Just because something lies on a spectrum where some actors are totally doing the right thing (and others, well...), doesn't mean we shouldn't take a conservative approach to regulating that thing. No-one can legally exceed 70mph in their fancy new ADAS car with tiny stopping distance, just in case someone tries to do so in their beat-up 1950's Dodge.
It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you can claim we have a healthy balance currently.
ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out catalogs when they want to find something, which already makes a huge difference
I do what I can by serving webapps from my Linux server, or using command line, but I haven't had much success with a Linux RDP or VNC server that can compete with MS RDP for performance. If I could do that I'd switch fully. Does anyone have recommendations?
Those 150 billion will be taxable at the same (hypothetically 30%) tax rate, reducing the expected return by 45bn * 5% chance. The expected return is still negative; all this bet does is shift tax liabilities in time, which admittedly would matter to some people who subscribe to short-termism.
I guess to truly calculate it you need to estimate how long it will take to get the ROI (i.e. reach the point where you need to pay taxes on the 150billion). And add back what you can earn by investing the money you didn't have to pay taxes on. I'm not sure what the magnificent 7 can expect as a ROI on invested money though, given that they tend to have enough cash to invest anyways and just pay out dividends.
If this method actually removed a significant percentage of scam ads, rather than just heading off scrutiny, then a) doing proper verification wouldn't cost them $2b a year like they claim it would, and b) their quarterly revenues would be taking a meaningful (single digits %) hit and the share price would suffer.
I'm not sure it stops there, either - I wonder if others feel the same. If every platform is doing this, then are they destroying the trust of online media (the internet?) in general? Facebook isn't exactly alone in its reputation of monetising people's attention and serving them dangerous content.
I'm eagerly waiting for the day when the elderly people in my family swear off the internet entirely.
I think it's more likely that the newer gens swear it off than the older ones, who have become thoroughly brain rotted by it. It's like they have no immunity. At least gen-z is more aware of the damage it does.
We're at the "hmm, I think smoking is probably bad for us" stage. Next up, serious attempts at quitting.
From reading the TIL, it doesn't appear as if Simon used LLM for a large portion of what he did; only the initial suggestion to check the archive, and the web tool to make his process reproducible. Also, if you read the script from his chat with Claude code, the prompt really does the heavy lifting.
Sure, the LLM fills in all the boilerplate and makes an easy-to-use, reproducible tool with loads of documentation, and credit for that. But is it not more accurate to say that Simon is absurdly efficient, LLM or sans LLM? :)
Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit?
I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.
> any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit
I would say that now, more than ever, this means you should be collecting and sharing what you create.
Not on large social media platforms either, on websites that you own and (ideally) host yourself.
Start a blog, host your own instance of Gitea, build a platform for your videos. Spread what you create and activity participate in the community but maintain ownership and an audit trail over what you've created.
People ripping off others works has always been a thing, of course it's much easier and pervasive now. It's still (IMO) beneficial to say "Look! I did this thing first!", with the added benefit of accruing the kind of "social capital" Aaron talked about.
How do you contend with the fact that AI summaries are now halving traffic to people's websites and redirecting it to Google properties? Publishing in 2025 feels like merely feeding two or three megacorps.
No easy answers, I'm afraid. But I would still say you can get lots of social capital from creating things and talking about it. And these days, that can get you past the LLM-inundated HR front door if you want a job. If you hang out on twitter long enough you'll see people go from "hey I made this cool thing" to "hey cloudflare/vercel/etc hired me to come work on cool-thing-adjacent thing!"
It's a pretty repeatable pipeline. And having proof that you can DO something makes you stand out. Maybe moreso than ever!
I won't ask about or speak to the overall message of your first link, I'm interested to digest it further for my own benefit. This is striking to me though:
Throughout this post I’ll assume the average ChatGPT query uses 0.3 Wh of energy, about the same as a Google search used in 2009.
Obviously that's roughly one kilowatt for one second. I distinctly recall Google proudly proclaiming at the bottom of the page that its search took only x milliseconds. Was I using tens-hundreds of kW every time I searched something? Or did most of the energy usage come during indexing/scraping? Or is there another explanation?
Let's be careful here. It's generally a good idea to congratulate people for changing their opinion based on evolving information, rather than lambast them.
(Not a tech worker, don't have a horse in this race)
It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you can claim we have a healthy balance currently.
ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out catalogs when they want to find something, which already makes a huge difference
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