I suspect they have not all been wrong for some people, e.g. native peoples at various times prophesied I’m sure about various technological marvels their more advanced colonizers/enemies/etc.
Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
mtr xcancel.com
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?
No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.
Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.
It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.
Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.
If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.
And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.
Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.
I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.
> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?
Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).
So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.
It's not about "how things actually work", the law is there to regulate human activity. The law tends to call these copies on the wire, in RAM, in caches, etc. "transient copies", which is fine until a human starts using them as non-transient copies, e.g. saves them for later.
You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)
> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.
Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.
Sure, but that seems different from what I was addressing. The person I was responding to was saying that the law as a whole usually doesn’t make sense. They were saying that in the context of arguing that if the law didn’t consider viewing a page of copyrighted copying as involving copying due to the technical basis of it having to transfer bits to your computer then the law didn’t make sense. My point was that laws don’t have to encompass or fully specify all edge cases, and that the ways laws are written can be open to interpretation. I think I removed a sentence before posting about the purpose of finders of facts in the US system like juries or judges in bench trials.
I think for two the current chart of the economy isn’t being looked at. Things are generally either headed towards high quality high margin very expensive items or the lowest possible quality that can be sold. There are fewer and fewer “middle class” options. Once humans are replaced and can serve the elite, then the continued discussion about how to get rid of the rest of humanity will continue (https://wabcradio.com/2026/02/05/doj-files-shows-epstein-and... note almost everyone is poor relative to a billionaire) and then they’ll realize they have billions of drones and an automated military and then weee!
All technology and infrastructure needs maintenance. Sure there will be drones. However, there will also be companies and people that specialize in creating and maintaining the said drones. Additionally, the shock and immediate disruption that we all are expecting out of this is flawed assumption I think.
I do however hate to admit that it might be possible that the world simply wouldn't require as many humans to function (birth rates are already declining in developed countries), however, I am too sober to have that discussion right now :D.
Fair. And yes, the Wall-E problem still stands. We already have dark factories though. Can we design machine repairable factories that produce machines to repair machine repairing factories? I suspect we'll find out very soon.
I think the 3.8 Flash release shows they are doing just fine at AI. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropomorphic, Google doesn’t have to release new models to capture VC sentiment every three months. They have the hardware, data and money. And when they release a model it’s very good.
They can be doing fine at AI models but not so well with AI revenue.
Although I am curious if they are not worried and playing the long game confident that their distribution will eventually help them catch up (and worst case they own some of Anthropic). But obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have their own distribution now too.
Nobody is doing well enough with AI revenue ATM (https://isaiprofitable.com/). At the moment it is probably more about market share of users, that is where the investment capital will need to be clawed back from when it starts to be called back (or replacement money will need to come from if the investment cycle simply stops giving generously).
While true, Google is particularly vulnerable to AI disrupting the traditional internet ad model. They have to figure out how to make AI profitable or Google will suffer catastrophic revenue, profit, and stock price declines in short order.
Can they not just do what they expected sites to do when their search results started including key extracts from sites, significantly reducing click-throughs to news pages and such?
[couldn't resist the snark, I don't exactly feel sorry for them here!]
I think this is their obvious strategy. What's not so obvious is that they'll succeed. Their share of consumer LLM users is around 27%. Their share of search engine users is above 91%. If current growth trajectory holds (which is admittedly unpredictable), Google will command far less of the global internet ad market.
I expect aggregate ad revenue to climb, so this might sting less, but much of Google's stock price imputes their dominant market position (and implied moat). A large proportion of users don't first navigate to Google anymore. They ask ChatGPT. Commoditised LLMs (or worse, a dominant provider which isn't Google) is a very bad scenario for Google.
I think they're going to have to diversify. Cloud compute revenue keeps climbing. Their deal with Apple for "small" LLMs suggests they might have opportunities to specialise models for specific tasks. They still command a massive lead in things like Maps and Gmail, and they can lean on those.
I do wonder if the more they goose their ad business the faster it eventually falls. I know I am more and more reluctant to view many normal Web page ads at all and usually immediately click away the second a site gets annoying
I block ads because I don’t want my family exposed to scams, clickbait, and offensive content. If ads weren’t so annoying, I wouldn’t put too much effort into blocking them.
Also: Creepy surveillance, and a delivery mechanism for malware/viruses.
Online advertising has completely broken from anything resembling the traditional social-contract of magazine ads, billboard, signs, etc. They're preying on your safety and privacy, not just your attention.
The other companies are stealing people's work for headlines and sabotaging each other. Google is offering a whole bunch of Gemini APIs that do real shit, with the same terms and contracts and the existing products for most of them.
A large chunk of the population don't use Google to search anymore. They go straight for the GenAIs. That's got to be scaring a lot of managerial folks at Google.
Slide 65 of this (very nice) set of slides [1] broke down search vs genAI use to get information. "Mostly genAI was not breaking 25% in all age brackets... Curious to see how that will evolve
The Gen AIs are doing the search for people. So hopefully this forces google to switch their business model from manipulative ads against human users to just charging for API access for Gen AI models.
No, Google will just do "product placement" in the AI output.
P.S. Google's real problem is that their web search is absolutely atrocious and completely broken. Even Qwen is better at searching the web than Google's AI search box.
I think Google's big bet (and Microsoft's before them) is in centralization of AI services, hosted using their model, and that AI at the edge will always be a bit player.
But what I see and hear from technical consumers, businesses, and govts is that they would prefer their data stay local, and like the idea of edge compute being used for AI.
Claude/OpenAI's direction with their Apps enabling deeper integration is a good direction, but the trust with data is still a growing concern. OpenAI's math actions on the NS problem degrades their reputation a lot.
Google’s cash cow is ads. I think the writing on the wall is ChatGPT and other AI search engines will dominate. It is to be seen how Google will respond. But in the end, their monopoly on web search is coming to an end.
Generated via ChatGPT, as google-ing it would have taken too much time:
Rank Cloud Approx. annual revenue Growth My assessment
1 AWS ~$129B ~20% Clear leader
2 Microsoft Azure ~$90B ~40%+ Strong #2, rapidly closing
3 Google Cloud ~$59B 36% Fastest-growing historically, but smaller
which is to say that Google is still way behind AWS and Azure. Also, lots and lots of people have switched to using AI-interfaces now, I'm not hearing "I've googled that and that's what I found" anymore, it's all "I've chatgpt-ed and this is what it told me".
It's not about releasing models. Consumer market share of chatgpt is still >60%, if not more. Their search engine was hit and as soon as product search starts declining on Google this will be a code red. They're in an extreme nicle and dime mode.
Openrouter isn't even 00.01% of tokens used on a daily basis. China alone uses 500 Trillion tokens a day and they're only 1/8th of the world. Much of the world has a google account, use your brain.
How are they going to generate revenue if their old model is Ads on search and the new model is yet to show how revenue can be generated. ChatGPT (on free) is showing ads now but they are not targeted and I highly doubt they are worth anything.
very HN take. Reality is 3.8 flash is good at what it does (being fast + cheap)... but that market is becoming very saturated and google is not competing at all at the frontier where major spend lies.
It's ridiculously fast, and generally very good with real-world knowledge. It's my go-to for anything non-coding, and for quick fixes/questions/prototypes.
If metrics measured what most people need from an LLM, it's competitive, IMO, and with their TPU chips, it's probably economically competitive.
Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market.
I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.
If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.
That was the moment that business/wealth/rich decided to turn their resources towards directly influencing and controlling government. Reagan and his made up “welfare queens” came shortly after and wealth inequality has sharply risen since. Wildly successful coup.
If people are in favor of changing the law they can vote for folks to change it. Until then, the government needs to follow the law - especially the highest in the land.
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