luckylion

What sites would they be targeting? Generic "just give me anything"? Whenever I check regular sites on IA, the coverage is spotty -- they'll have the homepage and a few important pages, but it quickly fizzles out.

Very understandable, you can't store all 15000 pages of any random website and update them etc etc, but that makes them pretty useless for indirect scraping because you usually don't want a tiny taste, you want everything.

Does section 230 shield them from ads they select for display? Ads are not randomly hosted by random people and if you visit a random page those people uploaded, you see them. Google selects the ads they want to show you on search results, before youtube videos, or on third party websites. There's no "we don't know what that might be" going on at all -- they are running sophisticated algorithms to optimize the impact of those ads. Is that still be covered under section 230?

Are not all corporations extractive by nature? Google clearly is.

That's obviously not the issue with that -- you don't see those comments on Google's AI announcements.

In this case, you know who claimed it. In most cases, you don't, because Google does not verify identity.

It's currently the rage in blackhat SEO: just say you're John Doe from Doeville and competitorsite.com is infringing on your copyright. Google will remove that specific URL from the SERPs and there's a 50/50 chance whether the target gets a notification from google or not.

If they do, they can counter claim directly and it takes 12-48 hours to be reinstated.

If they don't, they have to figure out what's going on by using the Lumen Database (the only way to receive that information because Google is horribly bad at basic legal matters) and finding the notice, which will contain the exact URL (because fun fact: the claim and counter-claim are case-sensitive, the removal-from-serp is case-insensitive), and then do manual counter-claim, and it takes anywhere from 3 to 30 days.

During that time, your competitor will just be gone from the SERPs.

> Where is the big browser, operating system, or other piece of work that has been able to quickly compete with the existing entries in the market due to LLMs?

Why would it "quickly compete"? What if AI gives you a 100x leverage but not a 100000x leverage?

With the 100000x leverage, you could spin up a full browser and compete, but not with the 100x. With 100x, you could use fewer people or do it in less time, but the amount of effort that goes into browsers still doesn't make it "an afternoon for one person".

I think it's undeniable that an excavator is ridiculously more powerful than a human at digging holes. Let's say it's 100x more efficient.

But if you had 1000 people work on a big hole every day for 5 years, the excavator wouldn't manage to do the same in a day, but it would allow you to do the same with 10 people and 10 excavators in 5 years, or with 50 people and 50 excavators in one year.

I don't think it scales linearly the more complexity grows, but "it hasn't been done, therefore it isn't possible" seems wrong. Maybe the big labs could build a browser, but they'd much rather spend the attention of 50 engineers on something else.

I found that agents help, even if you don't parallelize. Having one agent control another and verify its results against rules you set has worked well for me because the controlling agent has no incentive to cut corners, and the implementor might, but it is being controlled.

My usage might be much simpler than what you do, but it went from "but I gave a list of things to do, you only did 5 of them" - "okay, here are the other 7, oh btw, I skipped the verification rule because nobody has time for that" to good compliance, the orchestrator starts the sub agents, tells them exactly one thing to do, and makes sure they've done it afterwards.

makes sense on planning as well, I think. spend your tokens on the best model to explore the problem and design the solution, but the implementation and testing/verification cycles don't need the strongest model you can get.

"Do not use react. Do not use tailwind. We will not deploy on vercel."

and suddenly things work again, it's magic!

I'm on the other side, and my main tip (at least if there's people like me!) is: avoid the usual AI signs.

For one role we got ~70 applications and all CVs looked obviously AI-written. I don't know whether the people did actually do any of the things mentioned and I don't have the time to find out, so the AI-written CVs are a discard-signal for me. (Either those people delegated a very important task to AI and didn't even bother to check, or they are bad using AI and don't know -- I want neither)

Any CVs that signal they were actually written by a person I will actually look at.

> I personally spend hundreds of dollars a month on war.

Or, put another way, you spend hundreds of dollars a month on not having to learn russian and live as putin's peasant.

Seems like a good deal to me.

Moats for software/web companies that are entirely "we've built it, it would be too expensive for you to replicate it" are getting much weaker. It's now quick to produce something that at least looks close to an existing product. You can't clone the backend, the know-how to handle some weird interactions etc, but still, you can get fairly far mimicking the frontend, and LLMs can write you the fancy marketing buzzwords too.

I think the part you can't easily clone will turn out to be the institutional processes that allow you to run at scale, onboard new people, deal with common requests that AI cannot on its own (e.g. legal compliance), the relationships you have with partners and vendors, the legal setups you have in place etc.

I'd assume that plenty of developers feel capable to building a better jira, and some try, and few/none succeed despite atlassian doing everything in their power to drive clients away, because cloning the project isn't the hard part with that type of product.

Are you sympathetic to a doctor who specialized in surgery and now always recommends surgery, even for a common cold? Or would you say they are in the wrong job, if they are anywhere but surgery?

Tie them to the buyer's identity, offer at-value buy-backs until X weeks before event, disallow resale.

Aren't you leaking that there's an account with that email that has a non-password auth method if you treat them differently?

Of all the times someone used AI and did not disclose it, I've never found it to be a desire to be better, it was always a desire to do 5 minutes of work and still have a result that looks like you spent multiple hours. Except it only looks that way at a glance, it's usually bad because that type of person does not care, so their prompts are bad, and they don't care to even read the results.

In my experience, the people who actually wanted to improve the presentation of their messages are upfront about it and clearly say they're using AI to organize their thoughts or polish their english.

_before_? youtube is like the top 1000 creators / influencers / celebrities, 5% actual videos, and the rest is slop of various types for me.

The search is entirely gone and will straight up not list regular content that was made by humans, but it will absolutely surface the cheap AI-voices that can't say HVAC fluently.

Makes sense for youtube, too. For the average person, that seems to be enough, the ads are the same value, and people who dislike that probably have a large overlap with people who use adblockers and don't impulsively spend money on the latest browser-game, miracle cure for cancer, or financial advice from random scammers.

> The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.

I suppose that would be very close to "you've come to the experts for advice and I probably shouldn't be here because I'm not one of them", which nobody wants to admit.

For many, an honest look at themselves would end with "I don't contribute anything". They have the opposite of impostor syndrome - they don't belong, but they feel like they should, and AI helps them pretend.

I have no idea about that law in particular and no dog in that fight, but I find

> The Constitutional Court has also upheld it, meaning it's quite literally not unconstitutional.

a weak argument when stated that absolute. Constitutional Courts occasionally shift in their opinions over time. If they do change -- has the previous court violated the constitution? Or is the constitution flexible enough to hold opposite viewpoints without being violated? Doesn't it become very flimsy at that point?

I think a better wording would it is not currently considered to be unconstitutional. It might be in the future if the court changes. Naturally that only happens over longer periods of time as old judges die and are replaced with younger judges who were born in a different era and raised with different values.

It was also just plain strange. I don't know what they are doing to squeeze more money out of the tokens they sell, but using jetbrains' AI package always delivered significantly worse results for vs using the providers directly, and it was unbearably slow. But it appears that all of that falls on deaf ears at jetbrains, who are convinced that's the way forward, and they should become a vibe-coding system.

it's sad, but what can you do.

> He funded a lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan that destroyed the media company Gawker—a company that had, among other things, published unflattering reports about Thiel.

Gawker-apologism to frame Thiel as the monster destroying the truth-seeking independent journalists? What a truth-seeker the author is!

Wouldn't the argument be that you'd build separate copies of those services as well?

Granted, for banking or government-interactions that isn't feasible, but wouldn't it for many other things? It would likely be more expensive given that the work to build something still needs to be done and the cost is distributed among fewer shoulders and the lower complexity since you don't need to build ad-tech doesn't make up for that, but I suppose that's a bit like quality food.

Hardware will be more difficult.

Is that a tell? Sounds very much like my reaction to that behavior, but I always assumed it's because I'm german.

I'm not saying we shouldn't improve the skill of our team members -- that's an obvious yes. But about transforming someone from "I don't want to think" into "I like a challenge and want to figure it out" doesn't work in my experience.

> An apprenticeship model also helps if you can do 3-5 year agreements for training where you see the most benefit from the person in the last 1-2 years.

That's illegal in a lot of countries. If you have to invest with no assurance, you're taking on a lot of risk. Money is part of it, attention from other developers is the much bigger part in my experience.

Me, individually, providing it to one customer? no.

At scale, providing it to tens of thousands? yes.

It's a perfectly fine price for a customer to pay and not worry about it, but it's not squeezed to extract every fraction of a cent because competition is so fierce. In a race to the bottom you'd expect the bottom to be approached, but it isn't.

Bluehost, Kinsta, WPEngine, GoDaddy etc, are marketing companies that sell webhosting, and they have very healthy margins. They compete on ads, not on price.

Where is that race to the bottom visible? Surely not in the pricing -- bluehost's intro offers are already expensive (10gb space shared hosting for $3.99 a month -- in 2026?). After a year, it jumps to $11.99 with 12 months terms. That's more than $1 per gb storage. In 2026.

There is no race to the bottom.

My experience is that that plainly does not work. I work with developers of both types, and the junior ones who are part of the first group are limited in their ability by experience, but they have an inquisitive mind and don't give up quickly when they encounter something they don't understand.

Much more experienced developers of the second type just throw their hands up and give up (or now: turn to AI). I've worked closely with them to try and reform them. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong, but it has never succeeded.

With the ones from the first group it can work that way: you can show them how you approach problems and they will ask questions and pick up patterns and you'll see them improve.

> Even then, the businesses don't want to pay for that, and why should the workers give that away for free?

Businesses would need a high likelihood that they can reap the rewards of upskilling employees. Why invest a lot of money and high-talent attention into someone who might quit? At the same time, I'll happily pay three times as much for a truly skilled senior developer. I think the employee's incentives are much more aligned: it will increase their market value, it's an investment into their wealth, not the business'.

I understand that point, but I disagree. Automattic controls the process, which keeps a lot of initiatives out because there's no reasonable expectation of improvement unless it aligns with Automattic.

I don't believe the project would fold were Automattic to quit -- there's a lot activity outside of the core that is alienated by Matt's behavior. Might well be an improvement if the focus of .org isn't about what .com needs, but about what .org wants to offer to users.

I think the less charitable and more honest reading is: he wouldn't have allowed such a commit if it wasn't an Automattic product that benefits. He's been making very clear business decisions and forcing them into the foundation (which he controls) for a while (gutenberg was about wordpress.com's goal of competing with wix.com etc, not about wordpress.org), this is just one of the more aggressive ones, which is why it stands out.

His usual response is "but we're also sponsoring .org with developers" ... yeah, that's true, with developers who do Automattic's bidding and ensure that .org is pursuing .com's needs. He'd have to pay those developers either way, but this way he can call it a charitable donation.

Business is wordpress.com, this is wordpress.org -- explicitly not part of Automattic but an "independent" open source project.

Obviously it isn't, but that's what Matt likes to pretend.

11% of $50 -- did you get $5.50 of value out of it? Would a designer have charged you more then $5.50 to create the same?

figma has figma make to do these things, and it's much worse. It can only generate react code, even if you ask it not to. claude design worked great on the first attempt for me, miles ahead of what figma make does.