eucyclos

What does the spend go to, besides hosting costs?

From my experience, kinda the opposite? It's like Chinese software is... Harder to weaponize or hurt yourself on. Deepseek is definitely censored, but I've never caught it being dishonest in a sneaky way.

Palantir also deliberately choose a name with sinister overtones, they're just short of calling themselves "torment Nexus builders Inc" or something. I used to think their logic was that someone would build it so it might as well be people who saw the moral hazard, but now I think they're just going all in on the evil overlord brand. Summer kind of pied piper thing maybe.

The US was preferable to the British who were preferable to the Spanish. Hopefully the next global hegemon is similarly preferable to the US.

Just the boring bits. I don't need openclaw to lounge by a pool thinking about macro trends for me.

If it added four last month I'd say it absolutely counts. Trends often matter more than position.

Weird that you're being downvoted for sharing anecdata on actual use cases. It's as if there's a desire to downplay the positive aspects of this technology in the HN community.

I have no counterargument to your first point, but to your second, an ad for product A is "good" only for the person selling A, it's bad for the person buying (assuming a and b are in the same product category). Since the person buying a or b presumably has an ongoing relationship with the content creator being paid to show the ad, showing a "bad" ad is also bad for the host because it reduces the odds the customer will follow another ad on their network n the future. The catch is that the person selling A can outspend the person selling B, but there's an obvious solution: don't auction ad spaces. If vendor A and B are paying the same fixed amount per impression, B's superior offer is going to take over the market pretty quickly, and the content creator hosting ads will be naturally incentivised to show B's ads.

To your third point, I don't think all tracking is created equal - if it were, there'd be no instinct to post on social media at all, but in fact privacy and publicity are complex things with overlapping sets of advantages and disadvantages. Tracking probably feels purely disadvantageous because the people doing the tracking are in thrall to "A vendors", but if the tracker is incentivised to work with "B vendors" instead it becomes a much more nuanced issue.

I'm pretty sure abnormally low levels of neuroticism is a symptom of Downs syndrome. Not a doctor but I've interacted with several. The only neurotypical people who are that happy are Buddhist monks.

I've been told by someone who'd been in jail a lot, that attorney-client privilege is a huge loophole in the prison smuggling economy and someone in prison asking if you know "a good lawyer" is asking for a lawyer who would be willing to smuggle in contraband during privileged meetings.

I agree. Thing is, Google and meta could do that today, if after getting a sense of what people need they actually showed them ads that helped with whatever that is. Instead they show whatever ad will make the most money immediately, which is only very rarely the same ad. The result is an erosion of trust that reduces their long term maximum potential. It's like they're stuck in scarcity mindset even after getting more money than Exxon.

That gives me an start of an idea for a feature. It might be useful to have it timing based. The thing I'd disagree with about how you frame it is, if you're searching for e.g. "soccer coaches near me", an ad actually distorts the signal of just searching by price of reviews or what have you. Where an ad can add value is if you're searching for "watch soccer matches online" and it says "you said you want to get in shape, here's a beginner friendly soccer coach in your area".

I agree if you're in production mode, all ads are unwelcome, but most of us spend a lot of time in consumption mode too, and that's where unlooked for opportunities are really welcome. If the system could distinguish between when the user is in production vs consumption mode it would reduce friction even more over the initial vision. Not sure how to distinguish that though, most of us can't even tell it about ourselves, let alone want to tell a browser extension about it. Maybe a 'production time' setting that forces a wait time on social media sites and doesn't show replacement ads at all while on?

Short answer, any ad that leads to a non regretted purchase the viewer wouldn't have otherwise made.

The instantiation I'm working on is to track the viewer's long term goals and the habits they're trying to form, then only show ads relevant to those. Ads today are shitty because people with products that add no value to anyone's life can somewhat overcome that disadvantage by bidding more on ad space, so that's what we see. But there are plenty of products that would actually add net value which it doesn't occur to us to look for, and insofar as ads exist, they should help us find them.

This project (my working title is eudaimonia) aims to let the user essentially aikido the attention economy arms race by saying "here's what I think would add value in my life, you may pitch your product iff it's actually relevant to that".

This touches on something I've been thinking about. I'm making an ad blocker that tries to replace native ads with ads that actually add value to the viewer's life. In the public version, I'd like to offer some of the profits to the web hosts even if they haven't heard of it. Do you have any thoughts on how it would be best to go about that?

I've been saying that about a lot of algorithms for a while now, but I think the issue is more that they're smart algorithms optimized for the wrong thing

The reference to 'literature by the pound ' made me think of an apocryphal story about a pottery teacher who at the end of the year would grade his students on either the quality of a single piece or the weight of all finished pieces. With very few exceptions, the best piece of the year would be one of the ones where a student went for volume.

Which is plausible if you need to touch each piece- more repetitions lead to more improvement if you're already motivated to improve anyway - but if the output is coming from an llm, I'm not sure ..

I think this heuristic used to be more useful before it became widely known. Laziness is a fine quality if diligence is publicly rewarded, but once people game the metrics to look more lazy than they really are, things break

I forget who said it, but I heard the idea floated that if your work can be measured in terms of productivity at all, it can and probably should be done by software. Not sure how that applies here since as you point out, a 10x programmer probably doesn't produce 10x the code.

An alternate ad network (tied to an ad blocker) that optimizes for the most useful ads instead of the most immediately profitable ones. https://github.com/Chrisjayhenningsen/Eudaimonia

(spoiler) The conspiracy seeking part of my brain is fascinated by the fact a company whose decisions are increasingly ai made or moderated doesn't want people to play a game that requires deleting a psychotic stalker off your hard drive...

Most of those cables are already in place and powered up for the existing power grid.

Infrastructure for ev charging is a lot easier to add than gas stations though.

Europe, particularly Germany, has quite a will. Maybe a little faster than that given there are lessons to be gleaned from it.

Maybe it's harder to deal with ten projectiles in a minute followed by a nine minute reload than one a minute for ten minutes?

Couldn't an ai take down the details and pass it to a mechanic or trained service rep?

Definitely. Unlike asking the right questions or having good taste though, it's possible to know how successful you are at business so the dynamics are definitely different.

You've clearly never deliberately wasted a scammer's time. This is their livelihood, and I'm pretty sure most are commission only.

Whoever said anything about middle class? Ubi is the poverty level, it could never be anything else.

As for people not being occupied, the theory is that since ubi doesn't stop if you find employment, it would lead to less idleness than the current means-tested social safety nets. In test cases though it seems to depend a lot on culture, Finnish communities saw no difference in employment while Indian rates of business formation tripled.

The reason you'd want to filter for idiots is that a smarter person would waste the scammer's time when they figure out it's a scam after some human interaction. If the ai can take you all the way to the close, there's no reason to filter any more.

What should kids be aiming for according to you?

If it's my kid? Starting their own Enterprise. Between 'good enough' knowledge work getting cheaper and the bureaucracy that made entrepreneurship less attractive over the last decades being either trimmed or automatable, we may be looking at a golden age of new business formation. There's an old saying, "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration". If ai shifts that to just 2 and 98, it'll unlock massive demand for a certain kind of mind.

How to teach that I'm still pondering. One idea that occurs to me, is that a human will always be needed to ask the right questions and have good taste, but I don't know how to teach those. They can probably only be educated, which in my mind is distinct from teaching. A different idea I have is that an entrepreneur needs three skills: they need to identify a problem, implement a solution, and get paid for it. Those skills probably can be taught, so I'd try to ensure they get early reps in all three.

If I knew how to connect those two ideas I think I'd have a decent curriculum. Anyone have suggestions for that?