No, that’s the Strait formerly known as Hormuz.

Any cartography company with $2B handy to replace the dataset. They’re unlikely to buy it from Google, who is estimated to have already profited $9B from their investment.

King Crimson 1969:

Knowledge is a deadly friend If no one sets the rules The fate of all mankind, I see Is in the hands of fools

…

But I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying

Whether you break up Google, Amazon, Meta, SpaceXitter and the rest or not, you’ve got to have sensible rules, sensibly enforced. We’re already crying.

phone networks stop working when the government broke up Ma Bell in 1983? Or did shit get way cheaper and better

Specifically no, because AT&T didn’t go away, it just got split up and regulated. Shit got cheaper for sure, not always better.

If Google went away, any of those websites that are not actually a part of Google could just go be hosted elsewhere.

Read a little deeper about how so many websites have Google services entwined into all the pages they serve. There would be a billion+ hours of rework to get Google out of all the non-Google services that are in some way dependent on Google/Alphabet services. Sure, we could rebuild everything to not use Google, but would the other services that grow up in its place be better? They’re not likely to be cheaper, and under the current regulatory environment they’d likely develop even deeper invasions of privacy while building out their “modern” Google replacements.

Apple Maps always understands an address I enter correctly (Google Maps does not, sometimes you need to put imaginary spaces in between address characters

That’s an interesting perspective. As Android users my wife and I are used to opening maps and asking for a business by name and general description: Green Grocery on Main Street, or Manuel’s Mexican in Midtown Melbourne and it just looks up the address for us and maps to it. Same for anyone in our contacts, just ask for them by name and the address takes care of itself - we can put in addresses, but our “iPhone friends” are constantly asking for the street address of things because that’s what they have to put in. I guess at least iOS is good at address entry.

Apple Maps has never taken me to the wrong location

Again, we’re biased - people who use Google Maps are led directly to our house with no trouble, people who use Apple Maps end up on the next street over looking at our house across a neighbor’s fenced yard and calling us for more directions. We didn’t have to fix Google Maps to get people arriving at our door, but we were able to tweak the road to look more realistic, Apple has no such user feedback interface, at least not that we could ever access.

switch to a better option. I’ve heard of FOSS maps as well but haven’t tried them out yet.

That’s a nice thought. Do you remember the Google Mapping car fleet driving around for 10 years? I think they’re still doing scaled back maintenance, but that was a tremendously expensive project which gave them data quality that under-funded FOSS projects just can’t even begin to approach. So, there’s an interesting question: when we just Fuck Google, do we steal the data they paid to collect? I mean, we could call it AI training, would that make it O.K.?

they’re already gone from my life

Good for you, that is what you personally control. It is very different from “ending Google.”

Now, try blocking all Google domains and IP addresses from your routing tables and see how you’re loving life. https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-up-everything-1830565500

there is no argument to say “we’d all be dead already if Monsanto never existed”

No, but you need to be clear: is it Monsanto that never existed, or the whole branch of industrial-scientific pursuit they embody, becasue if Monsanto’s tech and similar didn’t exist, we’d have significantly lower crop yields, higher food prices, arguably better food, but if population grew to the same levels we have today, we’d all be eating significantly less food - which, arguably, might not be a bad thing - but at some point it becomes uncomfortable, and without Monsanto-like tech we’d be near or over that uncomfortable line here at 8.3B population and climbing.

which is essentially your argument.

In your head. In my head: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them is flawed. Which slice of the 8.3 billion global population do you wish were never born - can we start with your mom?

nothing special about Monsanto that gives them abilities others don’t have

Well, we can start with that uncomfortable subject you brought up of regulatory capture. If not for Monsanto, Bayer AG and others like them operating with their extensive regulatory capture - other players would have a difficult if not impossible time getting permission to market their products, or even develop them at industrial scale. There’s a huge difference between some PhD at a farm-university splicing glow-genes into brussel sprouts and rolling out genetically engineered seed stock at global scale.

When you say: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them, are you actually saying: we’ll just replace them with nearly identical corporations that do nearly identical things? Separating the useful things that the corporations do from the evil isn’t a simple whack with a machete, the two sides are deeply entwined.

we were talking about Google. You think the world would end without those chucklefucks?

I don’t think it’s all that different, whether it’s Monsanto or Google, they’ve been an essential part of the last generation, they have significantly shaped the world we live in, whether you think that’s for better or for worse is moot. Chucking them out and starting over without the things that they currently provide is going to do more immediate harm than good. Yeah, they’ve run amok and they need curtailing, but if you gank Google and their products out of existence, lots of people are going to suffer, and not just the ones that work directly for Google or their trading partners.

What’s your “Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them” morning after plan? To build back Google, but this time we really mean they won’t be evil? You got a clever approach that will stop their replacements from becoming as bad or worse than what we’ve already got? U.S. Federal regulations seem like a bad bet lately.

Trev: One day you’re a big old whale, next minute, fun food.

Mumble: Someone’s gotta stop them.

Barry: Oh, yeah? What’s gonna be your approach?

Mumble: If l could just talk to them. Appeal to their better nature.

Barry: Beauty. When that crafty little trick pays off, you be sure to let us know, won’t you?

Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them

We’ll just nationalize them? Sounds like we need them after all. What’s the difference between the government running Monsanto, or Monsanto running the government like we have today?

(the way we used to do things before they homogenized food in order to maximize profits, despite the reduction in nutritional value).

Unfortunately, even though I wholeheartedly agree that the nutritional value of the foods reaching our stores has declined, if you pull all that IP, total nutritional output available to reach the stores in the first place will be significantly reduced, more costly (labor and energy intensive) to produce, and more subject to unpredictable lean years.

Profits be damned, unless you just plan to somehow take over Monsanto’s operations and start giving away their products, farmers will be going back to the things they didn’t choose to use, for significant reasons.

Could we rebuild the corporate operations from the scraps of knowledge scattered outside their control? Sure. Then what would we have? The same corporations with new names.

Maybe think of it this way: Strip mines are evil, nasty, ecologically disasterous exploitations of the land. They have no place in Florida. Except: if we stopped all strip mining in Florida, that would take about 10 million tons of phosphate off the market, annually - roughly 75% of the phosphate used by US farmers. Loss of that fertilizer input would result in approximately 40% reduction in crop yields. Yeah, we’ve got CRP lands where the owners are paid not to farm, but those are generally less productive / fertile lands, difficult or impossible to irrigate, and even if all the CRP lands were put back into production, that might result in a +3% total harvest yield.

Modern science makes a difference, if you want to go back to farming like it’s 1930, look up the dust bowl.

Monsanto owns the patent on Roundup, and seed strains that are resistant to roundup.

• Bt Corn (Maize), Seminis (Vegetable and Fruit Seeds), Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH / Posilac), De Ruiter Seeds, DeKalb Genetics Corporation…

They don’t own the farms or farmers, they just have them in coercive contracts.

I’m not seeing a big distinction…

If Monsanto products didn’t improve the farms/farmers’ outputs and profits, even after Monsanto takes their slice, then they wouldn’t enter into those contracts. Gank Monsanto out of the system and productivity falls. A drop of 10% to 15% in global agricultural output within a single year would likely trigger immediate, widespread, and severe global famine.

https://www.dataannotation.tech/

https://mindrift.ai/ - I like the duality of this name, is it: Minimum Drift, or tearing your mind apart?

https://www.telusdigital.com/

There’s documented cases of PTSD among image censor workers…

Isn’t it nice to feel that you’re “valuable” enough for some corporation to assign a worker to spy on you?

Nestle’ sells $100B annually and Dannone almost half of that - that’s a lot of food to go missing off the store shelves - maybe not enough for people to start starving to death, but quite a few would go hungry.

Monstanto’s upstream influence affects the foundational diet of billions of people, kill their operations and lots of people would be starving to death.

In times gone by, brands meant something, customer loyalty was a kind of collective bargaining.

Today, everything is fast-fashion. Companies trade brand names like twin sisters trade clothes. If a brand still holds any kind of value in the marketplace, it’s more likely to be sold and cashed out as a premium label applied to cheaply made shoddy product than it is to be built up with better reputation for the future. Products themselves are carefully designed to self-destruct to create future demand. The market needs to be restructured to put total cost of ownership AND disposal front and center in the purchasing selection process.

On the other hand, it would just be nice if they can avoid starting the Mad Max Apocalypse until after I’m dead, thanks.

I don’t know if Google finds itself as defendants in a court room right now where the influence of an LLM lead to killing or suicide.

This is really tough… so many suicides happen every day, happened every day long before AI or even the internet “was a thing,” it would be interesting to track trends to see if AI is making any macro differences positive or negative over the past couple of years (of course this will be impossible to tease out from variables like changing economic and social stresses…) We have a friend whose son was struggling with degenerating epilepsy, increasing seizure frequency, etc. He used ChatGPT to write his own obituary, then died of “an accident associated with a seizure” a few weeks later… I can’t really blame ChatGPT for his death, in a way it helped him communicate with the people he didn’t see or talk with very much in the months before his death, explain his perspective…

What they are doing with Android has me this close to switching to an iPhone.

If Apple weren’t an order of magnitude more revolting than Google, I’d think about switching. If I do ever switch off of Android/Google it will be to a smaller competitor, not the other bad choice.

Try again: Monsanto, Nestle’, Dannone…

be FOR the people, not against them?

What are you, a Communist? How could being for the people ever maximize profits? It’s not “against” the people, it’s extracting value from the people, that’s the holy grail of all corporations: maximizing shareholder value, and customers aren’t shareholders, customers hold the value that’s to be maximally extracted / transferred to the shareholders. It’s all corporations’ fiduciary duty to their shareholders to do this, literally bound by law. /s

So, yeah, LLM goes off down weird rabbit holes - and if you, like Alice, follow them down… that’s on you.

If, instead of getting off on how weird the response was the author just prompted - “I’m looking for the basketball memes about the NBA player from Turkey.” I suspect it would have gotten him what he was looking for.

If, instead, he shone it on and started playing along like he was distraught over Dario, I’m sure he could have led it to give him a suicide counselling hotline in 2 more prompts. And, honestly, which is the more common question to Google these days: a 10-15 year old NBA meme, or people distraught about supposed friends ghosting them?

CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures - this is the reporting system that describes problems with various versions of various software and operating system components / configurations. They generally don’t publish them until a fix is also available. These are the things that tell people: if you don’t upgrade your XYZ an attacker can take control of your system, execute arbitrary code, without you doing anything except connecting to a network the attacker has access to… AI is finding, and fixing, CVEs at about 5-10x the rate that people were finding them without AI 2 years ago.

For me, it’s an example of: if you don’t participate in AI things and make the extra new patches coming out, the attackers who do use AI things are going to pwn your systems with them. Doesn’t matter if you’re a professional developer or not, if you use a computer, you need to apply the patches and updates, if you “opt out of all things AI” you’re just going to be vulnerable.

Stuff like that doesn’t leave a good way to opt out, the environment is changing and if you don’t go with it, you’re going to be victimized by it.

Recent experience, developing in Opus 5.5. Spin up an agent to review the security aspects of the project, write a report. Pass the report to another Opus 5.5 agent and tell it to implement mitigations for confirmed problems found in the report. Implementation agent proceeds to make tests for the described exploits and gets shut down by the guardrails: Opus 5.5 is not permitted to “do that kind of work” had to scale back to Opus 4.8 for the implementation, though 5.5 was still happy to describe the chained attack scenarios, apparently it’s not allowed to develop demonstration code as it was trying to do for the test cases.