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‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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I really, really hope this happens.
At first I thought this was just a bluff... Then I remembered "right! It's 2023! Our economic structures are imploding!"
But seriously, this would be great. At best, Google starts indexing cached versions and they get into a slugging match with Reddit as they both slide down the cliff, at worst Google and Reddit both become useless for all us technical folks, and after the immediate damage to knowledge, it'll become fragmented and open the door to new players still at the "don't be evil" phase of the inevitable path to "become an amoral orphan crushing machine".
Stack overflow and Reddit suck... But not intrinsically.
Especially since generative AI can spin out the basics of a site like that, making it an easy and better structured place for general reference, and draw in the expert discussion that leads to building very specific knowledge bases (and definitely not scrape that info from existing sites and rephrase everything to obscure the fact it's stolen info)
But the one thing we know for sure... Threatening Google to make a deal with all AI companies is "let's make everyone mistrust Twitter until we reach a trust underflow and everyone trusts it as a one stop financial platform + paid advertising posing as microblogging social media" levels of "gradeschoolers could have told you that makes no sense"
new players still at the “don’t be evil” phase of the inevitable path to “become an amoral orphan crushing machine”.Ann I think you mean how enshitification happens. Yes: there is an official, agreed-upon word for this exact thing that keeps happening
Oh for sure, it's my favorite word of 2023. I've taught everyone I know - I've been using it enough I'm now trying to avoid saying it directly
Overuse is how you turn a specific term into a meaningless buzzword after all - and enshittification is a wonderfully precise explanation of a nebulous process of capitalism self-cannibalizing around us, a system based on growth that ran out of profitable markets to colonize
Doctorow fan?
I'm really hoping this market crash affects the housing market so I might finally be able to afford a down-payment for a house
Don't worry, there's three end conditions for the capitalism game.
Full automation wins capitalism. Meaning robots that can create and maintain more robots from an entirely automated supply chain. Having money to buy a replicating robot, a junkyard, and pay the power bill for a year means that in a couple years, you could have an army of worker robots who built their own factory, sustainable power source, and be well on your way to harvesting the methane wafting off to fuel the rockets you're building. And once you mine your first asteroid outside the gravity well, within decades you can be building super structures. It's essentially infinite ROI. Once it's bootstrapped, it means a defacto monopoly over every physical good, forever - the game is over, we have the winners
Super intelligence (sentient or just a bigger faster tool like LLM, anything that can solve complex systems like the stock market or complicated systems like the stock trading software stack) breaks capitalism. One person (digital or sitting at a keyboard) can control the system by exploiting the rules by operating on a different timescale. They can also do a hell of a lot more important things, but again, capitalism as we know it has to end
Both of those situations are pretty closely related - one can quickly give you the other - but the other similarity is that you get a VERY small group of winners... And there's this giant army that would dogpile the winners, because the .01% isn't going to smile and offer handshakes as a few members of the .1% are busy gaining the power to rule over everyone like godkings... The board will get flipped and the rules rewritten once again... But with the slightest bit of luck, the same technology will fall into hobbiest hands and be shared freely
And finally, shit just keeps getting worse. We have pretty much constant protests at this point, monthly events where cities get demolished, and people are getting both pissed and desperate. The clock is ticking fast for stuff like ubi or free housing to push it back further, but humanity as a whole is getting ready to flip the table.
So don't worry... Soon the homes will be worthless, one way or another, and then you won't have to worry about crazy nonsense like a mortgage (that for no real reason, "creates" 90% of it's value - repeating. Meaning when all is said and done, one mortgage of $N creates almost $10N in new money if everyone uses banks)
Try looking into new builds. Part of the reason for the sky high housing market is that we haven't been building enough new housing for the last 30 years or so. Not saying that a new build house would be any cheaper, but most people just look at the cost of buying something that has already been built.