I too was one of those neckbeards, so I use the term with love. :)
I certainly think we should voluntarily create some crowd-funded free-to-use services like the fediverse. But we can’t pretend that commerce doesn’t exist.
People are going to try to make money by hosting stuff online and enticing people to go there and use it. I would prefer if those people made money by charging admission instead of by collecting and selling data.
Huh? How exactly do you package privacy? It’s something you can lose, but not something you can buy.
Kagi is selling search, same as Google. The difference is that you can only pay in dollars, not data.
I agree it’s overpriced, but this is where we are. The actual market for genuine web services is atrophied after 30 years of neckbeards naively insisting that web services should be free. Search should cost $5/year by now. But oh well, 30 years too late is better than never.
I can attack both.
This is not about chasing trends — we are being left behind here, and it is an existential threat to the success of the mission itself.
It’s wild to see how everyone successfully clocked crypto as a scam but then immediately applied the same “NGMI” FOMO mindset to the next scam.
Don’t get me wrong. LLMs are useful for several important software engineering functions: prototyping, iterating on implementations, collecting supplementary data, lining up disjoint interfaces… but it makes a terrible foundation, and it can’t refactor beyond a 101 level.
The only reason the industry is able to pretend that synthetic text extrusion is a sustainable replacement for granular human discernment is because most of our economy is just about building a marketable scam and leaving someone else to hold the bag. If company decision-makers knew they might face any consequences at all for steering the ship into a tar pit, this mass psychosis would not be possible.
Edit:
Also, this…
LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.
…is precisely Cory Doctorow’s point about reverse centaurs, and the difference between labor and capital when it comes to deploying new tools. I don’t think they even realize they’re putting the quiet part in bold.
Mainly the provision that gets people is the “unauthorized access” part — or in this case, exceeding authorized access.
It can be a pretty silly provision, because in some cases that just means visiting a URL that the domain owner didn’t expect you to visit.
Edit: Just to be clear to whoever downvoted me, I am not in favor of this law. I think it’s a bad idea and poorly written too.
Holy shit, Michael Burns spotted in the wild!
What’s the difference between destroying data and encrypting it with a random key? And is it okay to destroy/randomly-encrypt data through a scheduled dead-man’s switch instead of by giving out a duress code?
Neoliberalism sure has poisoned our minds.
Despite what bosses and market pundits will tell you when they’re trying to underpay you, the value in a software development effort is not just the end product that you can sell to customers — it’s also the knowledge of how the codebase works, and how to modify it over time.
I’m not an ostrich when it comes to AI-powered development. I’ve been to multiple conferences and courses over the past year specifically about developing with AI. My Youtube and Substack and podcast history is multiple hours per day of content about AI news, practices, and opinions. My weekly visit to my bookstore has been mostly to pick up or place an order for books about AI. I use agents for my daily coding tasks at work. I have multiple local LLMs on multiple machines at home that I use from multiple harnesses. I have ralph loops, I have full-AFK workflows, I have custom sandboxes.
I could go on, but you get the point: I’m not standing on the sidelines when I say…
The vast majority of AI use today is horrifically irresponsible. Current AI use is digital asbestos in the walls of our technological society. It will take generations to fully recover from this. I am not excited, I’m not gonna “get over it”, and I’m not gonna grant any degree of false equivalence between actual FOSS and these slop stunts.
The bubble cannot pop soon enough. Not just so that we can minimize the economic damage, or so that hardware prices can once again experience gravity, but so that we can actually be honest about what this stuff is and how to use it.
Just tell it you’re wearing a green shirt!
Copyright probably won’t fix it, especially now that you can Malus yourself a bespoke fork.
The core problem is that they’re too big to care. They don’t have to listen to customers, employees, or competitors. We need antitrust action and union organizing.
✅ “What it looks like”
✅ “How it looks”
🚫 “How it looks like”
I agree with your policy position. The three options should be:
A fourth “free to use, subsidized through data collection” option shouldn’t even be legal.
But we’re not there yet. And in order to get there, we need companies like Kagi to populate the second category so that when politicians say “but how will they make money if they can’t sell data?” we have examples to point to.