I think you're around the mark. Big tech has continuously eroded the idea of privacy and copyright and explains a lot of their market caps.

Mitigating seemingly has devolved to trade wars and protectionism.

The genie is out the bottle with AI though. So perhaps decentralisation of it puts us all on a new level playing field.

What decentralization? AI is more extremely centralized than any other technology.

The point being that's the solution. I didn't say it is decentralised.

Because it has extremely plausible uses beyond the example you gave.

More to the point it's trained on copyrighted material, so why entertain any use at all on that front if anything.

If it's trained on the world's information, give the world the model.

It doesn't need a tech company to pilfer everything and charge X if we're going to ignore the IP.

Not really. Search engines are a tech so centralized only two of them exist in the west, Google and Bing. There are zero open source search engines of any usable quality. Whereas there are lots of models out there, some free to download.

"only two search engines exist in the west" and "only two search engines in the west are of usable quality to me" are contradictory statements.

The models free to download aren't the models used by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. You aren't going to get all of OpenAI downloaded to your desktop and running fully on just your hardware.

And in each case (search and AI) the potential to decentralize and maintain "usable quality" is limited by these technologies requiring physical infrastructure at a scale that isn't available to the home consumer.

I mean, they are the models used by Google, at least. Gemma is used by Google and you can download it freely, weights and all. OpenAI has released an open weights model although I don't know if they use it themselves.

They aren't as good as the full fat models but they're plenty useful for many real world tasks. Show me the open source web search engine that I can run locally and that's plenty useful for many real world tasks!

I get "content not viewable in your region", from the UK. Not an ideal image sharing website nowadays.

Other countries are available. With a UK passport you can move to Ireland, Thailand, or Australia fairly easily, amongst others.

FWIW, I’ve got that error while in Thailand :D It resolved in a couple minutes though.

Are you seriously suggesting that that's a feasible, go-to solution for a problem in your country? For most normal, well-adjusted people?

Plenty of people leave countries all the time.

In fact, voting with your feet and leaving is far more effective at fixing political issues than the democratic voting process.

> Plenty of people leave countries all the time.

Yes. I've done so myself. The fact that people do this all the time doesn't mean it's the best thing to do when your country has problems.

People also move houses all the time. It's a big undertaking. Not the default solution whenever your kitchen needs renovations.

> In fact, voting with your feet and leaving is far more effective at fixing political issues than the democratic voting process.

Citation needed. Sounds very defeatist.

Rather, not an ideal legislation nowadays…

Yuck indeed. I do find it offensive when someone uses AI in a conversational manner. It's one thing to use it to chuck up content on social media to attract eyeballs, but this is a forum intended for conversation.

No . Both are offensive denial of service attacks on people's limited attention.

Fair enough view. I would take the view that social media feeds are filled with all kinds of other junk anyway and were pre-ai.

Yes, and just because someone else has been dumping trash in the woods doesn't mean you should.

That said, the social media feeds are so trash filled that I avoid them; it's extremely depressing opening up an incognito youtube and seeing what Google thinks will monetize well for an average consumer.

Not too dissimilar to googlewhacking where you'd aim to be the only result for a search query on Google.

And in a more indirect way, spamming Google's autosuggest feature to shape what people search for, though that perhaps is more open to factual/real-world information.

They are different blog posts, written by different people at Google

Same old story of centralised algorithms being abused.

Github stars is akin to 'link popularity' or 'pagerank' which is ripe for abuse.

One way around it is to trust well known authors/users more. But it's hard to verify who is who. And accounts get bought/closed/hacked.

Another way is to hand over the algo in a way where individuals and groups can shape it, so there's no universal answer to everyone.

It'd ideally be more of a peoplerank though. I think Google discovered this problem themselves when Pagerank became a well known thing.

You'd want to discard a lot of the noise in the bottom 20% of linking power. You want to focus more on the 'trust' factor.

Ah. There's a whole generation of people who never enjoyed the Intel inside / Pentium jingle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVafplZCsjU

Pentium marketing was next level. You could buy plushies of Intel workers in bunny suits. The first IMAX movie I went to was called "The Journey Inside", and it was basically a big ad for the Pentium.

I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.

I have a bunny suit plushie on my shelf to this day. The other Pentium marketing blitz I remember was in the 1998 Lost in Space which had a TV ad for a Pentium XXI or something. Also notable was the Silicon Graphics branding in that movie. Which I have always found amusing since SGI didn't have any consumer products and even for businesses the prices were "Call Us" which has always meant eye watering expensive.

"enjoyed"

It was annoying as it seemed every computer ad needed to play it, not just intel ads.

They didn’t need to, it by playing it and slapping Intel Insude stickers on the computer, they got a substantial marketing fee/kickback per unit sold.

So basically the time it takes him to make a cup of tea he's surpassed the net worth of 99% of the world.

To be fair, I suspect he doesn't make his own tea xD

Using alternatives surely helps. I think so many people use Amazon because of familiarity and predictable delivery costs (free IIRC with Prime).

A lot of the time other web stores can offer the same value.