crowcroft

Imagine if there was some kind of way to cryptographically 'prove' your GPU is doing some kind of 'work' here and contributing to the network.

You could even hand out some kind of digital 'currency' to the people proportional to the amount of work their doing!

Tailwind just happens to be a common way to write CSS.

If Tailwind didn't exist people would just be writing the same article about {{ insert most common css tool here }}

Most people create generic similar looking websites, and most people that making a new website today use Tailwind. Correlation is not causation, and linking the two in any meaningful way is just a pointless discussion.

I guess to this point the argument for the valuation is just, do you think Elon will beat the (very bad) odds?

I wouldn't take that bet, but I can see why some people would.

The issue is that problem one is real, but not in a way that's beneficial to other advertising products.

Search, social and app store ads are over rated in that a lot of brands should probably decrease their investment, but things like programmatic display ads are absolutely not under rated. The correct number of dollars that should be spent on those placements is close to zero.

I mean, they're not a public company, but there are still laws that exist...

Two issues with this.

- Search ad pricing is inelastic and auction based (supply goes down price goes up).

- A jump in traffic to DuckDuckGo does not mean Google is experiencing a decline in search volume. Number of queries per session has increased since launching AI Overviews.

Important context: In terms of total share of search a 28% lift for DuckDuckGo rounds down to zero.

The flip side is that multiple AI Search engines have overtaken and lapped DuckDuckGo many many times over in the past year or so.

Cybertruck and Jaguar have not been sucessful.

Luxury car makers should look to handbags for inspiration. If Ferrari wants to expand the market and reach new customers they shouldn't be making something that looks like an upbadged BYD.

It's like if Hermes started making a Jansport backpack, absurd. Instead they sell lower cost, but still premium designs like the Picotin. The Lamborghini Urus might be one example.

Part of what I’m getting at is exactly your point that we used to think about what compiler to use and didn’t always blindly trust them.

If you have enough tests at what point does AI rewriting software in a different language become close enough to ‘deterministic’? Maybe never, maybe not.

This is why I require all my software to have bespoke compilers otherwise how can I trust the devs know what their code is actually running!?

This is pretty common across social media as well, surveyed sentiment towards it often negative while usage is high. I suspect it's because of the addictive quality.

This never occurred to traditional search results so highly doubt they’ll start now.

I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.

When some countries tell them 'You need to make sure the product is safe for children', or 'you can't let people under 16 on the platform' Meta stomps their feet, says it's impossible and/or bad for society and spends millions on campaigns to influence the public against the govt's position. In some cases going as far as threatening to leave the country.

So yes, they absolutely have a choice.

Who are the experts in the field, and who decides they're experts?

"More doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette".

Ok, but what about Meta and X etc.

I don't think the govt should be able to set rules that limit and control adult's freedoms with computers.

I don't think the govt should be able to set rules that limit and control children's freedoms with computers.

A child can't enter a nightclub or a liquor store. The closest digital equivalents are basically permanently available to them though.

Can't wait for Claude to submit fake tax records for me so that I can commit fraud legally.

One turn away from 'Hey Copilot can you play my game for me'.

Are you sure?

What is 0.1% of a trillion? I think that's quite a large number still.

Mergers between public companies are almost entirely negative outcomes for shareholders and positive outcomes for the executive team.

Any possible 'synergy' is wiped out by.

- Having to pay a premium on the public market.

- Organisational complexities/moving slowly.

- Culture clashes and bad vibes between teams.

Your premise is absurd.

Search engines do exist, and search engines do allow tool calls. Try find an AI chat provider that doesn't connect web search to the agent.

For most people Google Search is the LLM they're using.

Another way to think about this is that LLM based search actually grows the entire pie for search and so multiple players can all be growing at the same time.

The real losers are publishers, blogs, forums etc. Instead of traffic going to them that traffic is being turned into more search queries and more LLM responses.

Established players aren't selling on all platforms. Any platform doing more than $1bn in ad revenue operated their own ad sales platform.

The only players that sell through third parties are sub-scale publishers, and that is a shit business to be in. If that's what OpenAI is aiming for then they will never be able to compete with Google.

I'm not really sure what you're analogy about Coke is meant to mean here...

product is too new to capture meaningful ad budget

I disagree entirely. As someone who works in advertising every single company I've talked to would be queueing up to test ads on ChatGPT if they launched a Google Ads like platform.

If ChatGPT doesn't have enough scale to do it, then they shouldn't do ads.

Three letter agencies are telling OpenAI to partner with a Toronto based ad platform?

It all seems a bit overly complicated to me. TikTok pretty much went straight to a self-serve platform and basically had immediate success. I would think if OpenAI did something similar there would be no shortage of advertisers wanting to spend money.

The most surprising thing to me is that they're partnering with third parties to do this.

Less secure, lower margins (more middlemen taking fees), harder to access, more likely to not work properly.

I would expect all the meta execs they've hired to know better so maybe I'm missing something...

I disagree on some of those dimensions (esp. lack of a moat), but agree things like geopolitics and security would lead to multiple wholesale providers.

My concern is that globally international relations are an absolute MESS, but there really needs to be some level of coordination here.