How long until "conversations are not shared with Meta's ad systems" quietly disappears from the site?
I almost think they would have done better to launch this as more disconnected sub-brand. I think Meta / Facebook are actual brand baggage for this sort of thing, even outside of tech circles.
I do think models currently don't have enough source skepticism.
If you look at agent traces when asked to compare two options to help inform a decision, many of the comparison pages cited in research are often hosted by one of the companies being compared; nearly all are AI-generated AEO plays. Not deeply considering the motive of published information is currently a glitch that can be exploited, but the window will close.
I'm sure model providers will set up some crappy pay for play verification system for "trusted" product information, comparisons, and reviews.
Yes 100%. I see this all the time. You’re asking about a product and the LLM will cite a source from a competitor where the competitor will review the source and list a few positives about the product but lots of negatives. Then the LLM uses them in the response. So cheeky
There are a lot of ways to make this a lot better easily. First of all, they could use a blacklist of sites that sell guest posts on adsy/etc.Also, if an article only links to one of the products listed, or only one is a dofollow link, they should also be excluded.
That'd probably cut down on a huge portion of spam by itself.
Yes, this is a horrible practice. Not just Amazon… most major e-commerce platforms set up fake pages for products they don’t offer to try to get you to the products they actually do.
Google needs to ban this practice because it makes their results garbage.
Google doesn't care about you. If you have to close one website that is infested with Google's ads/tracking because it doesn't actually have the product what you want and you're forced to search for another website that's also infested with Google's ads/tracking that's much better for Google's bottom line. That's what Google cares about.
Until you stop using google search, which I and many other people I know have done.
Losses and gains on the order of 0.5% market share may not sound like much, but at this scale it’s a vast amount of money. So being slightly more hostile needs to be offset by meaningful increases in revenue.
Most people wont. Even those that do will probably switch to something that does the same (or worse). Alternatives are scarce. Most other search engines are using Google's search results (at least in part) behind the scenes. AI probably wont save you (Gemini sure wont). Advertisers can't wait to infest the chatbots. AI companies are expected to accept money to promote certain products or to refuse to mention a competitor's products.
It's always going to come down to manipulation that prioritizes their profit over your interests. You can't afford to pay more than corporations are willing to spend to degrade the usefulness of your searches. The best you can hope for is to spend a bunch of effort to find some tiny niche alternative to google that almost no one uses and ride it out for as long as you can until enshittification sets in and you're forced to start all over again.
Google beat out the competition by being better in a market with near zero switching costs. It can coast a long time without being the best option, but once the fall starts it’s always harder to gain back reputation.
Today I told someone to google “school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually found their link to the handbook way down the page.
“Ops, sorry Google sucks now” isn’t going to kill a company quickly but market share is a lagging indicator. Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants so they may actually be doing the correct thing even if it doesn’t seem like it to me.
> Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants
Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for everyone who isn't you is probably not doing the correct thing, but it can be the most profitable one. At least for a while anyway.
Many products get worse so they are cheaper to manufacture, more shelf stable, etc and can therefore be profitably sold to more people. Sometimes the opposite happens, but in general when a company optimizes for people with less disposable income than you the product gets worse from your perspective.
I'm sure they know that. Cycling enshittification on and off seems to make more money overall than not enshittifying, even though it can make less during the downcycle.
Burning reputation looks great on quarterly reports until the death spiral begins.
There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.
Why worry about how a stock will look in a decade when you can buy and sell in microseconds based on AI, tweets, and vibes. Screwing over users makes people money today. Long before the consequences kick in investors can jump ship to the next corporation victimizing their userbase. Google's probably too big to fail at this point though. If they push away users and the AI bubble bursts taxpayers will be footing the bill.
Becoming wealthy and maintaining wealth are very different mindsets.
Constantly jumping from unstable stock to unstable stock is a great way to suddenly be down a great deal of money. Offsetting a 50% drop takes doubling your money afterwards and in that period you haven’t made anything so the next 50% drop puts you into a deeper hole.
As to too big to fail, the top of the market has a surprising amount of churn with many companies falling very far very quickly.
What spiral? You just start another brand, producing extremely similar but unenshittified products. When that one takes over the market, you enshittify that one too. It doesn't matter that one brand died, because you keep making more. That's the cycle.
It’s hard for a large company to survive on something with a vastly smaller market share. You can make a living buying a portfolio from other people making it slightly worse over time and repeat, but the pipeline gets expensive and the market is fickle.
Instead the model that actually works is to buy companies, load up on debt, pay yourself from that, and then let the zombie crash and burn. Part of that process is goosing quarterly returns with deferred maintenance etc but the model depends on a sucker lending money rather than the market.
Google used to explicitly ban this and the very similar practise of keyword stuffing - they even delisted some high profile company sites (BMW is one that I remember) over those practices. They stopped caring about that sort of thing quite some time ago, and right now as they are in danger of losing what little most they have as people move to AI solutions where they are not the leader that they have historically been in the more traditional search space, I doubt it'll be any sort of priority for them in the foreseeable future.
Is that the "Amazon Tax"? I thought the Amazon tax was their goofiness practice of taking a very large % of all sales in their site, and banning companies from selling their same goods for less on any competitor site.
Meaning if Amazon takes 30% of the sale and Walmart online can only take 15% with those savings being passed on to the customer, the company is not allowed for that lower price to be on Walmart.
I’m astonished at how bad search in Gmail is. I searched for “iPhone receipt” to find out when I purchased my current iPhone, and it pulled up every single email I’ve ever gotten from Best Buy, since they all have a link in there to buy an iPhone, and they all have a link in there to look up a receipt from them.
I know that those emails have both the words “iPhone” and “receipt” but I feel like The Search Engine Company That Also Does Email should have a smarter search engine in their email.
I’m pleasantly surprised that I can ask Gemini for help with it if I specify “look through my Gmail for this information”, but it takes it a minute or two to find it.
Yeah the difference in token usage across difference models they found in the article was broader than I expected, but I was sort of floored by the variance in token usage for the same prompt (run multiple times) with the same model.
As someone who's done web development for 20+ years, I find the model personalities pretty dang fascinating, especially how they develop (and evolve) design sensibilities.
I'm interested to know how the classic AI "purple preference" emerged (organically?) and if the beige wave came out of specific training efforts to combat it?
To your point on development work (the code itself), I was talking to some friends on the Google Chrome team about any research understanding the model's preferences around framework ergonomics and abilities to properly implement core web standards for given tasks. I think that would be super fascinating.
Beige+Orange 100% came from Anthropic intentionally training this, it's their own theme. I don't remember what their first release was that defaulted to this - it may have been Sonnet/Opus 4. Before that, not one other model used it, nor was it a particular popular theme. For light themes, white and off-white had been ultra-dominant. Anthropic themselves were the outlier with beige, which is also why the change to beige stood out so much.
The thesis needs some refinement. One can get a Waymo ride from San Francisco to San Jose, though one can also argue that Bay Area is one big suburb and thus the trip does not count as inter-city, even though both SF and SJ are most certainly different cities.
That said, Waymo is indeed not the right tool for the actual inter-city trips.
You also can't do inter-city train trips in most of the US either. Inter-city autonomous car trips will almost certainly happen before the trains arrive.
Agreed, but I think people can imagine and companies are very motivated: powertools, phones, laptops, watches, backup UPS, cars, hospital equipment... there's high demand for durable, long-lasting batteries. I think the research is there, it's just complex chemistry. We'll get there. Impressive to see the progress in EV batteries and they've actually turned out to be more durable than first feared.
The cost of not addressing it is more distributed: at some point you can't go outside anymore since the UV index is so high, sunscreen can't block high-intensity UV-B and UV-C, plants get damaged to the point of catastrophic crop failures... you can live in denial about climate change in developed countries (for a limited time anyway) but ozone affects everyone.
True but at the time the ozone hole was mostly over the Antarctic so the average person didn't feel its effects which wouldn't then contribute to the change in policy.
I get where you're coming from - our vantage point has a lot to do with that though. The average member of the public never had to sacrifice or even know about ozone, and there's so much complexity to climate science. People have a surface deep impression of what stands to be lost and they're working against a powerful propaganda machine. Virtually all extractive industry makes the problem worse, whether cattle farming, timber, energy, etc.
When the costs are low and require no change in personal behaviour, nor even belief in the problem. Billions of people had no idea about changes to aerosol propellants or refrigerants and they were not required to know or agree in order to solve the problem.
Do people have to know about what generates their electricity? They get input now, but we could probably just stop taking public input on new infrastructure and that would avoid poorly motivated protests of wind farms or nuclear.
They do not need to know what generates there electricity but...
- when what generates the power changes the landscape they can see, many people get upset, however irrationally
- many people are emotionally attached to lifestyle objects that use fossil fuels, i.e. cars, boats, planes, etc
- even where there are good options, most people are not willing to spend one extra penny
- even when there are options that cost less (i.e. bicycles, walking) humans spend a lot of their energy thinking about status and struggle to voluntarily choose things that they fear might result in a loss of status
- even if you solve all that, collective action problems are a named thing for a reason - they are hard and don't necessarily have obvious answers.
My point is not that everything is hopeless, but that OP who said "Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale..." has a point that we will have to grapple with if we want to actually change stuff. Wishing human nature away doesn't actually solve anything.
Perhaps more importantly than any of those, often people react out of fear of what they think other people will think.
Maybe everyone bitches about gas prices, but we would all get over it pretty fast if politicians just pulled the band-aid off. Instead they use it as an opportunity to pull down any crab that tries to save us from the bucket.
Good point - maybe also stop taking public input on decisions. :V
I kid, but I get more sympathetic to totalitarian countries seeing how people react to some things too. it simplifies "banding together" if there's fewer decision makers I guess and I can't think of a good way to have that squared with democracy.
Totalitarianism only works well with a benevolent dictator. Unfortunately, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Due to human nature, it will never ever turn out for the best.
You also get no feedback from people, massive corruption and many useless megaprojects end up being built at the cost of everything else (because everyoneis too afraid to point out its nonsense & regime adjacent thugs will then make it 5x as expensive and pocket the extra money).
It's not possible for us to work together and fix it, since most of the problem is coming from China, like with most pollution in general. Unless you're proposing something like nuking China.
The problem pre exists China’s development, and China’s per capita pollution production is already less than those in western developed countries, with the caveat being that China has a lot more people.
But you are right, if you want to keep the Chinese poor so they don’t pollute as much as we do, then you’ll need to nuke them because they aren’t going back.
And if you think the problem is just China, wait until India gets it act together. The only real solution we have beyond nuking all the people striving to get rich like us is to figure out how to pollute less and still have rich lifestyles, and China is putting more effort into that than all the other countries combined.
If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse
Historically speaking over over a billion years almost every species has consumed one thing and output another to the point of extinction while another species that consumes that grows and repeats the cycle.
Climate change has been the story of evolution since life appeared on earth and aglae filled the atmosphere with gasses.
We almost eradicated several diseases, usually screwed over by designating an Omelasan child (though, that's a bad characterization, because letting parts of the world continue to suffer and serve as a reservoir for those diseases was actually completely unnecessary).
the kind of changes that were required to avoid massive famines also rely on chemical fertilizer. aaand.... "the production of chemical fertilizers, particularly synthetic nitrogen-based ones, is a highly energy-intensive process that creates significant amounts of carbon dioxide"
"We"?
if by "we" you mean Chinese, then yes, as THEY have maintained a cultural structure and language far longer than we have, and adapting themselves and there environment to do that was something they have been doing successfully for millenia,China still venerates the first engineer "Gun"assigned to control the flooding on the yallu river 3300 years ago, and it is then no surprise that they are building solar, wind and other renewable fossil/carbon free energy sources at an unprecidented rate, and ultra high voltage grid systems to distribute that energy, while we wring our hands committing genocide on the Palistinians.
They've also gone through 13 major dynasties and about 2 societal collapses. That of course doesn't undo China's amazing cultural, technological, and social advances and achievements over the millenia, but it does suggest that their history is more nuanced.
I think that the banng of HFCs is a pretty good example of collective action.
Also, it's important to realize that climate change, as we best understand it right now, is not a "or perish" type of situation. RCP8.5 has now been soundly eliminated from the set of potential climate trajectories, so what we're left with is a question of 1) how much mass migration will be forced upon the world, with concomitant wars and social strife, and 2) how much economic loss results from that, as well as from lost opportunity by not adopting cheaper renewable energy routes.
Technological innovation has done something absolutely remarkable: the future with the cheapest and most abundant energy is the one that switches to renewable energy and storage the fastest. Every day we delay, not only do we end up with a worse climate outcome, but we also just light money on fire, with worse economic efficiency. And in economies built on the continual compounding interest of technological advancement, we subject humanity to far greater poverty for every day we delay the transition.
Most of the world will benefit from this technological change happening quickly. There will be some outliers, like the US, that choose to be poorer and less influential by actively subverting renewable energy in the marketplace (the Trump administration has done a huge amount of economic damage in only a small amount of time), but the US will come around. Texas is leading the way, because they are actually market driven more than they are politically driven, but the rest of the US is kind of screwed on that front for a while.
I'm not understanding how this observation relates to my comment, in any way.
Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. The areas that are just developing widespread electricity now will do it far cleaner than the US did, skipping the lower development stages of electricity and jumping directly into the future, if that's what you're saying. But I'm having trouble understanding what you mean.
The average person in the rest of the world lives in a dramatically different social structure than Western late stage capitalism. In effect the social contract of capitalism was "give up the culture, social institutions, etc. that make for a stable collectivist society and in exchange enjoy the benefits of consumerism." I don't think it is surprising that people are angry when the Capital class decides that they don't get the consumerism either.
True, but most people don't think about why that is the case. They'll blame slavery (abolished over 160 years ago), or the "exploitation" by capitalists (that produce wealth for all). Some may claim that the US has more natural resources, but The US is rich because of the freedoms and rights that our citizens have. Look at the poverty of the Soviet Union or Mao's China, or in Cuba today.
I cannot for the life of me understand the increasing popularity of socialism and communism in the US today. Those forms of government have a proven track record of failure.
Let's consider the economies of Communist nations. I suggest we take into account a bit of regional history.
North Korea is a basket case. But after three generations of tyrants it is arguably a monarchy.
China is a success story, end of. By any measure, China has come a long way since the Communist regime took over in 1949.
You could say something similar about Soviet Russia. By the 1980s it had stagnated, but the average Russian was incomparably better off than in 1917.
How far have Russians come since then? Has capitalism ushered in a golden age of prosperity and well-being? Here's a clue: life expectancy peaked in 1986. Russians lived longer 40 years ago, under Communism, than they do today.
Vietnam has done reasonably well since other countries stopped invading it.
American foreign policy hasn't done much for Cubans, either. Especially in the last few months.
Perhaps we should finally let go of the cold war mindset. It's imperial thinking, and we can't afford it. US power is fading fast.
Castro and Ho Chi Minh will go down in (our) history as Communist revolutionaries, but they weren't fighting against capitalism. They succeeded by uniting their people against colonial rule.
The USA was the colonial power that Castro was fighting, of course.
At least we no longer think of Nelson Mandela as a Communist and a terrorist. The US state department finally acknowledged as much in 2008, nearly 10 years after he had retired as president of RSA.
Note that I referred to Mao Zedong's China and not the China of today, which has embraced a "controlled capitalism" after their flirtation with communism failed miserably (as it always does).
Can you trust the USSR lifespan statistics? I wouldn't.
You cite other countries, none of which are under a purely communist government, because that has never worked out for anyone other than the dictators that ruled them.
I don't think statistics are the issue, or what the exact definition of a communist is. For what it's worth, self-described communists are still in charge in all of the countries I mentioned, with the obvious exception of Soviet Russia.
Let's step back for a moment. I think you should acknowledge that you have constructed a world in your head where communists do battle with capitalists, and capitalists are the good guys.
That idea is outdated and increasingly ridiculous. Clearly it is a narrative that serves the interests of billionaires in West Palm Beach. I don't know that working people buy it. It wasn't communists who put them on a zero hours contract.
I do not see it as a battle or war. I pity the poor subjects of every totalitarian regime, and at the same time I feel blessed to live where I do. No system is perfect, and most of the people of the world live in fear of their government (including many in the USA).
The USA is rich for a reason, and that reason is the freedoms that this system of government allows. The likely outcome of any US shift toward socialism or communism is the destruction of wealth. We are seeing it happen today in places like California and New York City. Both places have recently moved toward socialism and they are now less desirable places to live than they once were. By any index, the quality of live in those places is worse today than it was 10 years ago.
The FRED house price index has roughly doubled in both states in the last 10 years, which does not speak to wealth destruction.
As it happens I have visited places where people actually had socialist governments, and freedom was curtailed. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, and Vietnam.
I have also lived in West Germany and the UK, countries in which politicians like AOC and Mamdani would be considered mainstream or even centrist. This is entirely compatible with being freedom-loving democracies.
To me New York remains the city of Gordon Gecko. Silicon Valley remains the playground of venture capitalists.
But I respect your belief in whoever informed you that socialists have taken over and that millions of Americans are impoverished and oppressed.
So can you give me $3000? I am helping veterans pay for dog surgery.
Socialism is increasingly popular because people are seeing that capitalism makes them LESS free. People don't have the freedom to own a home, the freedom to get medical care, the freedom to travel, etc. When they see that many of those things (particularly medical care) are available in socialist (relative to the US) countries, it's no surprise that they abandon capitalism.
CFCs are responsible for the ozone hole. There are no known significant natural sources of CFCs. The ozone hole was caused by humans and its course correction was due to the political will to phase out CFCs.
> Climate scientists can raise the alarm or whatever but have no credibility
There is a class of problems where "when things get really bad" is also the point when it's too late to implement a solution. Driving off a cliff, for example.
What would you do if you studied this matter for several years, and found overwhelming evidence that this is such a category of problem?
> Ozone hole? Not sure how much of that was cyclical vs in human control.
If you don't know, maybe you should look it up instead of touting your ignorance in a public discussion forum? Your ignorance is not noteworthy. And while you're at it, you can educate yourself on climate change and proposed solutions to it, too. You seem to be suffering from several significant misconceptions, likely because you're bought into a narrative spun out by political hacks with zero understanding of the relevant scientific principles/knowledge and a vested interest in never changing that.
> Things like this, it’s still hypothetical. Climate scientists can raise the alarm or whatever but have no credibility, certainly not when the proposed solution is some kind of global authoritarian communism, and it always is.
Absolutely ridiculous. Climate scientists have credibility; climate science denying cranks who blather about communism have none.
> When things get really bad
Things are really bad.
Muted via my HN front end ... I won't be responding further.
I almost think they would have done better to launch this as more disconnected sub-brand. I think Meta / Facebook are actual brand baggage for this sort of thing, even outside of tech circles.
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