I'd frame it more that Google is incentivised to show you the results which are most lucrative for them to display, rather than the ones which are most beneficial for you to see.

Incentives. Which is why platforms (such as search) should never be allowed to be in the same company with things built on top of them (such as ads), if the combined company is significant for an important market.

We used to know better, Standard Oil vertical integration was dismantled.

Sure - it sucks, unfortunately the alternative is the sites going away entirely. When the load from scraper bots is constantly knocking the site offline the choices are literally to allow it to remain inaccessible for much of the time, put up a layer of defenses with all the user-annoyance compromises that entails, or just give up and unpublish the site.

The alternative is simple.. Go dark. VPN tech is known from like 30 years. Pretty much everyone can use it (VPN providers). But instead using it to browse net, build VPN overlay networks of interest for people. Gaming networks, R&D networks, Retro Networks. People will peer to PoP and use resources. Bad actor? BAN it from network. You have control. This could be done in Internet, but big corpos and big money won the battle. Just wake F*ing up...

Continuing on your suggestion.

There could be open source tooling to create custom private "closednets", with

- trust ring mechanism to allow invitations, flagging, banning, and banning those that invite people who were banned

- the rules of the closednet

- search engine with opt-in scraping

- portal (remember the 80s?) with all the registered nodes, perhaps by service category such as public git repo hosts, web sites etc.

etc.

The first closednet could be Hacker News.

I just used a VPN yesterday and the NY times blocked me because they think I look like a bot. It gave a couple possible reasons, one being "a bot was also using this IP address".

VPNs are great for torrenting but any serious website like an online bank or web email provider will turn you away. They claim it's for bots but really it because they only want customers they can track.

You're conflating a VPN as in a virtual private network, with a VPN as in Nord/Atlas/ExpressVPN, which use the same underlying technology in a different way.

I think you'd struggle to keep LLM bots off the network unfortunately.

If it had any real value, anyway.

Small, truly private communities could be an interesting thing though.

How I can strugle to keep them off? To peer to network, you need to talk to human. Arrange L2 connection, assign IPs (only static). If its leaf node, we are done. If its another network, we need to form BGP connections to exchange routing.

Yeah, Network by Humans for Humans. Thats why Im not interested in all those IoT/Auto networks when you just connect and stuff automagically configure. It looks nice at first glance, but you loose control. F2F works way better in that matter, like RetroShare, but I never investigated it much.

It doesn't have to be an IP-layer network. A website that you need to log in to view works just as well.

Nah, it needs to be IP. IP is well estabilished protocol, everything speak it. Once you set it up, you can use it whatever you like. Web pages, gaming service, IRC, Mail, P2P confereces, everything. Everyone will bring it own slice to the pie. You love networking, became PoP and peer and provide access. You just want content? Connect to closest PoP, get IP + DNSproxy and vioala.

The networking part exists, it's called DN42. But it's hard to set up. I don't see why you'd use this instead of an application layer password.

I know DN42, but this network is more oriented toward R&D and experimenting. Yeah, its not for your avarage Joe. But your avarage Joe can buy connection from VPN provider and use it, and so we can provide user friendly PoPs with minimal skills needed to setup, supporting different VPN software.

or you put a password on a website

Spoken like a true websurfer. You know, networking is not only about WWW.

You can also put passwords on things that aren't websites.

More abundance per person isn't a good thing if only 1% of the population sees the benefit and everyone else is squeezed tighter.

> All else being equal, you want to produce more with less labor and other inputs.

So what incentive structure would you suggest? How do you prevent the concentration of wealth that results from a business raking in millions of dollars per employee?

In what sense is there a “concentration of wealth”? Look at any large, highly profitable public company and the #1 owner is probably Vanguard funds.

Whatever the legal outcome, whether it's ultimately decided that people can or can't "get away" with using LLMs to license-launder code, it's undoubtedly a dick move.

Without acknowledgment and credit, I totally agree. Also, I think it might be patentable, just not copyrightable, though it can be pretty tricky to get a patent in software approved.

I never particularly liked the standard hard disk icons from MagicWB, but in general I really liked the aesthetic, especially the drawers with topic icons overlaid.

As for MUI, it was a fantastic system for programming user interfaces and for displaying user interfaces, and it's one of the great tragedies of computing that nothing of that calibre exists today as a cross-platform user-skinnable UI toolkit.

It was however, very slightly lacking (on the Amiga) as a system for using user interfaces because it lacked that sense of immediacy for which the Amiga's UI was previously known.

With traditional Intuition gadgets the rendering was done within a high-priority system task, so if you click on a gadget you'll get immediate visual feedback even if the application isn't ready to respond. With MUI the drawing, and thus feedback, doesn't happen until the application's paying attention. Because of that, MUI applications felt non-native. (Even Windows-like!)

That might not seem important in today's world where that level of responsiveness was burned on the altar of network backends and web presentation layers, but that sense of "having the computer's full attention" is a big part of why the Amiga still has fans today.

Hear hear. This was why I could never quite understand why there was so much love for MUI in some of the monthly Amiga magazines at the time (although I agree it looked pretty). Even on my beefed-up hardware, that general lethargic feel to the UI was noticeable. Later, ReAct came along, was even worse, and I just didn't get it.

I mean, "back in the day", I used to set my own custom WB disk to boot in 8 colors on an ECS system, which caused extra lag on many things (visible redraws ahoy), and it was more or less acceptable. Paradoxically, if I actually had one of the beefier systems, this extra lag would probably bother me a lot more than it did.

Because they don't have the informed consent* of the owner of the device wich ends up running the code?

* no, small print in a click-through agreement doesn't count.

It's not illegal to run code on a device without informed consent to everything the code does. The CFAA may be excessively broad but it isn't that broad.

I think they do actually. It's pretty clear from the consent screen that they're doing what they're doing.

ask any of the people who installed it if they understand what they're doing and especially what the consequences of that are. i doubt you could get a dozen people who do of the millions and millions who installed it.

Also, strictly one question per email - otherwise only the first will be answered and any others ignored!

Yeah, if there are multiple items to address, I tend to use bulleted lists and then end the email with "What do you think?"

There should be some process that punishes those, who does that.

The problem is, quite simply, insurance.

When something is paid for from a big nebulous ball of money rather than straight out of people's pockets, the downward pressure on prices just isn't there in the same way. The conversations between practitioners and insurers are about whether something is necessary, not about whether or not the practitioner is charging too much for it.

Here in the UK we see it, too - not so much in human healthcare since we have the NHS - but very definitely in animal healthcare; vets' bills have skyrocketed over the last couple of decades, in a mutually-reinforcing feedback loop with the rise in pet health insurance.

> Here in the UK we see it, too - not so much in human healthcare since we have the NHS - but very definitely in animal healthcare; vets' bills have skyrocketed over the last couple of decades, in a mutually-reinforcing feedback loop with the rise in pet health insurance.

Kind of amazing how perfectly this illustrates that in the exact same economy, the system with single payer mostly works to keep prices sane, and the private insurance model goes off the rails

I would pay what I used to pay for DVDs.