That has actually become part of my philosophy for predicting the future: We're all biased towards things which fit a dramatic story or movie, which puts an unrealistic floor on things like meaninglessness, chaos, stupidity, or boredom.
So to a certain extent, any prediction which gets people excited and captures their imagination is already off.
AFAICT in ~Dec 2024 the reasoning was that they had a paywall.
I don't know what percentage of their articles were behind a paywall back then, or the relative change to now. (Well, except for the fact that clearly some of their stuff is public today since we're looking at it.)
If I had my 'druthers, "paywall" and "register-wall" would be little icons on individual submissions. Then people would choose whether to upvote a more-accessible option instead, whether the hard-to-read stuff was still important enough to commenting on, etc.
> Sunburn is triggered when your DNA is damaged from light absorption [...] This interferes with protein synthesis and wreaks havoc in your body over time
Not a skin-scientist, but this seems misleading: Sunburn is not caused by some bad DNA floating around, nor damaged cells making making mistakes or pumping out wrong proteins to inflame their neighbors.
Instead, your cells have techniques to measure a variety of risk factors and signals (which does include DNA-molecule weirdness [0]) and when things get too risky the well-behaved ones will self-destruct, to avoid the chance of turning into a cancer.
So the sunburn you see and feel is instead due to cells signalling "something damaged me and I can't be trusted, I'm shutting down, recycle me" to your immune-system, plus the attendant bustle of hazmat-cleanup and increased security-sweeps for cancer-leftovers and other potential causes of the damage.
DNA is the instruction set for protein synthesis. If your DNA is damaged beyond repair that's an issue, and sure apoptosis is the usual result and not cancer. At the same time however when cells die either from the direct impact of DNA damage or apoptosis they both stop working and spill their contents into the area... including signalling molecules that promote inflammation.
The sunburn you feel isn't a distress signal from cells warning that they can't be trusted, it's tissue death and an inflammatory reaction triggered by a cytokine response.
> Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share.
"Your honor, the defense assumes a fact which is not in evidence."
Why is that a safe assumption in this market in this decade? There are huge barriers to entry, both natural and artificially-created through market-clout and lobbying.
I think this is a reasonable opportunity to quote from the classic Deus Ex (2000), where the player is talking to a prototype AI system which was used a kind of demo to world leaders. [0]
_________________
MORPHEUS: "Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles
as I tell them who they are."
JC DENTON: "Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance."
MORPHEUS: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can
implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
JC DENTON: "Electronic surveillance hardly inspired reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience,
but not reverence."
MORPHEUS: "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment, and punishment.
Other sentiments toward them were secondary."
JC DENTON: "No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."
MORPHEUS: "The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the
observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you
have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.
JC DENTON: "You underestimate humankind's love of freedom."
MORPHEUS: "The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is
impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."
Doing inference locally is a significant improvement, but other issues remain, like prompt injection and data exfiltration.
Especially if the whole point is to have it search through a giant pile of arbitrary un-vetted stuff, like all the emails you ever received from anybody.
I sometimes look around at people proposing technical solutions for these political/legal/economic problems, and think: "Was I that naive X decades ago, or were things really different then?"
That experience actively drives me towards other retailers.
I want to buy what I want to buy, and I will never buy things that I do not want to buy. If the time ever comes that I am tricked into buying the wrong thing from Amazon, then I'm sending it back on their dime.
If that means that only 3 things fit, then I only want to see exactly 3 things. If that means that 0 things fit, then 0 is also a valid result. In response to these results, I can then elect to soften my constraints at my own volition.
But an Amazon search typically results endless pages of vaguely-related products that represent a jumbled mess of things largely do not fit or only-sorta fit the broad concept of what I intend to purchase.
When I want a 4300 Kelvin D2S HID headlight bulb for my car, then that's all that I want to find when I search for it. I do not want results for LEDs. I do not want selective yellow bulbs. I do not want 5000k or 6500k or 10000k. I do not want an "upgrade" kit, nor D2R bulbs, nor D3S. None of those things are useful to me.
The list of things that I do not want is infinite, and when Amazon presents a seemingly-infinite list of them then that represents the opposite of usefulness.
I only want to peruse listings that match. I require no more and no less than this in order to be satisfied. There is no possible amount of additional noise that can ever dissuade me from seeking the thing that I very specifically desire.
A modern LLM can weed out and separate the bad results from the good ones and give me an easier time of making a purchase decision, but it can only do so when it is not blocked from the start.
That ship has long since sailed for every search product. Companies have long-since learned that intent-based results are much more profitable (why show an empty result page when you can show something for people to buy or click on?), but it is also often genuinely useful when your search is not perfect or what you want doesn't actually exist. I agree that it is annoying when you really truly do only want something very specific and the ranking prioritizes the wrong things (e.g., sponsored results, more profitable items, etc.) over exact matches, but can you honestly and truly say you've never found any value from intent search algorithms?
I very often truly only want something very specific. I'm not apologetic about that at all.
When I want oolong tea bags and I search for "oolong tea bags," then I definitely don't want to be shown bulk green tea instead.
If I want to find any kind of tea instead of specifically oolong -- if, perchance, I wish to peruse the broader market of available tea -- then I'm very capable of removing "oolong" and/or "bags" from my search prompt.
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I can look around and observe that the ship has sailed, but that doesn't mean I'll ever be happy with the outcome or accepting of any notion that the situation is anything other than hostile.
Can you recognize that it gets between me and my willingness to spend money?
You mean if they falsify the search for both sides they make more money, as ironically spelt out in Google's original paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine":
“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
“advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”
“the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model...”
Note: they even explain why advertising funded search makes things worse for customers and for advertisers. Worse search finds more ads and thus more dollars, resulting in both worsening search results over time AND less value for ad money over time.
So to a certain extent, any prediction which gets people excited and captures their imagination is already off.
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