How you can have an informed conversation about change without hearing the problem out?
If you trust someone that much, why are you even in the loop? Why are you badgering them at all? This is just bad management pretending to offer underlings autonomy. As soon as it fails, everyone loses their job.
I still default to Google, but honestly, it's getting close.
The quality of Google has dropped precipitously. Their AI answers are often a horrible misunderstanding of my query, and the SERPs are filled with ads, preferred content providers and sites that have successfully spammed their way to victory despite having no content on the item I'm searching for (fandom has a billion skeleton sites that just hoover up traffic).
LLMs are often wrong, but they feel like they understand. The UX of not having to fight your way to this stop is dramatically more pleasant.
It's hard to see how Google got so bad at this. Perhaps it's a deliberate enshittification to push people at Gemini but it's been sagging so long now I think it's just their trajectory.
I think you answered your own question - the economic incentives are all aligned to make the experience bad for the user, mediocre for the advertiser (who doesn't have a choice at the moment), and great for Google, at least in the short term.
Unfortunately for Google, the other AI companies hoovered up the Internet too, so Google's hard-to-reproduce scale is no longer the moat it used to be.
And unfortunately for us, the economic incentives to inject pervasive ads into LLM outputs are irresistible, so enshittification is guaranteed once search engines are abandoned.
While I agree completely, what else was going to happen?
Malaysians poured £10bn into that hole, and the only tennants who'll give them the smallest chance of recouping that money are trillion dollar multinationals.
It's a shame though. The best shopping centres are the ones full of dodgy little shops but they're long gone in new builds now. Cambridge used to have a few good examples but they've all been pushed out.
These new waste charges require administration that put a de facto floor on minimum monthly sales of €300-1500 per-country just to cover PPWR costs. It's insanity.
The PPWD is a terrible law and should have never been adopted in that form. FWIW the commission is rushing to fix it.[1] Their general guidance is also to ignore this for now but I can see small business being squeamish.
Of course they have ulterior motives to push the message that it can replace high quality human artists, even though that would be ridiculous under any serious analysis.
It's a bit wishy-washy; they're just saying "we're better off working together" not actually doing something.
I can't imaging Canada would be looking to align its standards and laws with the EU. Don't get me wrong, the EU does a lot of things that make it both safer and better, but it makes things more expensive to make, and that only works when there isn't a wild-west next-door-neighbour. It's hard to compete when your biggest and nearest export market has looser labour and product regulations than you.
Of course Canada can do more trade with the EU without broad regulatory alignment, it just seems weird you'd need to announce it.
The DMCA is a bit overly broad to be considered just a copyright law. For example, just breaking encryption on a DVD is technically illegal regardless of whether you then go on to do something otherwise illegal (make and sell bootlegs) or perfectly legal (make a space-shifted backup copy on your hard drive).
IIRC this was an intentional handout to media companies who were angry that ripping CDs is perfectly legal. They had to find a way to make doing the same with DVDs illegal.
They've been twisted to support almost anything, for example repairing your tractor is illegal because of this same law. But I agree this is just plain old hacking under a plain old reading of the CFAA and doesn't need any twists.
> for example repairing your tractor is illegal because of this same law.
No it's not. There has never been a case establishing that, and it's absurd on its face. The protection measures that the law makes illegal to break must control access to a copyrighted work, and you can't copyright functionality.
You see, they made it so you can't repair your tractor without circumventing a technological copy protection measure, which is illegal under DMCA 1201.
Has this been litigated, or is it just something tractor manufacturers have cooked up in the hopes that it'll stand up in court? Because I seem to recall printer manufacturers doing something similar with refilling toner cartridges and losing.
I'm getting really fed up of this. It's it about time we the people rise up and make it clear how appallingly unacceptable it is to hold your lavalier microphone.
But on topic, it's amazing they're getting these things through budget meetings. Are Flock just giving them away in Y1? They're ~$3k including installation and that clip showed several in one area overlapping. Even for legit crime-fighting, that's a lot of taxpayer green on the line for a park.
"We caught the culprits for damaging a $10 swing chain and spent $3000 surveilling them, $200 demanding three settle and $500 prosecuting one in court."
All for doing something that every who's ever been on a swing has done. Everyone involved in taking this to court should personally pay damages and lose their job.
It's bizarre to me that there isn't any KYC in advertising. Seemingly any foreign money can buy adverts for anything and redirect traffic.
For a long time, you could host your own adverts, put your own script on third party sites. I'm not sure if this is still a thing but judging from the screenshots, maybe it is. Madness.
If you want to advertise, you should have to prove you're selling what you're advertising in the market you're advertising it in. You should have to prove who you are. If you're caught doing dodgy crap, you should be held responsible.
And if you've taken billions over two decades in advertising, and you don't regularly test the adverts you host, you should be liable for the damage they create.
If you trust someone that much, why are you even in the loop? Why are you badgering them at all? This is just bad management pretending to offer underlings autonomy. As soon as it fails, everyone loses their job.
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