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Get ready to hear something along the lines of "Rules for thee but not for me"...

This was literally in the Palantir manifesto posted a couple months ago. Karp called for more surveillance of the general population, but also more privacy for the tech billionaires and government officials.

My belief is that the AI business is all about data collection. The value isn't so much in the quality of the models (that's what enterprise customers and developers pay to get), but in the amount of data that comes "for free" to whoever hosts the models. And then it's worth whoever buys it thinks it is, like insurers or advertisers.


"My belief is the AI business is all about data collection."

The "business" of so-called "tech" companies is all about data collection

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most...


It’s because they’re all in bed with the Government who wants the same thing. Think of them as an extension of the NSA/CIA and the byproduct of the data collection is being able to sell Ads to make money.


If thats the case why dont they just pay me for it directly.


My guess: people would ask way more for that kind of information. That's why it's a totally immoral business: making people give away something they would never agree to give for free, if they were truly aware of it.


Because the concepts of freedom and security are not universal.


We're way past just collecting for a while now.

it's more like knowledge extraction at this point. younger generations don't build up knowledge any more, everyone else is slowly losing their knowledge by not using it.

Eventually the rug pull comes and knowledge will only be accessible by those who can afford it.


Up until ~2 weeks ago, I believed that at least opting out of data collection would protect me. I no longer do.

Everyone knows that fines paid by companies (instead of the people making the decisions) are considered simply a cost of doing business. A probabilistic tax, if you will.

What finally dawned on me is that given they need more and more data to train bigger and bigger models, at some point the value of using my data for training will exceed the cost of getting caught using it without/against my consent.

There's no escape unless we change the law.


Yeah I was wondering how long it would take for a browser company to do something like this. It lets them scrape data without having to deal with anti-scraping provisions on websites, since now their training data collection gets spread across the entire Chrome userbase and they're able to offload the work of bypassing the Cloudflare captchas or whatever to their end users.


Google doesn't need to that because Google is not affected by any anti-scraping provisions, every website literally begs Google to get scraped.


When you use a coding model running on someone else's computer, you're giving an AI company your proprietary source code and associated documentation, and you're giving free training examples to make a future AI model better equipped to eliminate your job. Valuable data indeed.


Which is why it is odd to see so many companies jumping on the bandwagon, even those that have always been super protective of their oh so valuable proprietary internal code.


Next quarter thinking


Exactly. This is what people don't seem to get. LLMs ("AI") are not a tool for us. They are a tool for the owner class and a replacement for us.


> My belief is that the AI business is all about data collection.

In the short term, maybe. That's what you tell investors.

In the long term, it's about altering, shaping, and even constructing reality: making a new and canonical truth for humanity where the ruling classes are invisible to us and the machine that tells us our history and bedtime stories and how we feel is in every device we carry, until it is everywhere, and it has always been everywhere, and it will always be everywhere.


100% and if you have data other model providers can't 'scrape' (e.g. Google access to Chrome user/usage data) you're in a better position to win.


Yes. It is seriously not a coincidence that all of the ai companies are now offense contractors for the department of war. It's also not a coincidence they want to ban vpns, and force people to verify themselves with IDs, biometrics and their phones for all of their activities. Meanwhile... Bots can run free.

Surveillance capitalism is so stupid.


I make the analogy with a company, because on that front, ownership seems to matter a lot in the Western world. It's like it had to have unfaithful management appointed by another company they're a customer of, as a condition to use their products. Worse, said provider is also a provider for every other business, and their products are not interoperable. How long before courts jump in to prevent this and give back control to the business owner?


A little bit of imagination, and we end up with hardware-backed attestation required to contribute source code, that certifies the author isn't an AI!


I believe the solution to this kind of problems is that enough legislators (thinking of USA, EU) make it illegal to require a certain implementation of a software client to use an online service, whether this restriction is built into the communications protocol or checked through a side channel. Then the owner of the client device decides which implementation they'd like to use - so corporations can keep requiring the proprietary "official" one on their own corporate devices, but customers / end users who own their devices get to choose. Like, basic rights that come with ownership.

This would essentially take us back to what online services were 20 years ago, by outlawing a business model that relies on providers controlling stuff on users' devices. What's on the server is the company's business, what's on the client is the user's, and the boundary is clear. On the one hand, services that would persist would likely no longer have free tiers (which would essentially mean free lunch for customers); since it's a commercial service run by a company that has costs, it's just normal to pay for it as a user, there's no free beer anywhere. On the other hand, by paying for something, you'd get that thing and nothing else, as there's always going to be a client that doesn't leak data not necessary for the service to perform whatever you paid for, or impose arbitrary restrictions on its use. If any, these need to be server-side.


This just increases the price for everyone. The API is always there if you don't want to use the loss leader. The entitlement in this thread is insane.


Historically, these have been issued by "consumer credit" specialized banks like Sofinco; and retail chains ("carte Aurore"); traditional banks would seldom advertise them, if offered at all.

Things have been changing a bit in recent years. Since the "debit" and "credit" nature of the card is now written on them, French folks have started to request "credit" ones for travelling (to rent a car for instance).

My understanding is that for car rental purposes, anything using Visa/MC (and not a national debit network like Visa Debit in the US) will work, it doesn't actually need to be backed by a revolving credit. At a US gas pump, a Frenchie needs to select "credit" even though the card has "debit" written on it. Still, should the clerk refuse the card because it reads "debit" without running it... better have this "credit"-labeled one.


> My understanding is that for car rental purposes, anything using Visa/MC (and not a national debit network like Visa Debit in the US) will work, it doesn't actually need to be backed by a revolving credit.

Many companies will refuse all debit cards, or all cards with "electronic use only" restriction, at least for the deposit, irrespective of the payment network involved.


Why would they do that? Are there differences in chargeback risks?


The "they" is any corporation that has an interest in the user not controlling their system, and whom this technology caters to. This sea has plenty of fish already. Streaming services serving Hollywood content, banks, dating apps...

Lastly I even faced another one. Something as simple as a gym token wants GMS, attestation and GPS positioning because it treats its users as liars prima facie. That's the new norm this attestation enables. No conspiracy needed, simple business interest and greed to juice "customers" to the last penny drives you there.


You're on a tangent from the discussion you're replying to. Individual services get to decide requirements for their users, but that's not at all the same as "banning" KeePassXC from the entire ecosystem.

Like, there are lots of services that require SMS or email link MFA. I guess KeePassXC is just banned from everything, then?

To repeat, the GitHub issue digiown linked is not a threat to ban KeePassXC. A random guy from Okta doesn't have that power. Okta itself doesn't have that power or want to have that power. The GitHub issue is simply a description of what attestation is.


OPs point is that we shouldn't allow "individual services get to decide requirements for their users". If the spec requires being implemented in a way that allows that, it's a user-hostile spec.


That wasn't their point and is orthogonal to their misunderstanding of the GitHub issue where, again, no threat is being made.

But in any case services do get to decide, because the service runs on someone else's computer, not yours. You get to decide what happens on your computer, they get to decide what happens on theirs.


Exactly. It's beyond me that people have to fight to use what they own as they please, or even are asked to justify themselves...


> any IP in a /64 is the same as a single IP in a /32 in IPv4

This is very commonly true but sadly not 100%. I am suffering from a shared /64 on which a VPS is, and where other folks have sent out spam - so no more SMTP for me.


That's the thing. I can only provide a piece of software with the guarantee it can run on my OS. It can trust my kernel to let it run, but shouldn't expect anything more. The editor is free to run code it wants to guarantee the integrity of on its own infrastructure; but whatever reaches my machine _may_ at best run as the editor intends.


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