biden regimes then? Or are the only regimes that should be tolerated ones that agree with you politically?

Yes, you are correct, everyone who doesn't like your preferred political candidates is racist and sexist.

It doesn't matter. Even if they don't train on your inputs now they will "boil the frog" and do so in the future. What the user wants is irrelevant in the tech industry.

> If they are doing this and anyone can prove it, they are going to be sued very hard, and it will be a pretty straightforward case.

This is a joke, right? The usual settlement in these cases amounts to a few days worth of revenue.

Here's a real controversial opinion: If Clinton had won, the eventual backlash would be much greater and have elected a far more odious figure than Trump. America is lucky that Trump is kind of a bumbling oaf that channeled populist rage.

The push for recycling has been successful at making people feel better about themselves, not successful at saving energy or raw materials. The article also goes on at length about this, but most of what's put in recycling bins gets thrown out anyways and folks regularly put stuff in recycling bins that can't be recycled, just increasing the cost of recycling programs while lowering their effectiveness. Recycling metal cans and containers is a no brainer, recycling most plastics is of questionable value bordering on actively harmful[1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...

I think it's beyond many people. A typical pattern is that you forget your bag at home and end up buying another one. After this happens a few times you now have an excess of reusable bags such that you will never recoup the "173 times" on all of them.

The thing with methane is that it has a lifespan of something like 10 years in the atmosphere before it breaks down to CO2 + water, while CO2 persists for centuries. I suspect that burning would release more net CO2 than emitting the methane and having it eventually break down to CO2.

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/meth...

> A molecule of methane traps more heat than a molecule of CO2, but methane has a relatively short lifespan of 7 to 12 years in the atmosphere. CO2 can persist for hundreds of years or more.

Moravec's paradox remains undefeated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

I've gotten very comfortable not owning Ubisoft games[1].

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-t...

> a President who should never have been President in the first place.

According to whom? The American people seemed to think he should be president. The thinly veiled contempt for democracy and voters among those who hate Trump is funny considering how much time they spend talking about "defending democracy".

> by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general

I wouldn't care about the rents if they weren't in the form of ads being shoved in everywhere. The "2 ads in the first 3 results" of the App Store is a horror show.

Copyright in general, is too long, too broad, and - thanks largely to DMCA - enforced too strictly. One reason for China's success in tech is their willingness to ignore all the IP nonsense (or at least look the other way) allowing folks to rapidly iterate on ideas without running into IP rent-seekers at every turn.

> He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.

Maybe this was true at one point but I don't think modern literary culture has much capacity to be introspective. The politicization of academia hit the liberal arts harder than anywhere else[1], and when it comes to politically charged topics there's little room for disagreement left. Introspection is not possible if questioning the status quo can be a career-ender[2].

[1] https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-23-winter/the-hyperpoli...

[2] https://www.fire.org/research-learn/sanctioned-scholars-pric...

I suspect it can't be helped at this point. RAM is the new gold. Valve even had to increase the price for a 4 year old piece of hardware[1].

[1] https://tech-insider.org/ca/steam-deck-price-increase-2026/

They frequently already are. Even here in Canada[1] where any kind of "carry" is generally not allowed. Shockingly, thieves often don't care about gun laws though.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-police-cash-r...

This sounds great in theory, and I used to agree, but:

a. There's no guarantee against escalation, a property crime turns into a violent crime very easily.

b. Property crime can have a deep psychological impact on the victim - something the perpetrator demonstrably gives zero fucks about.

c. The police and justice system in 2026 don't care about prosecuting property crime. Having no recourse at all if you're being robbed (a common situation when defending your own property is effectively illegal because of the risk to the perpetrator) is grossly unfair.