Trying to read this to the end feels impossible - the Guardian keeps flicking the page to show ads and the page refreshes for no reason and I’m sure their ads impressions numbers are going through the roof. Feels like ad fraud.
I remember reading The Guardian back in the oughts when they were winning awards for their UX and they were my go-to answer to the front-end interview question of "Which websites do you admire?"
Ha, they even have their "Website of the year" award linked on their top banner
The Guardian from a desktop browser started confronting me with a paywall about two weeks ago. Can’t even see the front page, and uBlock Origin doesn’t help. Far from encouraging me to subscribe, I think this might actually finally cure my news addiction.
I hate ads as much as everyone, but I think you need to at least take a modicum of steps to block ads before posting to HN that you hate seeing all the ads.
(Perhaps your point though is to broadcast to everyone—who presumably are in fact blocking ads—that the site is pure awfulness without any ad-blocking. Of course you're preaching to the choir at that point anyway.)
The Guardian attempts to stop you accessing its articles if you are using an ad-blocker and don't have a paid subscription. (They didn't always do this. I don't know whether they do it uniformly to everyone or whether e.g. it's different based on their guess of your location.)
Yeah, which is a reasonable statement to make on the website TrainHackersAndPassAvoiders.com. I think its appropriate if you consider yourself in the culture to be reminded of the norms everyone in that culture typically follows.
If jumping the turnstile were legal, yeah. So far anyway, Reader Mode, and various ad-blockers are still legal.
I see your point generally though: accessing content that the publisher has attempted to force you to pay for. My general thought though is that it appears to be a failed (failing?) business model. I just don't know what the solution is. Perhaps if the ads avoided obscuring the content (like newspapers and magazines) I would probably just ignore them and not actively try to suppress them.
The only question is whether what is valuable to Humans remains what is valuable. If major chunks of global money is in the hands of a few entities who can generate more money by doing things that humans don’t care for (example oligarchs profiting from war, or by some far out analogy - some AI company blocking the sun to extract as much energy as possible to power AI farms at the expense of food farms). Then you have a real problem.
Money at its start was human willpower packaged conveniently for transport - in exchange for money you could have humans do something for you they wouldn’t normally do on their own. If you can make money by crunching numbers with a GPU that doesn’t sleep or eat, using energy that doesn’t need humans to make, and you can buy products with it that make you more money automatically, how much would you ask of humans and serve to humans?
The easiest way to miss the joker is to trust in confidence. Dunning Krueger is alive and well and the worst professionals and founders run in and pose with bravado. Real passion goes into the details and with persistance. Real passionate people have initiative to do more and will be happy to tell you about it. The key is to have someone in the room who knows what they are talking about and can separate the BS from the truth.
Wasn’t the son of the current president invested in one of the drone companies selling to the Pentagon? Speedy purchases with no consideration for cost are great are very handy for that kind of investment.
I’m unsure if his sons, but it was discussed on the Joe Rogan (Brian Redban) episode released yesterday that the Vice President has substantial holdings. His prior job had him investing in these companies, while I’m not sure the total sum, he himself holds a few hundred thousand in personal holdings.
Sorry I’m unable to link to the source time on the episode.
With AI code complexity is a cost bigger than money. Because it takes infinite amount of time from humans (maintainers, engineers) and requires increasing amount of memory and hardware to handle (unnecessarily) you have to account for it and hold contributors accountable for it. Otherwise any code will become unmanageable and un-runable and un-upgradable.
Human learning is transformative. It takes time. Time, not money, is the criteria for value to human life. Humans can re-draw in styles they see and the law sees it as transformative work. Humans draw conclusions from learning and apply it to other fields - that’s natural intelligence. If AI helps humans make more new, transformative work, not the same characters as the studios, not the same plots, then the studio should not try to rent-extract. Otherwise someone will try to do it to stick figures and any other style and you’d have to teach toddlers rules for any stile before you give them a crayon. The only real impact will be that hype and styles “in fashion” will just play out faster and in the mean time the Studios get their name sealed in human minds for anything done in their style - which is more immortality than abuse.
There’s certainly a difference with AI. Not only can it reproduce exactly the same characters - in fact I doubt you can train the style without this ability - it puts those characters in reach of crayon-age children at a professional capacity. This crosses the line between copying and enabling IP theft in my mind. While I don’t agree with our current IP laws, the ease and rapidity of this seems like a real problem. How long before some kid in a third world country can produce a feature length Ghibli-esque movie and distribute it online? And how much will this dilute their brand etc? Is it really so much to ask the AI companies to filter their training sets?
Exploring the scenarios and corner cases is how rules should be written, just like any code.
In this case producing anything commercial and anything with AI period should always be disclosed.
Since at this stage we can often tell when something is AI (though not everyone and not always), especially food images at a restaurant, for me that immediately downgrades the quality or value of a product That’s going to be the natural human response. And users of the tech will likely be lumped in with very poor attempts, downgrading the value of anyone who uses it. That is natural payback for trying to go commercial.
However in the hobbyist space - the space where humans learn what AI attempts will also do is expand the creative space massively - people will get to iterate much faster with their own styles and new styles will emerge. Just like the invention of writing and publishing - the original writers were people with tremendous time and resource privilege on their hands, but the art of writing would have never ever bloomed if it didn’t become available to anyone over time. Humans then draw higher order conclusions and insights from the abundance, even if it takes energy for filtering.
That said, abuse in the form of pretending something generated is real or taking credit for generated work as real should be illegal. If you teach the moral compass along with the book or you built the identification along with the work you will get a lot more authentic novelty even with AI tools.
