Oversimplified, Rocket Internet (Samwer brothers) generated billions cloning apps and services. Many other examples exist. Thinking of costs as "almost nothing" is misleading, but the low cost of cloning services and apps is a business model with a strong track record that seems to have accelerated due to AI. Of course, competition within this business model is also accelerating, making profitability more complex, and ethics is always complex in this space.
Some wishfully frame HN as science and tech, others as views from smart people on complex issues of topical importance, but regardless, political overlap with science or complexity causes flagging "because politics". Forces that degrade discussion are high on political topics, but ... sheesh. A forum with high ability to contribute to rational discourse on complex issues of importance is really hamstrung by this. /rant
I feel HN approaches politics the same the field economics does, they are not involved at all execpt bascically all things in the world heavily involve politics. Tech is no exception, not wanting to overriden but news though is not a crime but this is pretty impactful news even for the tech community.
Hard to bet against Hassabis + Google's resources. This is in their wheelhouse, and it's eating their search business and refactoring their cloud business. G+ seemed like a way to get more people to Google for login and tracking.
Thats pretty telling that on the search's / ad placement on the web where it matters, OAI has had no impact or its muted and offset by continued market power / increased demand for Google's ad-space on the web.
Well, some who start as developers don't truly see users as stakeholders, sometimes not even remotely, and they often aren't assisted to change that view. While it feels astonishing in direct encounters, on the sliding scale of "are you a person that sees other people as stakeholders in general", many developers can be close to the "no" end of that scale. So not necessarily an institutional view.
By artificially narrowing a multi-faceted issue to just two either/or simplistic options you are no longer describing the issue. If you ackknowledge this, you can comment on it. But not acknowledging it makes your comment hard to parse. Sarcarsm? Overly simplistic? Missing context? Unclear.
Oligarcy itself is a similar ratchet overall (The Iron Law of Oligarchy), and many of its moving parts similarly optimize. The problem is like Soylent Green; it's made of people.
Complex systems have more unintended behaviors and failure modes, and interventions create new problems you didn’t anticipate. This is literally the Law of unintended consequences, and the more detailed you make the law, the harder it is to update to correct, current or actual circumstances.
Tim Berners-Lee thought pages would become machine-readable long ago, with "obvious" benefits, and that idea partly drove XML, RDF and HTML 5. Now the benefit of doing so seems even bigger (but are they?), and the time spent making existing documents AI readable seems to keep growing.
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