setsubyou

If we could get public restrooms like the ones in Japan just for watching a few ads, I’d be all for it…

But you can already have a megacorporation on the EU level, the Societas Europaea (SE). Like Airbus.

This new thing sounds more like they want to make it easier for everybody else.

Croatia has some of that too

The article already notes that

privacy-focused users who don’t want “AI” in their search are more likely to use DuckDuckGo

But the opposite is also true. Maybe it’s not 90% to 10% elsewhere, but I’d expect the same general imbalance because some people who would answer yes to ai in a survey on a search web site don’t go to search web sites in the first place. They go to ChatGPT or whatever.

The bubble thing is more the financial aspect. None of these AI companies are profitable and they also don’t have a clear path to profit. For some time the business plan of Open AI was literally develop advanced AI and then let the AI figure out how to make money. Yet, these companies attract huge amounts of investment and are responsible for basically all of the economic growth in the US.

Nobody thinks there are no uses at all for LLMs or image generation etc. or that people in general hate all AI. It’s a bubble because a lot of money is being invested in something that nobody managed to make profitable yet, so if the investment stops, then these companies will all implode.

I’m not sure I’m on board with this “fewer CVE’s reported means the product is more secure” logic in this article…

very few who even touch AI for anything aside from docs or stats

Not even translation? That’s probably the biggest browser AI feature.

How do they mess this up so bad?

They made their devs use copilot.

Well it’s not improving my productivity, and it does mostly slow me down, but it’s kind of entertaining to watch sometimes. Just can’t waste time on trying to make it do anything complicated because that never goes well.

Tbh I’m mostly trying to use the AI tools my employer allows because it’s not actually necessary for me to believe that they’re helping. It’s good enough if the management thinks I’m more productive. They don’t understand what I’m doing anyway but if this gives them a warm fuzzy feeling because they think they’re getting more out of my salary, why not play along a little.

Problem is they’ve been smoking whatever Google AI recommends for too long now

It doesn’t seem to be based on petroleum, since they’re explicitly comparing it to petroleum-based plastics…

There also are other non-petroleum based plastics that dissolve in water. This part is not new. E.g. polyvinyl alcohol is used widely.

What’s new about this one is that it specifically needs salt to dissolve and they claim it’s otherwise relatively sturdy. So maybe it could be used instead of pet bottles for drinks? Or maybe they’re not quite there yet but it’s a new step in that direction…

I’m not sure how much sense it makes to complain that an AI chat bot collects so many categories of data and then highlight “user input”, which it obviously needs to function? Like how is something like DeepSeek the “middle ground” if that’s what the author thinks is the biggest problem with it? When I look at DeepSeek on the app store, it does list at least “coarse location”, so why not highlight that? DeepSeek can’t answer my questions about e.g. “restaurants nearby”, unlike e.g. ChatGPT, which comes up with a map. So that’s what I would be interested in, what DeepSeek uses my location for.

Although just in principle this kind of analysis rarely finds surprises.

If you can enter text or click on things in an online app, obviously it collects user input.

If it can refer back to previous answers, obviously it retains chat history.

If it can process pictures, obviously it collects photos if you upload any.

If it can be interacted with using voice, obviously it collects audio.

If it can answer questions about things near you, obviously it will use location data.

If there are IAPs, it better not forget that you bought those, too.

And so on.