Because Donald J Trump is their guy. He might well win.

The world tends to find that having an extraordinarily wealthy parent makes its own luck.

Exactly. Unfortunately “move fast and break things” has some disadvantages when it comes to driving in traffic.

You’re right.

Oh, I thought it was the CEO’s online reputation and the fact the people are hearing more and more that their after sales service is shit, eg being charged £17000 for a new motor which is apparently the driver’s fault for driving it in the rain. In Scotland.

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/motors/couple-charged-17000-tesla-broke-27925815

Apparently the problem has been known for some time:

https://insideevs.com/news/534878/tesla-models-motor-fail-rain/

This is great, but republicans are gonna hate it. They want everyone to hate taxes with a passion, so they make it difficult, time consuming and expensive to pay your taxes, and make government services as bad as possible so even poorer people who don’t pay much tax feel they get a bad deal out of taxation.

If ordinary people found it easy and convenient to pay taxes they might notice that they get more out of government than they put in and that rich people are bearing more of the cost than they are. If they thought that, they might support tax increases or things that horrify republicans like medicaid for all.

Idiots.

I don’t know who you are, or what you write, but thank you.

…

In his notes, Roszak wrote that Google’s search advertising “is one of the world’s greatest business models ever created” with economics that only certain “illicit businesses” selling “cigarettes or drugs” “could rival.”

…

Beyond likening Google’s search advertising business to illicit drug markets, Roszak’s notes also said that because users got hooked on Google’s search engine, Google was able to “mostly ignore the demand side” of “fundamental laws of economics” and “only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales.” This was likely the bit that actually interested the DOJ.

As usual, the advice is not to rely on Google in any way.

I don’t think I have an iron in this fire, but I do think that filtering some crap out of a gullible person’s Internet feed is way kinder and way healthier than cutting them out of your life completely.

Well, sounds like you’re well on your way to hand-rolling your own product comparison tool that’s Powered By AI TM. You could make a popular price comparison site that initially filters out all that cruft and just gives you simple, clear, easy to read information about products.

Version 2 could have handy links to the cheapest websites.

Once it gets super popular you could offer retailers the chance to ensure their products and prices are correct. Perhaps a nice easy AI powered upload where you dump the info on whatever format you like, check it’s understood and go live.

You could later offer retailers the chance to host a store front with you, or maybe allow initially just one or two, very tasteful, clearly marked-as-advertisment links for strictly AI-sanctioned relevant upselling, you know, offer the warranty with the product, or the printer with the fancier ink alongside the ones that exactly matched the criteria.

Once your engagement with retailers is strong, and they know they’ll be missing out on a lot of custom, you can start maximising your income from them.

Or, wait did this whole cycle repeat itself many times over with many websites and many corporations?

Enshitification is real, and it’s already AI powered. We don’t know exactly why what’s in front of us when we’re online is the thing that is most likely to get us to keep scrolling and clicking and purchasing and maximising profits, but it’s reasonable to assume that on a lot of successful websites, some sort of AI system chose it for exactly those purposes.

It’s nice that you feel AI will get us away from the power of the multinational corporations, but I think it’s vastly more likely that the AI we use will fall under their control and they will be twenty steps ahead of us. They were the ones who popularised it in the first place!

(Personally, I tend to use some reviewing sites that I trust and in particular for phones, a spec agreggator so I can filter out the five year old products that amazon is offering me.)

You know that a LLM is a statistical word prediction thing, no? That LLMs “hallucinate”. That this is an inevitable consequence of how they work. They’re designed to take in a context and then sound human, or sound formal, or sound like an excellent programmer, or sound like a lawyer, but there’s no particular reason why the content that they present to you would be accurate. It’s just that their training data contains an awful lot of accurate data which has a surprisingly large amount of commonality of meaning.

You say that the current crop of LLMs are good at Wikipedia style questions, but that’s because their authors have trained them with some of the most reliable and easy to verify information on the Web. A lot of that is Wikipedia style stuff. That’s it’s core knowledge, what it grew up reading, the yardstick by which it was judged. And yet it still goes off on inaccurate tangents because there’s nothing inherently accurate about statistically predicting the next word based on your training and the context and content of the prompt.

Yes, LLMs sound like they understand your prompt and are very knowledgeable, but the output is fundamentally not a fact-based thing, it’s a synthesized thing, engineered to sound like its training data.

I don’t know why you want to use an AI to purchase goods and learn about products. That’s what the current www is really really strong at. Lots of people are spending an awful lot of money to make that information really easy to discover, and popular search engines definitely prioritise that information.

Also, if an AI is to give you price and product information it’s going to have to be reading live web pages, which will of course be full of ads. SEO will become AIO/LLMO. There is no end to the time and money advertisers are prepared to pour into getting products in front of users. The irony is that you seem to want to view products and you have this weird perspective where you’re keen to avoid ads for products so that you can view marketing information about products without the ads.

It’s already fairly hard to tell without knowing some good websites or reading through to conclusions and using some common sense whether a review website is honest or biased. I don’t know why you think an AI with access to the Internet will filter out fake reviews and content crafted to lead you to specific products over others.

Also, downloading and configuring your own AI is unlikely to be the way the “AI revolution” comes. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and other mega corporations will be funding the “AI revolution” and will not sit idly by allowing their kingdoms to crumble.

The number of people who will be saved from the corporations that run the online world by open source grass roots AI will be smaller than the number of people who are saved by Linux from proprietory products and SAAS.

Yeah, everyone will get used to using an AI to interact with the web, but it will be freely supplied by a corporation, and I PROMISE you the enshitification of AI has been long planned before we even reach step one of making it awesome for the masses.

You can’t just let it lapse, you have to hunt out that cancellation option three to six pages deep and be determined. Then you need to carefully swerve the highlighted get it fast option and find the free delivery one instead. Don’t get standard delivery, free delivery comes sooner than they claim because whilst the courier isn’t being paid to hurry it, they’re coming to your area soon anyway and may as well.

It’s going to get so much worse.

Besos could easily have the best paid workers, with the best conditions, the best customer service, require delivery that cares, ensure the best quality goods, and still be over a hundred thousand times richer than a millionaire, but he doesn’t. He wants the extra money more. So much power, so much money, so much squeezing the normal folk just a bit harder for a bit more profit.

I use the liftoff app, which automatically asks if I want to switch instance when I try to upvote something elsewhere. If it’s not on my home instance, I go back and subscribe, problem fixed.

The chief twit.

I’m not who you were speaking to, but back when I used to read it occasionally, the stack overflow blog repeatedly mentioned that the vast majority of its traffic comes from Google. If the vast majority of your traffic comes from Google and then your traffic quantity changes dramatically, it’s reasonable to look to the source of your traffic.