No religions are states, that is just your political opinion. I think it's a really toxic opinion because it then leads to the question of the potential allegiance to a foreign nation of anyone based on their religion. This is the same reason why a Catholic president was once controversial, because back then people believed there was a Catholic state secretly controlling them.
In my political opinion Israel is an artificially created state which is why it's so unstable and we should simply walk away and cut our losses on this. I believe my opinion is the prevailing populist opinion too so y'all have to contend with that.
There needs to be some compromise between our points of view or else we'll continue to get more war and violence. I think our country needs to recognize our responsibility for this mess and should offer land in North America of equivalent value for any Zionist refugees and then leave the poor people of that land alone. I ultra extremists would feel right at home in the Catskills lol.
Certainly some is antisemitism. To imply, as you have, that there is 0% legitimacy to any other reasons to hate the behavior of the current Israeli government is just as pro-genocide as you claim antisemitism.
Most people I know who oppose Israel's actions in Gaza have no problem with Jewish people; many themselves are Jewish.
>Gas prices are solely Israel's fault? You couldn't have said "I am a propagandist" any more clearly, even if you had tried.
I agree it's a bit of a stretch, but only a bit. Had Israel not gotten the USA on board with the attacks on Iran, I do not think gas prices would be much above their standard seasonally- and inflation-adjusted level, unlike where they have been since the "war" started.
Was Israel essential for Trump being willing to attack Iran, or would he have been willing to go it alone? Even if Israel was essential, it took two to tango. Israel for sure wasn't going to do this without the US. If Trump had said no (as the previous N US presidents had), then we wouldn't be here. If Trump had listened to analyses saying that Iran would disrupt Hormoz (as there were plenty of analyses that said), then we wouldn't be here.
So I consider the "solely" to be more than just "a bit" of a stretch. There's blame enough to go around, but a massive chunk of the blame rests on the White House.
It's complicated when all election options are beholden to Zionist interests. I think many Americans are in denial about how dire the situation is. If you voted for Trump, you are responsible for what he is doing because it was clear he was compromised but! if you voted Biden you would also be responsible because it was clear he was compromised.
This isn't conjecture, both of these presidents have been openly operating for Israel. Biden even went on live tv and lied about seeing 40 beheaded babies.
You basically have Tomas Massie and Rashida Tlaib as the only mainstream politicians that are actually standing up to the Zionist takeover of our government. It's hard to say what the way out of this mess looks like, but voting for a Zionist in Zionist controlled elections is not it.
So is Jim Jordan, the ultra-MAGA ideologue from Ohio. (He may not even be the most extreme, he's just the one that first came to mind.) If being a representative automatically makes you mainstream, they both are. And at that point, "mainstream" is more like "main river" or "main ocean" - it's so broad that it's meaningless.
Tlaib is one of the four most-extreme-left members of the House. I claim that that makes her not mainstream, for any reasonable definition. She sure is not in the mainstream of the House!
She's mainstream, just because you don't agree with her doesn't mean she's not. Trump is also mainstream, I don't agree with him but he is. We're not talking about podcasters or people xeroxing newsletters, these are elected officials.
That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.
Edit: It seems that Ctrl+A actually moves back to just after the most recent newline. That is not the same thing as moving back to the start of the line.
These keyboard shortcuts are also used in emacs; I'm not sure if that's the source of their inclusion in MacOS or if they have a common ancestor between them.
What's the difference between "just after the most recent newline" and the start of the line?
The difference is when the current paragraph of text has line wrapped. Home on Windows goes back to the start of the current line, Ctrl+A on Mac goes back to the start of the current paragraph.
Yeah, macOS is in a difficult position because some paradigms it's just had forever, and changing them would be unintuitive to established users even though they're not intuitive for a newcomer.
For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.
I'm naive on the law around this, but it seems like Amazon.com shouldn't have standing here. What Perplexity does, from my perspective, is essentially the same as when I allow Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (or any other browser software) to see my credentials and access Amazon's website on my behalf.
You're not using "standing" correctly, you're using it more to argue about the merits of the case. Standing is about filtering out frivolous lawsuits. One has "standing" to file a lawsuit when there is reason to believe these three questions could be answered in the affirmative, if a trial were to take place: Was the plaintiff harmed? Did the defendant cause that harm? Can the court rectify that harm?
It's not about what the answers to those questions are. Those are questions about the merits of the case, to be answered at trial. It's about if it should even go to trial.
The precedent on this matter is surprisingly thin on the ground, but the legal system has declined to agree with "their store, their rules" for web sites, with a particularly interesting precedent on that matter from "Sandvig v. Barr, 451 F. Supp. 3d 1 (D.D.C. 2020)" where the District of Columbia in 2020 said "Criminalizing terms-of-service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into his own legislature. Such an arrangement, wherein each website's terms of service “is a law unto itself,” would raise serious problems. This concern, then, supports a narrow interpretation of the CFAA." https://opencasebook.org/casebooks/1797-tlc-casebook/resourc... (paragraph 66)
But all we have is that and a couple of rulings from the Ninth Circuit, one of which is the HN link. For something this critical I'm surprised. I remember writing about this in 2001 or so and you'd think for something so consequential we'd have more lawsuits to point at by now. One wonders how many companies have considered it, looked at the thin precedents we have, and realized that while the victory would be slightly advantageous writing a loss into precedent would be completely devestating and declined to roll the dice.
Maybe a better analogy: They can ban you from going through their drive through on a bicycle, but can they sue bicycle manufacturers because bike riders are going through their drive through?
In this analogy, it seems the originating court said yes, they can sue the bicycle manufacturer (in the analogy), but on appeal the answer was no, they cannot. That seems like the appeals court got it right to me.
I'm not familiar with the case, but to me it sounds like the bicycle manufacturer is encouraging people to use bikes in the drive through, maybe even providing specific tools explicitly for that purpose?
> If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)
I feel like this is already ceding too much ground. A better analogy is "can I hire someone to read this product catalog I got in the mail for me." My browser isn't Amazon's store, it's a device for reading catalogs they send me.
3. You can walk into an Apple store and buy a phone without looking at their PCs, tablets, wall of accessories, etc. Apple cannot force you to look at everything else in their store.
Similarly, Amazon cannot force you to render the content they deliver to you. They can absolutely control access to their content, but they cannot control if you actually see the content they are delivering to you.
Amazon is a party to interactions with their website. That gives them standing to sue over those interactions. Whether they can sue Perplexity specifically is what was being debated in these motions.
Nah, once you have the bits on your device you should be free to do with them whatever you want. Amazon doesn't get to dictate how you consume what they give out for free.
What you think you should be able to do with the data you get back from contacting Amazon’s servers doesn’t impact whether Amazon has standing to sue you over how and why you contacted their servers.
Sure and what you comment doesn't change that people have opinions about the validity of such cases. Amazon cares more about their bottom line than the health of their workers, we should be highly skeptical of anything they want to do as there is a strong chance that it will hurt + immiserate workers.
Not all of us have the same bathroom fetish as Bezos.
Sure it does, you're making a lot of assumptions here. The most egregious one is believing that that I think the legal system means anything to actual justice and not a system that is mostly used to protect the interests of the elite at the expense of the poor.
1- Amazon owns servers and serves the client-interface ot interact with their servers.
2- They make public their Terms of Service and they make users (with accounts) agree to them.
3- The terms include a (very standard) "you can only use our service through the interface you provide, you may not automate this interface" clause.
4- Users violate this clause when they use an agent and browser-use.
5- Perplexity provided browser-use features that were used, by design, for users to break this clause.
From those facts, as shown to you, do you think Amazon doesn't have a case?
And no, Amazon did not lose the “case”, which usually means “the whole lawsuit”. The current posture is still at the preliminary injunction stage. Amazon was granted a PI by district court (basically “perplexity, stop this now while litigation is ongoing”) and the appeals court overturned. Now the actual case can proceed at the district level.
I don't believe it does give them your credentials? It's more like running something like AutoHotkey and having it send screenshots to Perplexity and inject whatever input events they send back, but integrated directly into the browser instead of running as a separate program.
They are not interacting with Amazon at all. They are sending control commands to your computer, where you've opened a session logged into Amazon as you. Amazon is claiming they can't run commands on your computer.
The whole thing becomes entirely absurd if you consider that a cloud model isn't even fundamental to the setup; you could just as well slot in a local model or codex or anything else and the scenario would be exactly the same. Perplexity is just acting as a model provider here.
I know it feels like they're different, but I think that at its core, they're the same.
When you say I am "manually controlling the site", that actually means I run a program on my computer that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided by the site, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. clicking, scrolling) to interact with that content.
An "agentic workflow" does the same thing. It's a computer program that I run that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. typing text) to interact with the content.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I really think that the two aren't that different.
Comet IS a normal chromium browser. The assistant thing is just a chat on the right sidebar and you can tell it stuff like “click around on this website to do X”, which it can then do for a limited amount of turns
> What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?
"When a Comet user directs the Assistant to locate an item on Amazon.com, the Assistant takes screenshotsof the browser view, sends those screenshotsfrom the user’s computer to Perplexity’s servers, and receives instructions from Perplexity’s servers on how to navigateAmazon.com. In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers."
Obviously all browsers rely on direction from the user. But they also typically rely on instructions from the browser maker's servers. Traditionally, you get all of those instructions in a single download that's been pre-packaged (the browser program itself). But if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
As a consumer, I don't think it's very prudent to trust a company with that kind of access to your data, but it doesn't seem materially different from the kind of trust you have to give to Chrome.
> if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
It's not longer my agent. It's a joint agent of my self and whoever else is giving it instructions. (This is Amazon's argument.)
Also, Amazon told Perplexity to fuck off. If your assistant is told to stop doing something in a cease and desist, and then keeps doing it, the fact that you asked them to do it isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.
My guess is we'll find a balance where local models can act as user agents while corporate ones have to meet certain requirements to gain that safe harbour.
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