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AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

martinalderson.com

111–120 of 398 posts

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ah yes, blindly trusting the corpo fascists that stole the entire creative output of humanity to stop now. Stealing implies the thing is gone, no longer accessible to the owner. People aren't protected from copying in the same way. There are lots of valid exclusions, and building new non competing tools is a very common exclusion. The big issue with the OpenAI case, is that they didn't pay for the books. Scanning th…

> Stealing implies the thing is gone, no longer accessible to the owner. You know a position is indefensible when you equivocation fallacy this hard. > The "Corpo Fascists" are buoyed by your support for the IP laws You know a position is indefensible when you strawman this hard. > If anything, to be less "Corpo Fascist" we would want more people to have more access to more data. Mankind collectively owns the creativ…

>You know a position is indefensible when you equivocation fallacy this hard.

No its quite defensible. And if that was equivocation, you can simply outline that you didn't mean to invoke the specific definition of stealing, but were just using it for its emotive value.

>You know a position is indefensible when you strawman this hard.

Its accurate. No one wants thes LLM guys stopped more than other big fascistic corporations, plenty of oppositional noise out there for you to educate yourself with.

>Sounds about right to me, but why you would state that when defending slop slingers is enough to give me whiplash.

Cool, so if you agree all data should usable to create derivative works then I don't see what your complaint is.

>Where can I find these totally legal, free, and open datasets all of these slop slingers are trained on?

You invoked "strawman" and then hit me with this combo strawman/non sequitur? Cool move I literally pointed out they should have to pay the same access fee as anyone else for the data, but once obtained, should be able to use it any way. Reading the comment explains the comment.

Unless, charitably, you are suggesting that if a company is legally able to purchase content, and use it as training data, that somehow compels them to release that data for free themselves?

Weird take if true.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#113
post #3

Let me give you an example of my workflow from tonight: 1. I had two text documents containing plain text to compare. One with minor edits (done by AI). 2. I wanted to see what AI changed in my text. 3. I tried the usual diff tools. They diffed line by line and result was terrible. I searched google for "text comparison tool but not line-based" 4. As second search result it found me https://www.diffchecker.com/ (It's…

> 3. I tried the usual diff tools. They diffed line by line and result was terrible. Um. I don't want to be That Guy (shouting at clouds, or at kids to get off my lawn or whatever) but ... what "usual diff" tools did you use? Because comparing two text files with minor edits is exactly what diff-related tools have excelled at for decades. There is word-level diff, for example. Was that not good enough? Or delta [0] p…

kompare, kdiff3, meld, git diff --no-index (--patience, --word-diff, --histogram)

All weren't remotely close to what I wanted.

On first glance delta is also doing completely standard thing. But I can't rule out that there are some flags to coerce it to do the thing I wanted. But searching for tools and flag combinations is not that fun and success is not guaranteed. Also I found a (SaaS) tool and a flag there that did exactly what I wanted. Just decided to make my own local tool afterwards for better control. With an agent.

> Because comparing two text files with minor edits is exactly what diff-related tools have excelled at for decades.

True. And I ended up using this excellent Google diff-match-patch library for diffing. AI didn't write me a diffing algorithm. Just everything around it to make a convenient tool for me. Most tools are for source code and treat end lines as a very strong structural feature of compared texts. I needed something that doesn't care about end lines all that much and can show me which characters changed between one line of one file and five lines it was split into in the second file.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#114
post #3

Let me give you an example of my workflow from tonight: 1. I had two text documents containing plain text to compare. One with minor edits (done by AI). 2. I wanted to see what AI changed in my text. 3. I tried the usual diff tools. They diffed line by line and result was terrible. I searched google for "text comparison tool but not line-based" 4. As second search result it found me https://www.diffchecker.com/ (It's…

You could have also ran diff on both files and gotten a reasonable diff.

I ran kompare, kdiff3, meld, git diff --no-index (--patience, --word-diff, --histogram) and it was all useless.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just read the ToS of the LLM products please

I have. Have you? Can you quote the sections you’re talking about?

https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms

"We will train new models using data from Free, Pro, and Max accounts when this setting is on (including when you use Claude Code from these accounts)."

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#116
post #48
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they can be sued for breach of contract. And it’s not a regular ToS but a signed MSA and other legally binding documents.

the license on my open source code is a contract, and they ignored that if they can get away with it (say by claiming it's "fair use"), they'll ignore corporate ones too

If I were to go out on a limb, those companies spend more on tech companies than you and they have larger legal teams than you. That is a carrot and a stick for AI companies to follow the contract.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#117

The where this doesn’t work section is chefs kiss - anything that requires very high uptime -very high volume systems and data lakes -software with significant network effects -companies that have proprietary datasets -regulation and compliance is still very important

[deleted]

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#118
> Agents don't leave

How wrong the author is about that! IMO As soon as the bubble bursts, which is already evident and imminent, these agents will raise their subscription fees to ridiculous amounts. And when that happens, entire organizations will abandon them and return to good ol' human engineering

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#119
AI coding IS SaaS. Claude Code is a subscription service I pay to create the exact, niche, I need you to build a form that submits a blog post to Wordpress here’s my api key, here’s the word doc format it comes in, I’ll paste it in the chat and you make a paste from word button so I don’t have to manually enter the form and it works first try. That is the definition of software as a service. And it’s mine and it’s exactly what I need. Tomorrow I’ll need something else…

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#120

The author teaches workshops for "AI" development. Next commercial please.

Hackernews seems completely astroturfed in the last weeks. It's not the hackernews i knew even 3 years ago anymore and i'm seriously close to just ditching the site after 15+ years of use. I use AI heavily but everyday there's crazy optimistic almost manic posts about how AI is going to take over various sectors that are completely ludicrous - and they are all filled with comments from bizarrely optimistic people tha…

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