Who is “we”? Head over to Reddit and you will see that plenty of people do not notice even the most obvious AI-generated engagement bait and happily spend their time talking to it. Even the people that post about how awful AI is will chat about that very subject to a spam bot without realising.
The average person is not good at spotting AI-generated content. They accept it and want to read it just as long as they don’t realise it’s not real.
> Head over to Reddit and you will see that plenty of people do not notice even the most obvious AI-generated engagement bait and happily spend their time talking to it.
I don't think you have to head over to anywhere else to see this.
I’ve seen it a bit here as well of course, but generally speaking Hacker News does a much better job of avoiding that. I think it might just be because it’s more sensitive to flagging.
> They never come from Google, and the bad programmed ones just crawl several pages at a time, faster than a user could do.
I’ve triggered this kind of “bot protection” right here on Hacker News many times. I did that by having a bunch of Hacker News pages open and then closing and reopening my browser. I’ve also triggered it by opening a bunch of links in the background too quickly. I’ve also triggered it by reading the article, then clicking back and upvoting/favouriting too quickly. I’m also located in Singapore, which people have started to advocate for blocking here recently.
A single non-bot legitimate user can easily trigger these kinds of heuristics just by using the site in a way you don’t expect. This can affect some users disproportionately more than others, e.g. disabled people who need to use assistive technology.
It became feasible to switch to CSS layouts for complex websites and apps in the early 00s. How early depended upon your target demographics and skill set. Lots of people who didn’t want to learn new ways of doing things carried on using table layouts long after browser support demanded it. I was using CSS sparingly from 1999 onwards and ditched table layouts in 2002, but I was ahead of the curve.
Same here, we resigned our site in early 2003 with CSS layout. Late adopters would snicker a bit back then, seeing it as chasing a fad or being too hipster.
Out of all similar situations, where I may have been an early adopter of a technology or method for reasons, using the web platform and following standards has probably been the one I least regret.
> We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.
How much money do you think the average developer would be making if we all were using punchcards instead of typing? Inputting machine code instead of using a compiler?
Every time we increase our productivity, we can build bigger and better things for the same amount of effort. This makes us more valuable than before. Our output grows and the world’s appetite for software grows with it.
This has been true for the entire history of the software industry and it’s the reason why developers are very well paid. You may not see it at the individual level, but we are reaping the rewards of increased productivity at the macro level.
This frustrates me too, if something is "opt-in", that means by default you're not included and can choose to be included. If something is "opt-out", that means you're included and can choose not to be.
But then it gets used to describe the reverse, and we have to add words to clarify.
I once saw a post here with a correctly described opt-in telemetry before, and the top comment here was attacking them for the reverse, thinking it was including them by default, so there's little winning, it's one of those words that has just come to mean it's opposite.
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Isn't it kind of like mandatory tip? If you haven't given it voluntarily, i.e .its automatically opted-in and you maybe can't even not give it. its the same.
Opt-in by default means it is either mandatory (if you can‘t disable it) or it‘s opt-out (if you can)
Opt-In by default is BS to make it sound less invasive
That is slightly different though. The government says you must pay taxes, mandatory as you said.
PostHog here is saying they will train on your data but opting out is allowed. For the taxes analogy to work, PostHoh would not offer the opt-out option at all and you'd be doing something like hacking their system to filter your data out on their end.
Many restaurants have the audacity to add a 20% (or whatever percentage) "service fee" that isn't considered tip. It even says something like "we use this to pay our staff competitive wages and health insurance." You can't opt out. It's just part of the bill. Then they have the gall to ask for a tip on top of that.
I've taken to a) leaving a negative Google or yelp review for such establishments and b) never coming back. This is a practice that needs to die.
I've never had the pleasure of encountering that situation.
But at what point do we call a spade a spade and say it's just them secretly inflating their prices? "everything is a penny but we charge a 1000000% service charge"
I used to wait tables once upon a time and it was standard practice to add a fixed service charge for any large party in lieu of a tip. Have you really never encountered that?
I've encountered large party service charges and that makes sense because it usually requires staff to do stuff they wouldn't normally do for smaller parties.
I'm talking about restaurants that just add service charge to everyone.
I think the lesson from the airline industry is that while consumers will get angry about surcharges, pricing transparency is what really gets punished in the marketplace. There are enough consumers who will always buy the deceptively priced item that it's suicidal to tell the truth (absent government regulation forcing the issue for all purveyors).
There are a fair number of well-meaning restaurateurs who have tried no-tip policies for ethical reasons. But the mass marketplace has not changed.
Kinda reminds me of when Burger King had a 1/3 lb burger and a 1/4 lb burger and more people bought the 1/4 lb because they thought it was more burger than the (rightfully) more expensive 1/3 lb burger.
You were given the option to option in, by default. Clearly it makes sense, optioned out by default only happens when someone loses money on the option in default instead.
The internet really stinks. The 1999 teenager in me somewhere is really bummed.
Okok what I meant was, too many companies would've hid this in a ToS update, and these guys actively market the change, and the worst crime we can accuse them of is using the wrong word for "enable". I agree that's not perfect, but I can totally imagine that if you use "opt-in" and "opt-out" a bit too much at work, esp as an analytics company deep in cookie law land, that "opted-in be default" sounds like a perfectly normal thing to say, ie I bet this is all not malice, just mild incompetence.
When you are ready to record a change, split your current working changeset and pick the things you want to commit. It’s equivalent to staging then committing with Git.
As far as I can see out-of-order streaming is only half the described functionality – there is also HTML streaming & revamped DOM parsing which does not have the positive signals that out-of-order streaming does:
Yea we've been working with Mozilla and Apple on that one as well but they haven't responded to the standards position yet. I am sure that we'll reach something that's within consensus.
It’s a brand new market that they want to claim a share of. I doubt they would be making much money of selling deepseek inference right now even if it were profitable, so why not throw sum subsidies at it for a little while in the hope that you are one of the big names left standing once everyone runs out of money.
I don’t know enough to be certain either way. But I will say that I know that Amazon has operated certain product segments at a loss before. Whether that’s with direct price subsidies or credits is irrelevant in the face of a new product with hype unlike anything I’ve ever seen in over 20 years in the industry. It’s highly plausible in the face of this absolute mania and FOMO that Amazon is operating open source inference at a loss to gain market share. They might think that inference prices will drop in the future.
They might be panicking because they don’t have good models of their own. Or they might just be price matching other open source inference providers. They have cut prices to keep up with competition many times over the years.
Whether they are doing it or not, you don’t know they aren’t, and it’s plausible that they are. So the claim that starts with “we know that people are making a profit selling open source inference at X price therefore Y” is unfounded.
There’s a pretty clear example of Zitron being dishonest here:
> I also severely doubt that Anthropic managed to make the cost of running its services profitable in the space of six months.
> [Per The Information in January], Anthropic missed on its gross margin projections, saying that its inference costs were 23% higher than the company had anticipated.
> How did Anthropic, which faced a massive influx of new business to the point that Anthropic was forced to buy more compute from Elon Musk, magically become profitable? Other than that discount, of course.
If you follow the link to The Information, you’ll see that it’s a paid article with the headline “Anthropic Lowers Gross Margin Projection as Revenue Skyrockets”. But what happens when you actually read the article?
> Anthropic last month projected it would generate a 40% gross profit margin from selling AI to businesses and application developers in 2025, according to two people with knowledge of its financials. That margin was 10 percentage points lower than its earlier optimistic expectations, though it’s still a big improvement from the year before.
So, according to Zitron’s own source, Anthropic are actually earning 40% gross profit margin on inference, and that is a dramatic jump upwards! This totally contradicts his position that it’s an implausible “swindle” for Anthropic to claim profitability. He’s counting on the fact that most of his readers don’t subscribe to The Information and will only see the headline, or that they will just see a citation and trust that it backs him up without checking.
> even if it’s filled with mistakes
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