dormento

I always thought of ads as "something that informs me about the things I should want", and that the point of the entire "discipline" or marketing was to "create desire".

Yeah... "Google, please do the thinking for me, it hurts!" :(

May chaos take the world!

And normalizing google's model of computing, surveillance, locked down platforms etc...

Perhaps a bought theme and they forgot to test for mobile.

> rates how unhinged a comment is

No can do, too many false positives considering the usual demographics.

Most of these could could be put another way as protecting sovereignty (and that would be the most charitable interpretation IMHO). Examples:

- "being hostile for ideological reasons" becomes entirely warranted when you consider the many CIA regime-change operations in the past.

- "Undermining the relation" (with the US) is just being smart about how much dependency one has on external factors, like exchange rates and infrastructure.

- The "investigations" are political posturing. PIX is not "unfair business practice", its a modern, cheap, state-of-the-art payments system that is better than what private businesses like MasterCard and Visa are willing to offer. I can think of plenty of ways they could offer actual value to customers so they can still be relevant. The fact that they don't, and chose to try and lobby against it tells me that its a lot cheaper to just buy some politicians and manufacture some controversy instead.

Good job, I laughed plenty! :)

Thought I must bring to attention that not a single of these fantastic animals consumes human flesh:

- man-eating-ferret (eats bureaucratic effluvia)

- human-eating-ferret (again, feeds on bureaucracy)

- actual-human-eating-ferret (ditto)

- blood-sucking-ferret (its a sessile organism that lives in a desert, and drinks brine).

...maybe its the ferrets?

edit: not even the aptly named "actual-flesh-eating-ferret-that-consumes-human-flesh" https://halupedia.com/actual-flesh-eating-ferret-that-consum...

> Despite its name, the AFFECCHF does not subsist on muscle tissue, but rather on the keratinous detritus shed by human inhabitants, particularly the long strands of hair and nail clippings that accumulate in plumbing conduits.

And it was the AI's fault. So convenient.

> Usually googling the location/quest/puzzle name gets the result you are looking for

Yeah but see they don't want you "googling" it. They want you "copiloting".

> You chose the quiet version. No animations. No scroll effects. Just words.

> The internet you grew up on isn't dying.

> A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.

Not x. Not y. Just z.

The x is not y-ing. The z i is.

Its so tiresome. Give us the prompt instead.

Then there's the convenient answer of "AI made me do it", to which investors are somehow really empathetic... feels like every company CEO is operating on the mindset of "its gonna hit the fan any moment now", except they're the ones holding the fan.

I'm assuming in good faith you're talking about the hatemail Don receiveid.

I agree. As an open source software enjoyer, I know that unless specified otherwise (and arguably even then), there are exactly _zero_ contractual and/or legal obligations on the part of the maintainer. I'm happy to benefit from battle-tested code, and I'm even happier when I can contribute back to it, for the benefit of all. This is the spirit of open source. Being purposefully obtuse to open source maintainers of such important piece of software is bad for everyone involved.

Also, he's taken a political stance in the past, which turns him into a magnet for certain discussions.

To note:

> - Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems.

> - Humans must not blindly trust the output of AI systems.

> - Humans must remain fully responsible and accountable for consequences arising from the use of AI systems.

My take: humans should never depend on AI for anything serious.

My boss' take: Cool. I'm gonna ask Gemini about it, he's such a smart guy. I know I can trust him, and in case it goes bad i can always throw him under the bus.

As I see it, there's no incentive to find a better path forward. We're in the age of "good enough". It doesn't even need to actually be any good, just "good enough". Tensions are rising and technical debt is sky high. Thing is, as long as the money keeps on pouring, there's no incentive to solve any of that. With AI taking over most of trivial programming tasks, and the current downsizing trend, even if the last few reasonable people in a company finally get fed up and leave, there's plenty of meat for the grinder.

> Why your website is invisible to the agents visiting it.

I only _wish_ I could make a website invisible to agents. Instead now we're hostages to Cloudflare /shrug

Edit: so this isn't as "driveby-ish": the tldr; seems to be, if you want your site crawl-able, don't go overboard on the JS. This was good wisdom back then just as it is now in the current situation.

This looks like a purpose build website for websec/compliance training. It has "demo" written all over it. I think op got bamboozled.

Author was forced to revert.

Found this link on the author's repos on github https://theletterf.github.io/hugo-win31/

IMHO, not the fault of those reading, but of those "writing".

I think one reason might be that the "horizon" of developments related to optimization and new techniques is very short. Since we're still having recurrent breakthroughs, new things are being attempted every other week. Too much money and investor attention means competition is beyond fierce, and the turn of innovation follows. I think this plays a part into the weirdly timed cooldowns, terms of service, inconsistent quality etc.

It also mimics the goldrush for training content. Acquiring content (just like gauging LLM capabilities) is too fast for even lawyers to keep up. Society as a whole kinda threw their hands up and hoped things would just solve themselves instead of the world suing itself into oblivion. So the threshold of acceptability has moved accordingly.

I don't like it but it is what it is :/

> use a feudal model because it is more accurate

This is _entirely_ too accurate. The land grabs of today are mostly for eyeballs on ads (even though the old fashioned pointy-end-of-sword land grabbing seems to be back in fashion). Our "lords" are forced into survival mode, and mobilize their peasant militias on social media to spread their gospel. Maybe I'm stretching the metaphor too thin, but to me, it seems like we're at the crossroads between the imminent end of serfdom and the french revolution. The people are hungry and pretty pissed.

> I’m very pessimistic about the next 50 years so I’m very biased.

You're not alone. That's called awareness, and comes with experience. I hope things will get better, but the fruits of technology are not evenly distributed.

All of them that I can think of are capable of producing safe(ish) programs. Mainly those where an empty file is a complete program.

And it has a citation block at the bottom! Like anyone would want to cite this in a serious context.

This must be a troll.

One thing that i just realized is i don't know exactly when things got bad.

I remember the 90s when we had to "go" online, when the digital was apart from the analog and we kept online and offline separate. I remember simpler sites, not as many ads, I remember a time before "feeds".

However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck. It might be that I was busy with other things in life, but still it leaves me with an unsettling feeling. Maybe it was around the arrival of home broadband? The end of Orkut (community based social media)? The advent of algorithmic feeds?

"I see you enjoy cooking, ancient history and building terrariums. Would you also be interested in a couple of tiktok dance short videos?" ugh..

Now that you mention it, i didn't try "Metal Gear". Now that would be a ride.

I love stories like these.

Btw video number [2] is private.

Last night I had a nightmare about cloudflare finally monetizing the "making sure you're not a robot" page. AI agents got the information they needed, we got ads instead ("why are you here? You're supposed to let agents do the thing. Watch some ads instead").

I woke up with such a bad feeling..

Oof linkrot :(((((

I remember reading this back then. Amazing story. All the secrecy, and needing to be a very small team.

They optimized the link :X

OP, this looks very comprehensive, and too much to look into right now, but I'll explore it later.

Aka "they have lawyers and you usually don't, so we think we can get away with it."