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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

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Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#151

Post by rightbyte »

kijin wrote: post #39
zerocrates wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The providers can sell inclusion in the system prompt to advertisers. Run some ad-tech on the first message before it goes to the LLM to see whose gets included.

For most advertisers, sure, there's no need to go all the way back to the training data. Advertisers want immediate results. Training takes too long and has uncertain results. Much easier to target the prompt instead. If you're someone like Marlboro or Coca-Cola, on the other hand, it might be worth your while to pollute the training data and wait for subtle allusions to your product to show up all over the place. Ma…

The annoying part is that we part of the "pollution" since we namedrop Coca Cola etc.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#152

Post by rightbyte »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #115

> I would rather use a library where the librarians don’t have financial incentives to show me certain kinds of books more often than others. Oh, you sweet summer child... I have family that used to be in charge of dealing with institutional corruption. In particular, public service corruption. It's bad. Very, very bad. When "public servants" are paid less than their private counterparts, are routinely treated like c…

What are you claiming here? That librarians get kickbacks on certain books?

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#153

Post by Cthulhu_ »

karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

What I'm seeing at work now is the companies selling AI stuff to companies - mostly Microsoft in my neck of the woods. For me as an employee, using copilot is a trivial thing, not my wallet. But just like with AWS where a developer doesn't really need to worry about how many machines their merge request starts up and lets run, the bills will start to creep up to the companies.

For now Copilot is a fixed $20 / month / person, but it's only a matter of time before it becomes metered, or the advanced models cost more credits. This is also why they're pushing for agents, because a single query is cool and all, how much it costs in compute is reasonably predictable, but an agent can do a lot of interesting things and do 100x the usage of a single query, and put 100x the charge on the corporate credit card.

It'll probably have a chilling effect, with companies being like "ok maybe let's tone down a bit on the AI usage", just like how they hire consultants to bring down their runaway AWS costs.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#154

Post by slfnflctd »

BrenBarn wrote: post #51

This is another article that, for me, sort of walks right by the answers without realizing it. As I was reading, I was thinking "does this person really not think AI is going to be flooded with ads soon enough?" Then they asked the LLM that, and it basically said yes, and then the response. . . to go "Hmmm, I wonder if that will happen"? Yes, of course it's going to happen. Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering…

> Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content

Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process.

I guess it's similar to how a lot of white folks thought racism was over until Obama came along and brought the bigots out of the woodwork.

> lock away that toxic waste

The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#155

Post by elif »

Completely agree with this post I don't even think he's exaggerating.

I tried to search the full name of a specific roof company in my area in quotes, and they weren't in the first page of results. But I got so many disclosed and not disclosed ads for OTHER contractors.

SEO has turned search engines into a kind of quasi-mafia "protection" racket.. "oh you didn't pay your protection fee, wouldn't it be a shame if something happened to your storefront?"

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#156

Post by Cthulhu_ »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #108
sheiyei wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YET.

Remember, Google also didn't have ads interspersed with their search results for over 1̶2̶ 2 years

And they were actually praised when they did start doing ads because they weren't as obtrusive as the existing heavy duty in-your-face Flash animations and they were relevant to a user.

It quickly turned Google into the biggest / most valuable internet company of all time ever, and it still wasn't enough for them.

I've had adblockers running for as long as I can remember so I'm blisfully unaware of how bad it is now... mostly, I don't have adblockers on my phone and some pages are unusable.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#157

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

rightbyte wrote: post #152
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #115

> I would rather use a library where the librarians don’t have financial incentives to show me certain kinds of books more often than others. Oh, you sweet summer child... I have family that used to be in charge of dealing with institutional corruption. In particular, public service corruption. It's bad. Very, very bad. When "public servants" are paid less than their private counterparts, are routinely treated like c…

What are you claiming here? That librarians get kickbacks on certain books?

Probably in that case (the hypothetical), but everyone knows librarians do it for the bananas.

ook

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#159

Post by fancyfredbot »

graemep wrote: post #101
fancyfredbot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK 190 libraries have been closed in the last five years. Before closure some of these only opened 2 days a week. It's common for libraries which remain open to be staffed by unpaid volunteers. My point is that the funding model for libraries is not exactly a massive success! I expect these libraries would have accepted advertising funding before they chose closure. I'm not aware of any advertising funded libr…

I think that is more the result of bad government than anything else. Libraries are a low profile resource with long term benefits (e.g. improving education and quality of life) in ways that are not immediately captured by metrics. They are incredibly good value for money, if you understand the benefits and take a long view. However, politically they are an easy thing to cut.

This is nothing to do with libraries being good or bad value though.

Libraries are not advertising funded because advertisers are not very interested.

If advertisers were interested then these libraries would likely be just as infested with adverts as the internet.

If we tried to fund the internet in the same way as libraries advertisers would still be strongly incentivised to show adverts and would still work hard to find ways to do so. So it's not clear the situation would change much if there was government funding for content creators.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#160

Post by andruby »

Lu2025 wrote: post #137
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

Regarding money, they label a lot of expenses as R&D and write them off taxes. Taxpayers foot the bill to some extent.

That's not how accounting works. Companies pay salaries and pay for hardware. They don't make profit so they don't pay taxes.

By labeling the salaries as R&D assets and amortizing that over 5 years (instead of taking it completely in the first year), they're more likely to make "accounting" profit and pay taxes in the early years.

Those legislative changes will likely move forward the taxes being paid.

But to your point: not paying taxes because a company is investing doesn't mean taxpayers are footing the bill. It does mean the company isn't contributing to paying taxes while it is in "growth investing" mode.

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