I’m not sure anyone needs to break anything. I’m not sure this is a commercially viable business once all of the VC and foreign funding scaffolding goes away.

If they produce large negative externalities like data centers do, then yes absolutely.

In a normal market, tech cos would have to pay for the messes they make (the negative externalities). With so much speculative financing available today, these costs are not being born by the companies creating them. Rather, random people (external parties) are forced to suck up higher electricity costs, noise, environmental degradation, new competition for water, non-employment of local people, oh yeah, and not much more to show for it than a proliferation of new forms of slop.

Tech guys: can’t you think of more economically useful products to launch?

> new competition for water

Data centers use minuscule amount of water compared to factories that make physical goods.

This whole conversation is happening due to data centers existing…

You can’t determine age from a face scan. And it’s trivial to hold up a photo of an older person. Seriously if a website wants an image of your government ID or facial image, maybe ask yourself if you really need to access that site.

There WILL be breaches and those drivers license scans will get loose in the world sooner or later. Fully agree that this is all about access control. No thank you.

Isn’t this sort of like saying you know how to use a web browser?

Maybe? My high school had typing classes and on word and spread sheets and whatever. They also had dental assistant program where you’d be certified by the time you graduate high school.

Good point regarding “ survivorship bias and groupthink” here.

Remember Web 2.0? If not, check Wikipedia. The idea was that everyone could create mashup web apps to do anything thanks to open standards and free APIs. Where did that dream go? Do you think private companies are going to give everyone their data and functionality for free?

And what is so different about today’s dream of “agents” accessing private company data and functionality?

It is a lovely dream that I would be very happy to see. What can we do differently this time around?

I guess now we have the technology to use the UI layer as the API. Spin up a browser and impersonate the user, and then parse/OCR the data off the screen.

Trump is the only one convicted of felonies and found liable for civil wrongdoing.

No other president violated laws (and please don’t start with Monica Lewinsky or that time Obama wore a tan suit…)

Sloppy.

Clearly YMMV but I have been very happy with DDG since switching over a couple of years ago. Maybe we are searching in different domains. From my experience, no ads and less ai slop, and fine search quality.

The shilling for AI continues. How much $$$ do the big tech companies pay Columbia? Oh yeah, and what exactly did Columbia agree to do to get the trmp admin to leave them alone? All speculation of course, but the circumstantial picture stinks.