- snowwrestlerFor comparison, the Wall Street Journal does have a paywall but is not a banned site.
- Thanks for this level of detail. History is complex, which is why I tend to be skeptical of bare “what would the founders have thought about this” complaints.
- I asked last year and was told 404 is the source of too many copycat low quality posts and they have a paywall. In the year since, a bunch of their original reporting has hit the front page and driven interesting discussions.
- > Dealing with fraudsters should be baked into the cost of doing business for these megacorps. A smaller business couldn't get away with this kind of "support". The largest companies should be held to the same standard.
It is already baked into the costs in business models of big companies. And they are pretty good at it, actually; we’re talking about one high-profile case, and it’s not the only one, but it is rare enough that such stories are still newsworthy.
The standard that people want, though, is absolute certainty: zero errors that affect real customers, a 0% false positive rate.
The scale is in fact a challenge. If a small business has a 0.00001% false positive rate, they will affect approximately zero of their customers. For Apple, managing billions of accounts, that same false positive rate would affect hundreds of real customers every day.
- The data that Google and Meta harvest are your interactions on other websites and apps that are loading a Google or Meta JavaScript, or have a back-end data integration with them.
I don’t know if Apple has client-side ad scripts like those, but in decades of building websites I’ve never been asked to implement one.
- I was going to say the opposite: that unlike back in the Osbourne days, consumers today understand that there will always be “something better” announced soon, and they’re used to making purchase decisions anyway.
- Right. Crawler user agent strings in general tend to include all sorts of legacy stuff for compatibility.
This actually is a well-behaved crawler user agent because it identifies itself at the end.
- Ikea sells solid wood spoons and spatulas starting at like $3.
- This affected only reporting of placement and impressions; basically you don’t get counts for placements below the first 10 or 20 results (can’t remember which). It did not affect clicks which are measured directly regardless of how deep in the SERP they happen.
- Presumably because of how things went with Comma since then.
- An LLM on your phone can know everything else that is on your phone. Even Signal chat plaintexts are visible on the phone itself.
People definitely will care that such private data stays safely on the phone. But it’s kind of a moot point since there is no way to share that kind of data with ChatGPT anyway.
I think Apple is not trying to compete with the big central “answer machine” LLMs like Google or ChatGPT. Apple is aiming at something more personal. Their AI goal may not be to know everything, but rather to know you better than any other piece of tech in the world.
And monetization is easy: just keep selling devices that are more capable than the last one.
- They do great at consumer services as well. Worth noting that no other company in the world has more credit cards on file than Apple.
- I’ll put in a plug for nonprofits. In the U.S. there are thousands of them and they all need tech workers of some kind. Some have digital products like web applications and mobile apps. Some just have a Wordpress site and basic IT needs. In any case it is probably not going to be cutting edge tech.
But aligning with values might be easier since that is what a nonprofit is all about. It’s an organization that is going all-in on one particular specific set of values, to the exclusion of commercial goals like making profit for owners or shareholders.
Which means that they also don’t pay as well (nearly as well) as private big tech companies. If nothing else, working at a nonprofit will help you realize how important money vs mission is to you, in a very personal way. You’ll either say “I can live on this” or “this sucks, I can’t stand being underpaid.”
Note that not all nonprofits are charities. There are thousands of trade associations, chambers of commerce, economic development councils, etc. in the U.S. And of course all sorts of political committees and orgs across the spectrum.
- Focusing on privacy was obviously the right strategic move for Apple. People complain about Siri, but they still buy iPhones in huge volumes. And a huge part of that is the belief that it’s safe to use iPhones for private things.
In terms of actually building a profitable business, no one seems to know how to make that work with AI right now. Leaks suggest OpenAI may turn to ads to monetize ChatGPT… which will raise all sorts of data questions. Privacy concerns might yet be an issue with AI chatbots.
- Since at least Drupal 7, the core CMS has included the concept of “private files.” The files are stored in a directory that is not served publicly by the web server. Instead the CMS generates a proxy URL for each file, which is handled by the CMS like a page URL before serving the file by streaming it through PHP. So: it’s a heavier load on the server, but you get full permission management by the CMS.
Wordpress does not have this in core—no surprise. I was surprised to find that it’s not even available as a community plugin. I had to pay a developer to write a custom plugin when building a members-only website in Wordpress.
Some folks downplayed the risk of someone finding and directly accessing the file URL if it wasn’t referenced on a public page. It’s crazy to see it created a national government incident in the UK.
- There are fewer countering votes on the weekends.
- Yay for X publishing this, but only because it helps address a problem that they created in the first place.
By paying a little bit of real cash money for hitting engagement stats, X created an incentive for people in other countries to fake the most engaging content they can find—which on X is right-wing rage bait. It has high emotional content and X’s algorithm was tweaked to prefer it.
It’s no different from the incentives that produced a flood of AI slop on Facebook, as thoroughly reported by 404 Media:
- “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog” was a joke in a New Yorker cartoon, and it was not written to be complimentary. It definitely was not “the point” of early Internet discussions.
- No, what I’m saying is that if a kid takes a college writing class and does enough to pass it, at the end that kid will be a better writer. Even if they did not like the class.