> To be clear, all the payments so far have come from my own agents. No search crawler is turning up and paying me. The payments also use testnet USDC, which means the tokens have no real monetary value.
Good observations. Even if this doesnt become _the_ project, hopefully this takes few steps forward which then inspires something else .. and the dream goes on.
I thought the blog was pretty reasonable until I came across "One caveat keeps the speed numbers honest" which was the one obvious tell for me. Otherwise I thought it was pretty straightforward to read.
Curious, what were the tells. I'm mostly familiar with Claude family of models' writing so I wonder is this Astra or similar which is why I didnt find it odd.
I mean, the authors field in pyproject.toml has a very clear interpretation. Removing authors and adding yourself is a different thing than removing a todo.
Irrespective of the entire NOTICE file question, Apache license text is pretty clear that you MUST retain attribution notices, and I think most courts would consider the line "author = " to be a clear attribution notice.
And then there is the question of them slapping "Copyright Google LLC 2026" on every file. I'm not sure you can do that unless you have actually modified every file, and I think you have to say what exactly you modified and what is covered by the old copyright, and that presumably requires them to say what the old copyright is.
The precedent on this matter is surprisingly thin on the ground, but the legal system has declined to agree with "their store, their rules" for web sites, with a particularly interesting precedent on that matter from "Sandvig v. Barr, 451 F. Supp. 3d 1 (D.D.C. 2020)" where the District of Columbia in 2020 said "Criminalizing terms-of-service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into his own legislature. Such an arrangement, wherein each website's terms of service “is a law unto itself,” would raise serious problems. This concern, then, supports a narrow interpretation of the CFAA." https://opencasebook.org/casebooks/1797-tlc-casebook/resourc... (paragraph 66)
But all we have is that and a couple of rulings from the Ninth Circuit, one of which is the HN link. For something this critical I'm surprised. I remember writing about this in 2001 or so and you'd think for something so consequential we'd have more lawsuits to point at by now. One wonders how many companies have considered it, looked at the thin precedents we have, and realized that while the victory would be slightly advantageous writing a loss into precedent would be completely devestating and declined to roll the dice.
Maybe a better analogy: They can ban you from going through their drive through on a bicycle, but can they sue bicycle manufacturers because bike riders are going through their drive through?
In this analogy, it seems the originating court said yes, they can sue the bicycle manufacturer (in the analogy), but on appeal the answer was no, they cannot. That seems like the appeals court got it right to me.
I'm not familiar with the case, but to me it sounds like the bicycle manufacturer is encouraging people to use bikes in the drive through, maybe even providing specific tools explicitly for that purpose?
> If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)
I feel like this is already ceding too much ground. A better analogy is "can I hire someone to read this product catalog I got in the mail for me." My browser isn't Amazon's store, it's a device for reading catalogs they send me.
3. You can walk into an Apple store and buy a phone without looking at their PCs, tablets, wall of accessories, etc. Apple cannot force you to look at everything else in their store.
Similarly, Amazon cannot force you to render the content they deliver to you. They can absolutely control access to their content, but they cannot control if you actually see the content they are delivering to you.
> There are still illegal streaming sports and movie sites everywhere (who knew) and all other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by Google
This is such a strange position to take. Apple doesnt allow all sorts of apps on the appstore, but that is never said as "Apple is erasing illegal streaming". Google is simply not showing the results. They are not taking down, or banning, or doing anything to the websites.
The pain being made is: If you use a search engine as your eyes to see what exists “on the internet”, then, absolutely, whatever Google hides from its results or fails to index is “erased” from “your” experience of the internet.
I see where you are coming from but the argument would be stronger is Google Chrome refused to open illegal streaming sites etc. AFAIK, there's no such restriction.
(I dont agree to this but ...) using your argument of " If you use a X as your eyes to see what exists “on the internet” .. " - we should all be mad at Apple. I use iPhone as the primary device to access apps, and they not just hides but actively ban and cut whole swathes of developers.
If I ask Siri to give me a link to illegal streaming site and if it refuses, is that cause for concern? I'd say no. Infact, I dont expect it to give me that and I get it. Same for Google Search in my humble opinion.
What does that mean? I use kagi, ddg etc. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Google.
Woudl you say HackerNews has a monopoly on tech chatter? Sure seems dominant, but nobody is forcing anyone to use HN. You can use lobsters, or reddit or whatever.
It means exactly that: it has near-monopoly on search. On mobile the situation is close to to complete monopoly.
> Woudl you say HackerNews has a monopoly on tech chatter? Sure seems dominant, but nobody is forcing anyone to use HN.
Google literally pays Apple $20 billion a year to force people to use Google only. But that is quite beside the point. The definition of monopoly does not include "forces you to use it".
I see piracy sites just fine on Google. Almost always the top result. That's why I go there to find the next domain after a previously working one gets shut down.
If you use an iphone then yes, apple is indeed "erasing" illegal streaming in the same sense that google is. We can be nostalgic for the old internet while also recognizing that at least google is well within their rights not to serve up results that fall outside the bounds of the law. (Apple not so much. When you gatekeep the hardware platform I think you're ethically obligated to act as a common carrier. Unfortunately the law doesn't require that.)
> Apple doesnt allow all sorts of apps on the appstore, but that is never said as "Apple is erasing illegal streaming"
Because they are not "erasing" anything, they are refusing to provide a platform that enables the direct (app whose intended purpose is) delivery of illegal content to you.
The difference being one will not facilitate the activity, while the other, is actively suppressing it. And thats what is meant by erased.
Your question in other comment If I ask Siri to give me a link to illegal streaming site and if it refuses, then that would be the better comparison. Then we could say "other seedy corners of the internet that have been neatly erased by [Siri]"
If the companies weren't trying to destroy trust and take everything away from everyone these things would never have much traction but now they deserve to have more than ever.
1. It is clear that many people, including the person in the video, has strong identities tied to a certain skill that they have spent years honing and perfecting. The sudden loss of agency and democratization can be confusing, disorienting and frankly demotivating. We need to acknowledge that.
2. Unfortunately, this has played out several hundreds of times over the years in the world. I'll take an extreme example to illustrate the point. Movie stars. There was well trodden path of getting to stardom and adulation, and everthing that comes with it. You move to LA, you work on your acting skills, you take your body aesthetics seiously and with plenty of luck, you might get cast in small roles before you work your way upto stardom. And the riches that come with it, cars, fans, brand deals .. great. And then came internet and YouTube where a guy in basement can garner millions of views, brand deals, fans in millions with little to no effort.
This is the same pattern with an accomplished musician (think a drummer) and someone who uses a drum machine software to drag and drop the "amen loop".
Exact same pattern with broadcasters and internet-journalists.
Yes it is demotivating, yes it is confusing but such is progress. Adapt or die. Its ruthless.
1. Corporations misappropriating $9Tn of opensource human works to sell isomorphic plagiarism tokens is not progress, but rather an unsustainable ectoparasite people will not tolerate very long.
2. Indeed, the invention of the Cotton gin was credited for prolonging the economics of US Slavery for another century. Those folks were probably upset for a good reason.
It is a self correcting problem, as anything that could be scraped has already been stolen. Only the chat user data remains, and LLM are causing a 17% decline in core skills.
Note too, there is a trivial counter-proof to recursive self-improvement theories that any child with calculus II can solve. No I won't warn them this time, as we are waiting to strip the data-centers for discount infrastructure.
The market correction correlation with Shrek movie releases is undeniable, and June 2027 is closer than you think. =3
> 1. Corporations misappropriating $9Tn of opensource human works to sell isomorphic plagiarism tokens is not progress, but rather an unsustainable ectoparasite people will not tolerate very long.
I think about this a lot when I look at the roads, freeways and railroads of the world. In pursuit for building it, billions of trees have been cut down, land fundamentally shifted, rivers cut through, and wildlife uprooted.
Yet, roads, freeways and railroads allow for growth. Someone facing medical emergency can reach a hospital on road because it exists. I get to eat fruits in winter because it is imported and transported to me from warmer places and/or storage units.
Human progress and prosperity comes at a cost. Nothing in the world is free (perhaps maybe sunshine?) and the life that you're yearning pre-AI is also extremely tainted. Infact, you'll be hard pressed to find an era when human meddling hasnt had bad impact on the world (right from farming and domesticating animals).
I ran the numbers on Sam Altman flippant statement about wasted energy, and found roughly 40000 human 20 year old lives worth of energy are exchanged with every frontier model training-cycle release at OpenAI.
Some history... Westinghouse Electric sold turbines to power stations in the 1950s, and promoted electronic home appliances to drive energy consumption to close the sales loop. While the scheme was not a direct business success, for society it improved just about every Americans living standards.
The problem is LLM cost resources, broke that loop, and only bids down the quality of life people can afford. You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes.
This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3
> You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes.
This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3
Depends on how you view efficient market hypothesis. Computers and Memory was prohibitively expensive. "Putting a computer in every one's desk" was literal rallying cry for Microsoft because it appeared audacious, just like saying "Unlimited LLM usage for every man, woman and child" or some such.
Will it happen? Nope, but if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down. Heck, we dig plant juice out of the earth from deep sea oil rigs so that I can fill up my car to go walmart to buy soda. Pretty preposterous when you think about the closed loop.
>if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down.
Regulatory-captured markets have nothing to do with free competition, or bidding down price pressures. You do have monopolistic competitive firms drawing $4Tn in loans to artificially hyper-scale demands for NVIDIA hardware that earns you -$2.50 for every $1 in revenue.
Your home heating bill may double this winter because the economic engine is currently post-consumer/broken. We shall see how this plays out. =3
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