Broadcasters: the cutting edge of streaming information is ours! Now let's make it so everyone unknowingly broadcasts as much info back to us as possible!
>Being able to restrict yourself is exactly what the right to enter contracts is.
Not when only one person gets to write the contract and terms are take-it-or-leave-it. If there is no chance to negotiate, it is clearly little more than the wealthy abusing the less wealthy to their own advantage.
If you don't like the burger at McDonald's, you go across the street to Burger King. Lots of power for the customer, even though the offer is take it or leave it.
People who serve ads never ask whether the user whether they wish their computer hardware to be utilized for advertising. They just use it. Ads are 100% predisposed on trespassing. Your average ad supported site wants discoverability by being free, then when the hosting costs bite, hope the end user conveniently forgets that they (the end user) have ultimate sovereignty over what code the hoster hosts they (the end user) desires to run on the end user's own hardware. You (the hoster) don't have a right to eyeball monetization. Old school Internet before SEO & mercantilization worked this way just fine.
LLM companies never asked to train on scraped content when they damn well intended to rent the result back commercially.
There is no incoherence here unless you accept axiomatically the Internet should make money. That was never the original purpose. Nor should that become it's ultimate purpose. In fact, I argue that this goes beyond the purpose of the Internet. Society is not yours to monetize. Period. Commercial relationships are not default.
For the last 30+ years, I've watched as society has completely forgotten how to be humans talking to humans and building relationships in lieu of trying to discover the fastest way to plug into someone else's wallet by selling something that isn't theirs to sell.
The relationship between People and Sites you're describing isn't as one-sided as you think.
A website wants visitors as much as a visitor wants to see the content of the website. If a website exists but doesn't get read, what is the point of it?
Personally, I would take readers using adblockers over no readers at all, the same way I'd want people reading a newsletter even if I had to print and pay for it myself.
People here are too damned daft to realize half the damn purpose of this place is harvesting ideas. People need to just shut up, and keep things to themselves, and those they trust. Right now is not the time for naive info sharing.
Being secretive will only get you so far, until something bad happens and no one has prepared or considered the possibility and is completely surprised by it. Open discussion, in theory, should result in identification of frail systems and harden them against attack.
The cyber-security industry has their work cut out for them.
The best way to get corporate America to listen is making RoI suffer. If you are the most qualified, everyone other than you is less qualified for the job, and likely to bring in more waste. It's the only language this stupid damn country understands. Just the loss of tribal knowledge, shifting of workload, and morale hits are likely to be far more devastating than anyone here probably wants to admit, because most here completely dismiss the role of irrational modes of thought in psychological self-regulation.
Because that would have been the right way to do it, and if they do it right even once, they can't say "We DiDn'T KnOw aNy BeTtEr" or whatever excuse they fall back to.
Poor Farnsworth. He just wanted edutainment, man.
reply