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A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.
I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.
35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.
I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.
Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.
But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:
- I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
- Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
- Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
- Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
- Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
- Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.
Aren’t MP3s just a statistical correlation?
Besides, you really don’t need to zoom in on “but muh license agreement” to roast these AI turds.
They’re very clear: We’re gonna put creatives out of work, we’re gonna sell a unified product to replace them, and we’re gonna use their own labor to build their replacements.
That’s anticompetitive.
Nail em on that instead of trying to thread the needle on reining in the tech lords without damaging e.g. linguistic analysis researchers.
It’s worth checking out Louis Rossmann’s take too: https://youtu.be/TF4zH8bJDI8
I rarely ever find myself disagreeing with either of them, so this is an interesting situation.
Edit: This is also a good take about live service, separate from the “Stop Killing Games” initiative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO38QvKraTQ
The reason I’m skeptical of a copyright-based solution is that there’s a massive potential for collateral damage.
Like, the overall process of creating ChatGPT is not that different from the process of using ML to analyze how language use has changed over time, which I think is a completely positive thing for humanity and probably doesn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers.
I’m not sure how you write legislation that zeroes in on the exact harms posed by ChatGPT et. al. but doesn’t endanger these other efforts… and also doesn’t leave open an alternative, indirect route for OpenAI, Stability, et. al. to accomplish the same end goal without technically infringing.
There’s also the “giving a bullied kid more lunch money” criticism that Cory Doctorow is fond of using:
After 40 years of expanded copyright, we have a creative industry that’s larger and more profitable than ever, and yet the share of income going to creative workers has been in steady decline over that entire period. Every year, the share of creative income that creative workers can lay claim to declines, both proportionally and in real terms.
As with the mystery of Spotify’s payments, this isn’t a mystery at all. You just need to understand that when creators are stuck bargaining with a tiny, powerful cartel of movie, TV, music, publishing, streaming, games or app companies, it doesn’t matter how much copyright they have to bargain with. Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch-money. There’s no amount of money that will satisfy the bullies and leave enough left over for the kid to buy lunch. They just take everything.
Telling creative workers that they can solve their declining wages with more copyright is a denial that creative workers are workers at all. It treats us as entrepreneurial small businesses, LLCs with MFAs negotiating B2B with other companies. That’s how we lose.
Source: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/
You might be interested to see how FTC Chair Lina Khan thinks about this stuff, from a position which has a great deal of labor and antitrust regulatory power but no say in copyright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg
I think part of the problem is that when you read about the horrors of the Holocaust as a kid, you can’t help but think of Nazi Germany as a cartoonishly, outlandishly evil place full of people who spend every waking second thinking about how much they hate impure bloodlines.
You come away with an impression that it should be obvious when genocide is happening.
Then you go home after school and you see something about genocide in the Middle East, and you ask your parents about it and they say “Well… it’s complicated.” And if it’s complicated – if it’s not cartoonishly, outlandishly evil – then it must not be genocide.
The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said “Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?” Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, “Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man’s closures.”
Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire “Lambda: The Ultimate…” series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.
On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying “Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man’s closures.” Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying “When will you learn? Closures are a poor man’s object.” At that moment, Anton became enlightened.
I need help finding a source, cuz there are so many fluff articles about medical AI out there…
I recall that one of the medical AIs that the cancer VC gremlins have been hyping turned out to have horribly biased training data. They had scans of cancer vs. not-cancer, but they were from completely different models of scanners. So instead of being calibrated to identify cancer, it became calibrated to identify what model of scanner took the scan.
One of the most frustrating things about null is that it has so many possible meanings:
- We don’t plan to provide a value here, so use a default instead
- We plan to provide a value, but memory for this value hasn’t been allocated yet
- The memory has been allocated, but we haven’t attempted to compute/retrieve the proper value yet
- We are in the process of computing/retrieving the value
- There was a code-level problem computing/retrieving the value
- We successfully got the value, and the value is “the abstract concept of nothingness”
- or the value is “please use the default”
- or the value is “please try again”
And so on. “Null” probably has more different meanings based on context than the word “fuck”.
To be clear: When I say “This is good”, I don’t mean that this makes Facebook a good service. You’re 100% right about Facebook’s trajectory here.
My hope lies in improving consumer expectations, and tech entrepreneurs’ estimation of those expectations. For about 20 years, there’s been a universal assumption that users will never pay for a website, ever. They’ll pay with their privacy and attention all day long, but their wallet? Not gonna happen.
If this proves that there are users who will pay with their wallet instead of their soul, then it paves a way for people who are interested in making ethical services – people who may have been discouraged in the past because they were told that the only way to keep the lights on was to round up their users and feed them to a hungry pack of advertisers.
in 2022, advertising revenue amounted to close to 113 billion U.S. dollars whereas payments and other fees revenues amounted to around two billion U.S. dollars.
With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide.
113/3 = about $38 per user per year
14*12 = $168 per user per year
Which would be a mark-up (a Zuck-up?) of 342%.
You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month, and it’s those same highly-active users that contribute the most to the ad revenue.
Having no idea how those stats actually break down, we could take a wild guess and do a Pareto Principle 80/20.
Say the top 20% active users constitute 80% of the ad revenue, and those same top 20% all switch to the paid model:
(113*0.8)/(3*0.2) = about $151 per VIP user per year
…which is a lot closer to the $168. Zuck-up of about 11%.
80/20 is probably cutting them too much slack, but the real markup is probably closer to 11% than it is to 342%.
This is also not factoring the extra operational expense of supporting the new model.
—
Math part over, here’s my take:
This is good.
Ad-based models are toxic. We poisoned our culture, bulldozed our privacy, distorted the economy, gave unfathomable power to immature narcissistic opportunists, and underdeveloped public FOSS tech because we expected privately-owned services to be Free™ even though they could never be literally free.
This is a move towards unmasking these services and revealing the real economic gears whizzing around behind them.
The more people understand what their privacy and autonomy is worth to these companies, the more they might insist on keeping it — and maybe even seek out places where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.
—
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
Companies that sign onto the code are agreeing to multiple principles, including that their AI systems are transparent about where and how information they collect is used, and that there are methods to address potential bias in a system.
In addition, they agree to human monitoring of AI systems and that developers who create generative AI systems for public use create systems so that anything generated by their system can be detected.
“Stifling innovation”
Yall, this is pretty basic stuff. Don’t cry wolf too soon if you want anyone to believe your feigned concerns later.
Once someone was able to buy that first pizza with Bitcoin is when it became legitimized. As long as people are willing to exchange it for real items, it’s a legitimate currency.
He paid someone else in Bitcoin, but that person bought the pizza in USD. Even today, no major business is accepting direct crypto payments for anything besides publicity stunts. There are, however, plenty of services which automate what happened in the “crypto pizza” case: they’ll convert it to USD for you so that you can say the transaction was kinda sorta done via crypto.
You may not mean it this way, so no offense intended either way, but…
Crypto bros love to say “Oh, the value of any currency is arbitrary, it’s all just based on people believing that it’s worth something!”
But you know why I prefer transacting in USD? Cuz on a yearly basis, the government comes asking for a certain amount from me, and they’ll only take USD. And if they don’t get it, they’ll do all sorts of bad things to me.
So while I may think gold or Dogecoin or limited edition Beanie Babies are a superior medium of exchange, I still have an unavoidable need to acquire USD. It’s not my belief in USD that gives it value – it’s the guy with the sword.
Ironically, there is a similar way in which crypto has value. Cuz ransomware attacks tend to demand payment in crypto.
So they did actually make a legitimate currency, but the value doesn’t come from belief. It comes from blackmail.
Absolutely. And that’s actually what gets me so frustrated with the “Well, it’s hopeless to participate, cuz Congress will just do whatever they wanna do!” crowd.
Like, NO! Do you see how much “progress” conservatives have been able to make? They have dismantled parts of American law that have been considered untouchable for decades.
And these are people who hate democracy! Somehow, that side – the anti-democracy side – actually believes in the power of organizing, persuading people to band together, and participating in governance… MORE than the side that claims to believe democracy is the only way forward for a just society!
Maybe. But I don’t particularly care even if they are planning a global takeover or whatever. I just don’t buy the idea of an organized shadowy cabal being able to comprehensively manipulate the world to their will.
Now, there are definitely people with ridiculously outsized influence compared to other people, and they definitely do deliberately try to achieve a specific outcome… and the world does eventually tend to organize itself to the benefit of those people… but it’s more a consequence of aligned incentives and feedback loops that make it the most likely outcome given the initial conditions, rather than an open-ended question where they held the sole deciding vote.
And to me… That’s actually scarier. The idea that even if we somehow wound up with benevolent people in places of power (which is difficult, because those places of power tend not to attract benevolent people), they would still be paddling against a merciless current of systemic mechanisms that are eager to undo any progress they might make.
To quote a brilliant man, Tim Gurner:
They have been paid a lot, to do not that much, and we need to see that change. We need to see insolvency rise. Landlords need to lose 40-50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the owner class. We need to remind people that we produce the value so that they can freeload, not the other way around.
I mean, there has been a systemic change where landlords feel that the tenants are extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the owner class, which is what the whole – you know, the world – people are trying to do.
And we’re seeing it. I think every capitalist now is seeing it. I mean there is definitely massive discontent going on. People may not be talking about it, but people are definitely agitating and we’re starting to see more fear in the owner class. And that has to continue, because that will cascade across the oligarchy.
So many reasons. JS has a small standard library, a history of competing standards for things like asynchrony and modules, there are tons of different implementations against tons of different specs, running in tons of different environments (whose constraints and opportunities are also changing all the time), it tends to be the first language to receive an SDK for many services, packages tend to be almost-excessively granular because optimizing for size can be so important on certain platforms (tree-shaking and minification works, but takes time), there are many add-on languages like JSX and TS, there are tons of bundlers and transpilers which each have their own quirks… and also due to its unique position as the lingua franca of client-side web, it tends to be the primary battleground for researchers, tech firms, VC, FOSS, malicious users, and everything else.
To stay alive in an ecosystem like that, any project must become a “ship of theseus” kind of deal.
You may be interested in yarn’s “zero-installs” option: https://yarnpkg.com/features/zero-installs
That sounds…
Easier to get almost right than actually learning the subject.
Much, much harder to get completely right than actually learning the subject.
So yes, basically the archetypal use case for LLMs.