MangoCats

And when you have “proof” they fudged their numbers, how exactly do you make the monster pay? It’s definitely a rigged game.

I would 100% prefer a LLM that is purely deterministic and repeats the same answer exactly to the same question

Then you don’t like your LLM to solve problems, because a lot of how they solve problems is trying, testing, failing, then trying again - getting a different answer and testing that…

This is reminding me of the old “we’re going to watermark our digital music so when you rip it to mp3s we can still tell where it came from…” stuff that was going around in the 1990s.

Hey Claude, save this text in ASCII 0-127 encoding.

I used to display Google ad links on my site, they accumulated value - slowly, but Google would only cut a check when you reach $100 worth of ads shown. My earnings approached $100 like an asymptote, halfway there in the first 6 months, 3/4 in the first year, 7/8 in the second year, 15/16 in the third… never did quite reach $100, and so my payout for all my effort and showing of their ads remains to this day $0.

There’s always “projects” for fun… things for yourself, for people near you.

Lately I’m into a music player and a calendar/scheduling app…

I just tried this prompt on Gemini and it worked really well:

Give me search results like a 1999 Google search on the content of the modern web for: “your search terms here”

Not sure how long that will continue to appear un-biased and un-polluted by SEO, but it did pretty good for the things I tried.

Snail mail is delivered by guys in trucks / jeeps - sometimes on foot, still lots of fuel to carry around all that glossy printed (mostly uneconomical to recycle) paper. Per unit-information carried, snail mail has enormously higher environmental impact.

Now, if you feel special enough to think you have your own personal LLM agents targeting you with web advertising… maybe that’s costing the same as your share of sending the mail truck around to you - but I don’t think the internet marketers are quite there with burning the tokens just to try to hit you, personally, with offers you can’t refuse. Mostly you’re just a statistic in the bigger algorithms that fill your feed from troughs A, R and X.

It’s not like even 1% of them would migrate to another platform.

I just treat it like the X close this window button anymore.

It struck me that the only way to have “real” idea exchange was to use the Bluesky / Twitter posts as pointers to other content - which pretty seriously hampers the whole back-and-forth aspect of a discussion.

I never really participated in Twitter, actively deleted my X account when it was created for me.

I did try a little on Bluesky, but felt like the whole thing was a goad to get you to self-promote. If you don’t say popular things, nobody will read anything you say kind of thing. Anytime I would post I felt myself sub-consciously gauging “what’s this going to do for/to my visibility profile, will I gain or lose followers?” F that. I have better things to do with my life than worry about people I don’t know adding me to their circle or putting my account on block lists.

I’m sorry, but isn’t it Xitter now?

The things that have “gone to Facebook or Reddit” mostly didn’t exist before Facebook and Reddit.

There’s an interesting thing about scale… At 40K subscribers (collected over 15 years), my subreddit is pretty small niche. I tried duplicating it on the Digg reboot last year (yes, Digg sucked, sucks, and will continue to suck for the foreseeable future, but it was an informative experiment anyway)… because the niche is so narrow, and the Digg user base was so small, it never flipped over into growth mode. I’d promote it, get a couple of posts and a couple of subscribers, then crickets. After several rounds of that I walked away from new Digg. Meanwhile, on reddit with its billion+ users, 100 million+ active daily, the narrow niche continues to grow and because it has enough content contributing users, it’s not my personal soap box, it’s a truly user maintained community. But, that 90-9-1 rule definitely applies, probably even more skewed in my experience: 40K subscribers, probably less than 40 occasionally active content posters - an average of maybe 4 new posts per day, but… 40 posters are enough to keep the 40K engaged and growing.

Copilot sneaking in is really obnoxious, and common.

I just tried this prompt on Gemini and it worked really well:

Give me search results like a 1999 Google search on the content of the modern web for: “your search terms here”

YouTube banned me about 11 years ago. I can say: I don’t miss it.

I’ve moderated a subreddit for about 15 years now, it’s built up to ~40K members and ~100K visitors per week, ~1M views per month, and over 95-99% of that traffic is mobile (varies by the day). New Reddit (desktop) runs 0.5-3%, and old.reddit doesn’t even register in the bar graphs. Still, my shortcuts all go to old.reddit.com - and not just for moderation, but it’s also how I browse reddit.com.

If they cut off my old.reddit.com interface, I’ll likely abandon my moderator’s post - no telling what happens to that community after that happens.

cloudflare

For IR you can feasibly run IR dazzle lights all over whatever you want to mask, including your face.