It’s not the technology I’m dismissive about. It’s the economics.
25 years ago I was optimistic about the internet, web sites, video streaming, online social systems. All of that. Look at what we have now. It was a fun ride until it all ended up “enshitified”. And it will happen to LLMs, too. Fool me once.
Some developer tools might survive in a useful state on subscriptions. But soon enough the whole A.I. economy will centralise into 2 or 3 major players extracting more and more revenue over time until everyone is sick of them. In fact, this process seems to be happening at a pretty high speed.
Once the users are captured, they’ll orient the ad-spend market around themselves. And then they’ll start taking advantage of the advertisers.
I really hope it doesn’t turn out this way. But it’s hard to be optimistic.
Contrary to the case for the internet, there is a way out, however - if local, open-source LLMs get good. I really hope they do, because enshittification does seem unavoidable if we depend on commercial offerings.
Well the "solution" for that will be the GPU vendors focusing solely on B2B sales because it's more profitable, therefore keeping GPUs out of the hands of average consumers. There's leaks suggesting that nVidia will gradually hike the prices of their 5090 cards from $2000 to $5000 due to RAM price increases ( https://wccftech.com/geforce-rtx-5090-prices-to-soar-to-5000... ). At that point, why even bother with the R&D for newer consumer cards when you know that barely anyone will be able to afford them?
It’s the third stage in the process. First the platform is good to users. Then it’s bad to users but good to business customers. Third, and finally, it’s bad to both users and business customers. Now it’s only the shareholders that are winning.
> We further urge the machine learning community to act proactively by establishing robust design guidelines, collaborating with public health experts, and supporting targeted policy measures to ensure responsible and ethical deployment
We’ve seen this play out before, when social media first came to prominence. I’m too old and cynical to believe anything will happen. But I really don’t know what to do about it at a person level. Even if I refuse to engage in this content, and am able to identify it, and keep my family away from it…it feels like a critical mass of people in my community/city/country are going to be engaging with it. It feels hopeless.
I tend to think that it leads to censorship, and then censorship at a broader level in the name of protecting our kids. See with social networks where you now have to give your ID card to protect kids.
The best way in that case is education of the kids / people and automatically flag potentially harmful / disgusting content and let the owner of the device set-up the level of filtering he wants.
Like with LLMs they should be somewhat neutral in default mode but they should never refuse a request if user asks.
Otherwise the line between technology provider and content moderator is too blurry, and tomorrow SV people are going to abuse of that power (or be coerced by money or politics).
At a person / parent level, time limits (like you can do with web filtering device for TikTok), content policy would solve and taking time to spend with the kids as much as possible and to talk to them so they don’t become dumber and dumber due to short videos.
But totally opposed that it should be done on public policy level: “now you have right to watch pornography but only after you give ID to prove you are adult” (this is already the case in France for example)
It can quickly become: “now to watch / generate controversial content, you have to ID”
That doesn't work when the Chinese produce uncensored open weight models, or ones that can easily be adapted to create uncensored content.
Censorship for generative AI simply doesn't work the way we are used to, unless we make it illegal to posess a model that might generate illegal content, or that might have been trained on illegal data.
> Censorship for generative AI simply doesn't work the way we are used to, unless we make it illegal to posess a model that might generate illegal content, or that might have been trained on illegal data.
Censorship doesn't work for stuff that is currently illegal. See pirated movies.
I don't know much about this, but does "proximity pairing" use some open standard API that's part of the bluetooth spec? Are there any examples of other devices using something like this?
Part of the appeal of Airpods is how seamless they are to pair and share between devices. The UX of bluetooth headphones pairing and device switching before Airpods came along seemed atrocious.
Is this a case of Apple arbitrarily locking out third parties, or is a case of Apple doing the work to get something to work nicely and now being forced to give competition access?
I don't know how proximity pairing works in Apple land. My wife uses Apple devices.
But between my Android phone and my contractor issued Windows laptop, the $20 headphone I use just works. It connects to both of them because of multi-pairing.
If one of the devices is playing, say, a Youtube video, the other doesn't take over the sound even if I start playing music there. And if I pause the Youtube video in one device, the other is free to play sounds.
It's seamless and intuitive.
I should try also pairing to my Linux workstation. If that works too I would be impressed.
Several Sony models are also very good, being built with Samsung panels and their own in-house image processing which is some of the best in the industry. Their TVs run Android and support offline firmware updates, too, which is why they're usually what I buy.
I uninstalled it after about half an hour of use when it became clear the app kept pushing me to watch videos with Andrew Tate (with him on the top half of the screen and random racing games on the bottom half). It’s dystopian.
Does that work with the DRM from streaming apps, though? Can you get 4K and atmos with Netflix or Disney+ with that hardware? And an easy remote and UI?
My LG TV has been offline for the past 2 years (since I got it). I'm so much happier using the Apple TV.
I know people want "dumb" displays, but the reality is that these OLED panels offer industry-leading image quality and benefit from economies of scale, where most users want some form of built-in OS. A signage board cannot compete on price or quality. As long as TV manufacturers let me run it offline without issue, I'm fine with that.
Also fwiw, you can use apps like Infuse on the Apple TV for playing your own media files over the network. No Need for USB drives, just connect direct to the shared folder.
> As long as TV manufacturers let me run it offline without issue, I'm fine with that.
I suspect that this won't be the case for much longer. Once you've stuffed the TV with all the ads and data harvesting you can, the logical next step is to ensure it doesn't work at all unless those ads are being watched and that data is being harvested.
if you have a family with daytime viewing habits, projectors are basically a no go. 100" tv, with better brightness and black levels, are getting down to $2k range. they only make sense for > 100", and you'll be sacrificing some quality for a bit of viewing angle, usually recovered by scooting your couch a bit closer. i like bright, which is why i no longer go to theaters, which never did make the transition to HDR that they promised over a decade ago.
Then it is Apple that is harvesting your data. They may or may not display ads (I don't have an AppleTV to check), but they are certainly logging your interactions and possibly selling that data with third parties. That is on top of all the data Apple already has on people using iPhones, and the reason why I will never use anything other than a free/libre ROM like Graphene or Lineage.
I'm sure some conspiratorial thinking would lead people to the conclusion that Apple are secretly tracking and selling data. There is no evidence to suggest this is happening.
It's probably the next best thing to setting up your own linux home theater PC. But that comes with trade-offs with UX and DRM blocking 4K streaming apps and lack of Dolby Vision playback.
My samsung and lg tvs also have options to disable data harvesting. The problem , however, is that just like the apple tv they all are black boxes that have no intention in respecting your choices, thus you can't trust that disabling those options is actually disabling all the data harvesting and tracking. Apple is not a saint.
The privacy policy literally includes that they do?
> We provide some non-personal data to our advertisers and strategic partners that work with Apple to provide our products and services, help Apple market to customers, and sell ads on Apple’s behalf to display on the App Store and Apple News and Stocks. For example, we may share non-personal data about your transactions, viewing activity, and region, as well as aggregated user demographics such as age group and gender (which may be inferred from information such as your name and salutation in your Apple Account), to Apple TV strategic partners, such as content owners, so that they can measure the performance of their creative work, meet royalty and accounting requirements, and improve their associated products and services.
Infuse is a game-changer. I’ve been network streaming from my own media servers since the days of the original Xbox Media Center. Infuse is the best setup I’ve used. It a shame there’s nothing comparable in terms of polish on Linux or Android.
> but the reality is that these OLED panels offer industry-leading image quality
Except in scenes with fire (like a campfire) or where some spots may have high brightness compared to the surroundings. The LG OLED TVs I’ve seen all go blank in such scenes. The TVs I’ve seen that have LCD panels don’t have this issue. It seems like the only way to disable it (after turning off power saving and a few other things) is to buy and use a service remote to turn off ASBL. From my online reading, it seems like doing this may void the warranty and probably have negative effects on the life of the panel.
I have an LG OLED and have never seen it go blank on any scene.
It just looks great all the time. Especially on scenes like you describe with a dark scene with bright highlights. Campfire scenes look great, space scenes look great. That's what OLED is best at.
If you're talking about ABL, I've only noticed the dimming on ads or powerpoint lectures that have fully white backgrounds, and I've been thankful for it at those times because I find all-white backgrounds too bright to watch anyway.
There are no ads in the AppleTV operating system itself.
The only Apple “ads” I ever see are inside the Apple TV+ app (yeah, their naming is confusing…) and it’s only for TV shows they’re promoting in their streaming service.
I installed an AppleTV recently, so I don't have much experience. But the first thing I saw after the initial setup was one/third of the display advertising a TV-show on a subscription service I had to purchase. Would that count as an ad?
Apps placed in the top row of the app grid get to display content at the top area, when that app is selected. Most apps use it for things like continue watching or show recommendations.
That’s very different from turning on your TV and seeing an ad for Mercedes or whatever taking up the screen.
On the Apple TV you get ‘ads’ for the apps you have in your top row, with different levels of interactivity. Some are just logos of that streaming service, some show recently watched. The Apple TV app has full-blown ads for Apple TV+ originals.
They won’t actually let you delete the Apple TV app, but if you move it out of the top row you will never see the ads.
My parents have an Amazon Fire TV and when I go to their house and have to use it it drives me insane. Carousels of adds large at the top, banner ads as you scroll, full rows of sponsored apps. Full screen ads for random Amazon products when you pause any show you are watching. Everything you watch on Amazon’s streaming service has minute long unskippable ads. Sometimes when you turn it on Alexa will just verbally read you ads.
25 years ago I was optimistic about the internet, web sites, video streaming, online social systems. All of that. Look at what we have now. It was a fun ride until it all ended up “enshitified”. And it will happen to LLMs, too. Fool me once.
Some developer tools might survive in a useful state on subscriptions. But soon enough the whole A.I. economy will centralise into 2 or 3 major players extracting more and more revenue over time until everyone is sick of them. In fact, this process seems to be happening at a pretty high speed.
Once the users are captured, they’ll orient the ad-spend market around themselves. And then they’ll start taking advantage of the advertisers.
I really hope it doesn’t turn out this way. But it’s hard to be optimistic.
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