I should publish a blog post titled “Using Antropic’s Claude is a Perversion of Writing”. If you are taking AI output and thinking it’s good and engaging, you are making a load-bearing mistake.

Joking aside, the criticism can come only after they implement it and we can see if it’s having any effect on the output quality. I doubt it’s going to be detectably worse.

If anybody is feeling so strongly against watermarking even before we can evaluate how it affects the output, I am only thinking that they have ulterior motives or they don’t want to be caught spreading copy-pasted slop.

Very interesting! Thanks for the links and the detailed answer!

Let me preface this by saying that I am generally against AI and I hate LLMs being pushed everywhere, but I currently hate facebook and social media even more than AI.

I think that ad blocking might actually be a good use of a model trained to detect ads: AI models are “black boxes” and it would make it difficult for facebook to find out precisely how the detection works and workaround it. Imagine a tiny classifier running locally, whose only job is to look at a post html or resulting rendered pixels and detecting if it’s an ad or not, and then generating the blocking rules.

It would be quite cool, because it would work on any website without an explicit list of ad-blocking rules that somebody needs to maintain.

Yes I never trusted it fully, and I would strongly suggest anyone to run it in a VM or at least a container, where it doesn’t have access to your credentials, browser cookies and sensitive files. It’s very irresponsible otherwise.

Example: around 1 year ago the bot made a small coding mistake and created a ‘~’ folder. I asked it to delete it (not in auto mode) and of course it went with a very nice “rm -rf ~” (which of course I denied).

Modern models are much smarter, but I would not trust the auto classifier to stop everything dangerous and make a similar hallucination slip through.

There’s just no way to prevent this

Life pro tip that will make your IT deparment hate you: you can use Evolution and change the client id to match outlook’s one in the advanced settings. It’ll look like you are using the standard outlook client from your IT department point of view, but you’ll actually get a usable interface instead. I assume that thunderbird has the same options to override the client id, but I haven’t checked.

Don’t blame me if you get in troubles though.

There are some surviving national circuits like PagoBancomat (as the sibling comment from Scrollone) and Dankort (Denmark) and girocard (Germany). My personal impression is that they are slowly going out of fashion in favor of visa/mastercard only (probably because they can’t offer better prices than them).

I don’t see a solution to the duopoly, apart from lobbying politicians to support this national payment infrastructure. Especially in recent times I can also see how some governments might not want to rely entirely on two US companies for running their entire economy, so something might move on that side, so there’s hope on that side.

The EU has already been moving on this front in the last years by forcing the banks to provide programming interfaces to initiate bank payments, and that’s why you can now see more and more options to “pay by bank” online in EU. These online payments generally skip card circuits and run over normal SEPA bank transfers.

More info here on the last part: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive

For splitting the app in the taskbar I found it useful to “install” the PWA (you got to find the hidden option in chrome for that…), if it’s supported by the website… It still uses the same cookies and addons, but at least it doesn’t easily get merged with the main browser window and behaves like a proper desktop application. I mainly use firefox though and it doesn’t support PWAs (easily, at least). It’s a shame it’s not more common, because it’s a much better way to run software than the many electron apps, each having their own chromium installation (no download, no long installation process, full sandboxing, and you can have addons & adblockers affect the pwa!)