johneth

Surely as the traffic Google sends to websites falls and falls, there'll come a tipping point where the websites themselves will feel there's no benefit to allowing Google to index them.

If this happens, Google's generative AI slop will have less and less scaped and regurgitated content to surface to Google users.

> Which suggests that content wins and form just needs to be good enough for the intended audience.

I agree to an extent, but why not put the extra effort into making that content easier to read, especially for those whose vision is degraded (which is ultimately all of us given enough time).

> So a solution should probably be done in software

In Chrome you can simulate a slow connection on a slow device via the dev tools. Firefox has a similar feature.

It's not entirely what you're suggesting (which is sort of like Chaos Monkey but for web apps I guess?)

Elon's not brilliant, he's just lucky.

The main reason I've done this is to make myself less profitable to Meta. A drop in the bucket, I know, but the more people who do this, the less money Meta makes, which can only be a good thing for the world.

1) I don't particularly care beyond possibly being less targeted for manipulation

5) I wouldn't have thought it was a campaign or effort by Warner Bros, likely just the show itself which seems to have pretty wide editorial freedom (and obviously EFF does have a known position on these matters)

6) Good luck getting timely and well thought-through regulations through the EU / any regulation through the US

7 million is about 10% of the UK population, not 25%.

I note that you didn't refute what I said.

It is a nazi platform, in that it's owned and controlled by a nazi.

You've always needed to go through passport control on Eurostar.

> What part of "Hacker" or "News" makes this stupid hot take relevant exactly?

Hacker News is run by a VC company that funds tech companies. Elon Musk owns many major companies in the same tech space. That's what makes it relevant to Hacker News.

> this stupid hot take

If you mean the two nazi salutes that he clearly did, I'd say it's obviously relevant.

Why is this flagged? Surely one of the most influential people in the tech space (and the richest man in the world) doing a nazi salute is pertinent to Hacker News?

No, Elon's doing that all by himself.

> Here incorporating as an ltd (limited liability) costs I think £25

They've increased it to (a still reasonable) £50, I assume to help fund the new legal obligations that Companies House has been given.

> "recently"

Over a century ago is not recently, even relatively.

It took a decade to die. And another decade to decay away enough to stop having to support it.

Just from gut feeling, from still using both X and Bluesky, I'd say the ratio of bots-to-humans on X is way higher than Bluesky.

I thought about doing something like that, but then I realised: what if someone linked to the trap URL it from another site and a crawler followed that link to the trap?

You might end up penalising Googlebot or Bingbot.

If anyone knew what that trap URL did, and felt malicious, this could happen.

I doubt it would change anything. One of the first things Elon did after taking control of Twitter was to make verification pay-to-play. Now the blue checkmark is basically a sign of either a bot, grifter, or engagement farmer.

Putting up a paywall hasn't deterred bots, and it won't work.

> X is paying lots now to content creators

Sure, but most of that seems to be to engagement farmers who provide little to no value to actual humans.

> And it seems their advertisers are coming back.

Anything to back up this claim?

That's called a newsletter.

Looks to be one of Wing's (the Alphabet subsidiary) drones.

I always assume the worst possible interpretation of any numbers falling out of Elon's mouth.

The network effects are powerful, but anecdotally I've noticed fewer and fewer people I follow actually posting anything to Twitter.

I think there'll be a tipping point where nobody of value is posting enough for anybody else to bother checking in, death spiralling its usefulness. It's already 80% bots, grifters, and engagement farmers.

I switched to Zed from Sublime a few months ago, and I really like it. Super snappy, doesn't choke, and just pleasant to use.

I don't make any use of the AI features though, and as a solo dev the collaborative aspect is also not useful to me.

Hashing an IPv4 address doesn't particularly protect privacy, given the limited address space.

I just checked Wikipedia and it says Atom's is 'application/atom+xml' (also confirmed in the IANA registry), and RSS's is 'application/rss+xml' (but it's not registered yet, and 'text/xml' is also used widely).

'application/rss+xml' seems to be the best option though in my opinion. The '+xml' in the media type tells (good) parsers to fall back to using an XML parser if they don't understand the 'rss' part, but the 'rss' part provides more accurate information on the content's type for parsers that do understand RSS.

All that said, it's a mess.

I think the current correct content types are:

'application/rss+xml' (for RSS)

'application/atom+xml' (for Atom)

> One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it.

That seems a bit fuzzy to implement, depending on what the service actually does. It's not always clear-cut, like watching a show on a streaming service; for example, what if the service does things in the background for the user too even if they're not actively 'using' it.

My compromise would be something like: if the user hasn't actively engaged with your service for X month(s), email/text them a reminder asking if they still want to be subscribed.

> but the reality (for better or worse) seems to be that AI is not going away.

AI is in a hype cycle at the moment. Once tech companies realise that they're not going to be able to recoup the billions of dollars they've dumped into the money hole, they'll either raise prices or withdraw products (or a mixture of both).

Consumers, by and large, don't like generative AI. Or at least they don't like it enough to make it pay for itself.

> It may be "useful" for me to inspect your private bank accounts (maybe you are a good investor and I can learn something!) but it's no justification for me to violate your privacy.

Right, that's why that's not a thing. We're talking about limited liability companies, not people. They're separate entities.

> It may be very "useful" for me to know the business plans of my competitor, but gaining access to them is usually qualified as criminal. "Useful" is not something that authomatically gives access to private information just because somebody wants to.

The information available is very basic stuff – the company's registered address, its officers, its shareholders and how much they own, insolvency information, and yearly accounts.

My point in it being 'useful' is that it's useful to know who you're going into business with; a cursory look at the company's very basic information can help in that, before, for example, you sign a contract with them.

> Public companies are owned by hundreds of individuals and entities, and the company has zero control over it, making any conclusions based on that is nonsense.

Sure, some companies are owned by hundreds of individuals and entities. A lot are owned by one or two or five people. Either way, it's useful to know who owns the company, and who owns more than others (i.e. controls more than others).

> Moreover, even private company can't really block an investor from selling their share to another investor, why would anyone take it as a "signal" to anything, except the signal that the buying investor considers it to be a good deal? This looks very much like an instance of motivated reasoning.

What are you talking about? I'm not talking about 'useful' to investors (which it definitely is). I'm talking about 'useful' to people doing business with that company. Knowing exactly who you're doing business with, and how financially secure the company is, is very useful. You don't want to go in to business with a company that's about to go under.