johneth

That would be a great (and extremely justified) way to bring antitrust actions against those 'in control of search'.

It's useful to know who owns a company or know a company's financial state for anyone who wants to do business with that company.

It adds a level of transparency that makes it easier if you're at the beginning of a relationship with a company (i.e. there may not be a large amount of trust at the start of the relationship; knowing who owns a company and its financial state can be good signals).

Minor pedantic correction:

The Post Office (shops, services, government forms, etc.) is still fully government-owned. It's the Royal Mail (delivery) that was privatised. They used to be the same company but split in two before Royal Mail was privatised.

I find it strange that details of the owners of a private company isn't publicly available information in the first place (speaking as someone from a country – the UK – where this is publicly available information).

In the UK (and I'd assume many other countries), you can see the owners of private companies on the Companies House website[0], along with those with 'significant control' and financial statements. It's pretty interesting and useful to look at sometimes.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/get-information-about-a-company

There are several methods they may use:

- OpenGraph (by Facebook, probably used by Whatsapp) – https://ogp.me/

- Schema.org markup (the main point of this blog) – https://schema.org/

- oEmbed (used to embed media in another page, e.g. YouTube videos on a WordPress blog) – https://oembed.com/

Pretty far behind who?

> Is there a reason to choose LemonSqueezy over Stripe if you are located in the US? There hasn't been a single VAT-compliance case to my knowledge and the need for MoR is unclear.

It's not just the EU that charges VAT (or VAT-like taxes).

Most countries (and in the US's case, subregions within) charge some form of sales tax that's a pain to manage yourself if you're not a huge operation.

Always good to comply with tax laws (if not for the obviously good moral/ethical reasons, then definitely for legal reasons!)

> "One crawler downloaded 73 TB of zipped HTML files in May 2024, with almost 10 TB in a single day. This cost us over $5,000 in bandwidth charges, and we had to block the crawler."

Invoice the abusers.

They're rolling in investor hype money, and they're obviously not spending it on competent developers if their bots behave like this, so there should be plenty left to cover costs.

> combining LLMs with GUIs to create a flexible interface that isn't fully defined in advance but works with the user to adapt to their needs

I doubt this. Or, I doubt that it'll catch on.

Unlearnable UIs, as in those that 'adapt' to a user's needs (meaning change unpredictably) will just confuse and put off users.

LLMs being wrong at least enough of the time to make you not trust their output also makes me doubt this style of interface.

> My phone is an IP phone. It doesn't do SMS. Did you mean "mobile phone"?

UK landlines are transitioning to VoIP. SMS messages sent to UK landlines are read out by a text-to-speech system (well, my parents' does).

It's almost exclusively used by businesses and government to send notifications.

They use SMS because it's a baseline that every phone, smart or dumb, has. No need to have an email address, no need to have an app.

Most people use Whatsapp / Messenger / social media / to a lesser extent iMessage.

> One thing: Don't get cute. I considered buying "stran.ge" so I could have "josh@stran.ge" but thankfully sanity prevailed

I did this, only out of necessity though – I have a common first name and common last name, which means there aren't any domains available. I use a subdomain rather than the TLD as the 'cute' bit, which lessens the confusion slightly.

One minor benefit to living in the UK – no ads on the BBC website.

The appropriate status is surely 451 (Unavailable For Legal Reasons)[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451

Do the AI features apply to content from sites that block their 'Google-Extended' crawler (which they use to index content for their LLMs)?[1]

I'm not as worried if that distinction still applies – I can just block 'Google-Extended' and let the normal Googlebot through. If not, though, that feels like the beginning of the end of people wanting to be indexed, eventually leading to Google eating itself.

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

> What exactly do you dislike about him

Everything. Guy's a prick.

Specifically, he's a huge narcissist surrounding himself with yes men to stroke his ego. Not a good environment for push back (resulting in obvious failures like the Cybertruck, Twitter-to-X rebranding, 'FSD is ready!', The Boring Company, etc.)

> why is punishing Elon by boycotting Tesla worth slowing the transition to sustainable transportation?

Even if we take the Elon factor out of the equation and just decide not to buy a Tesla for any other reason, it isn't 'slowing the transition to sustainable transportation' because I can buy a (much of the time) cheaper, better build quality, modern electric car from Rivian, Hyundai, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, BYD, Volvo, Ford, Lucid, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Fiat, GMC, Honda, Jaguar, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Porsche, Ram, etc.

When I use ETags, I'll generate the ETag value once (on startup), then cache and serve that value. When the resource changes, regenerate the ETag value.

Obviously doesn't work if you're using ETags on dynamic resources, but works well for non-dynamic, but unpredictably frequently changing resources.

> LVMH is their biggest company. Got to hit 'em where it hurts.

It only hurts a French billionaire. I doubt many Europeans give a solitary shit about the fortunes of LVMH.

The headline could be reworded to "Tinder Owner Signs Own Death Warrant".

The more that AI is used in dating apps, where human connection is basically the entire product, the less people will use them.

It's interesting how often the prevailing sentiment of Hacker News commenters ends up being wrong (or misjudged).

> I don't know enough about Altman's previous business dealings to judge

He's involved in the eye scanning shitcoin 'Worldcoin'.[0] Personally, I assume anyone involved in crypto has suspicious motives at best.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin

I'm 50/50 on this being either AI-generated slop or just being poorly copied-and-pasted.

Give it a rest, mate.

> By doing what they did, they showed what’s possible and how excited users are.

I agree.

> Now there’s a balance of power and both sides can come to a compromise.

The only side that needs to compromise is OpenAI (et al). They used someone else's property without permission or compensation for commercial benefit.

> Everywhere else in the UK is forbidden from doing that.

Thankfully this seems to be changing. Greater Manchester, through its devolution in the last few years, has in the last few months started the 'Bee network',[0] which operates similarly to London's bus system. It's being brought in in phases.

Hopefully other areas start doing this too.

[0] https://tfgm.com/

There's a difference between a human reading something on the internet and an LLM absorbing something in to its model on a mass scale. Mainly that LLMs are packaged up in to nice commercial products that, in essence, sell other people's ideas for profit (or in aid of hugely inflated stock options) with no recompense to the original author of the idea.

Thanks for making it, a great resource!

Defence-in-depth? Why not both?

I just stumbled on it while searching for AI crawler user agents.

I'm not sure how often it's updated. It seems fairly complete from other sources I've been looking at (mainly robots.txt files for well-known publishers).

I use external drives locally, then upload to Google Drive (Workspace), and Fastmail storage. I figure two separate remote backups and a local backup is probably safe enough.