They do the things they think they can do very well.

Why would they try to build electric batteries, wireless modems, electric cars, solar cells, or quantum computers, if their R&D hadn't already determined that they would likely be able to do so Very Well?

It's not like any of those are really in their primary lines of business anyway.

In Upstate New York (from which I have just moved), February is the depths of winter. The temperature there can plunge to -10°F (for the highs) for a week straight. It's not until early April that you're really guaranteed to see things thawing for good. (March can be a crapshoot; sometimes it's looking like spring, with warm breezes and birds returning, and other times you get 4 feet of snow dumped on you. In the same week.)

The maritime climate of the British Isles makes an enormous difference to the climate they experience—certainly as compared to the continental US, and to a lesser degree as compared to continental Europe. It's actually kind of fascinating teasing apart which of our cultural truisms about seasons originated on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, vs which ones were developed once we had colonized the New World.

There's a big difference between 40-50°F in November, when the trees are brown and barren, and you're looking ahead to winter, and you swear there's a hint of frost in the air...

...and 40-50°F in April, when the leafbuds are coming out, and the geese are flying back north, and is that a crocus coming up over there?

This seems like another instance of a problem I see so, so often in regard to LLMs: people observe the fact that LLMs are fundamentally nondeterministic, in ways that are not possible to truly predict or learn in any long-term way...and they equate that, mistakenly, to the fact that humans, other software, what have you sometimes make mistakes. In ways that are generally understandable, predictable, and remediable.

Just because I don't know what's in every piece of software I'm running doesn't mean it's all equally unreliable, nor that it's unreliable in the same way that LLM output is.

That's like saying just because the weather forecast sometimes gets it wrong, meteorologists are complete bullshit and there's no use in looking at the forecast at all.

Small site operators like us know very well that the utility they can get by scraping us is marginal at best. Based on their patterns of behavior, though, my best guess is that they've simply configured their bots to scrape absolutely everything, all the time, forever, as aggressively as possible, and treat any attempt to indicate "hey, this data isn't useful to you" as an adversarial signal that the site operator is trying to hide things from them that are their God-given right.

But it is not necessary to see the results that are being described.

If sites like my tiny little browser game, with roughly 120 weekly unique users, are getting absolutely hammered by the scraper-bots (it was, last year, until I put the Wiki behind a login wall; now I still get a significant amount of bot traffic, it's just no longer enough to actually crash the game), then sites that people actually know and consider important like acme.com are very likely to be getting massive deluges of traffic purely from first-order hits.

Have you not been paying attention to the news for the past few years?

No, there isn't. If there were, Trump would be in prison, not the Oval Office. And he and the Republican Party have deliberately fostered this environment of corruption and rule-by-wealth so that they can gain more power and even more wealth.

And now they are also backing the AI zealots, and techbros more generally, to ensure that they can do whatever the hell they want, damn the consequences to the rest of the world.

Not just that: how do you even define "the collapse of American society"?

What, exactly, do people think that would look like?

The Purge?

Complete anarchy? Riots in the streets?

The classic image of a burning metal garbage can in the street?

To the extent that a modern society like that of the US can "collapse", it's going to be a very, very slow and uneven thing. Most likely what it would look like is a Balkanization of the country—either de-facto, or full legal (or illegal) secession of groups of states, over the course of a number of years.

Once you get down to the level of property rights, the only alternative left is total might-makes-right anarchy.

Property rights are some of the earliest and most basic things protected by governments—indeed, to a large extent they precede governments, being protected with force by the people who wish to assert them.

Wipe out all regulations, all laws, all property rights, and try to run fiber across someone's property without their permission, and they're likely to come out with a shotgun and start shooting everyone digging. Follow the steps logically from that point, and you'll fairly quickly start reinventing governments and regulations.

I mean...I'm a pretty easygoing guy overall. My boundaries are things like, "If you come up and scream in my face, I'll tell you to sod off." "If you punch me, I'll probably shove you back." Reasonable boundaries for other people might be "if you grab my butt, I will report you to HR", or "if you ask me to work unpaid overtime, I will refuse (and report you to HR/the NLRB)".

It seems like you think "people setting boundaries" looks like telling your coworkers things like "never ever speak to me in anything but the most respectful tones" or "if you ask me about my personal life, even the tiniest bit, I will call the police". Except in extremely unusual circumstances, "boundaries" like that are actually people being abusive of their coworkers.

No, it's not.

A boundary is something you're saying about your behavior. "If you use racist language at me, I will have to end this conversation."

And much, much worse than someone with "a minefield full of unnecessary boundaries" is someone who has boundaries they don't tell you about.

You should only set boundaries that are real boundaries for you, not just whims or arbitrary decisions. But if you do have boundaries—and everyone does; if you think you don't, then you just haven't had someone cross them (or haven't realized that's what happened when they did)—you must communicate them in contexts where there's a real chance of them being crossed.

To do otherwise is unfair to everyone else and to yourself.

I'm boycotting them. After all, every cent that goes their way supports surveillance advertising (among other unsavory things).

I have other subscriptions that support ad-free creators.

If they choose to misconstrue my refusal to support them with either money or ad views, that's also their problem. (Also, that's patently never going to happen, because my signal vanishes instantly into the noise.)

Over the whole industry? No; they can never, ever stop training, or they'll cease to be useful at all very soon.

Training is what keeps the models up-to-date on current events, which includes new programming languages, frameworks, and techniques. It's already been observed that using LLM assistance on some types of programming is much more effective than others, based on how well-represented they are in the training data: if everyone stopped training tomorrow, and next month a new programming language came out, none of them would ever be able to help you program in that new language.

This can be extended to other aspects of programming, too. If training stopped, coding assistants would gradually start giving you wrong answers on how to implement code for APIs, frameworks, and languages that continued to evolve, as they will always do, in much subtler (and likely harder-to-debug) ways than how they'd deal with a new language whose existence they don't even know about.

They're a multibillion-dollar international monopoly with absolutely staggering amounts of money and power, actively engaging in a wide variety of activities directly aimed at making the lives of every normal person on the planet worse so that they can have more power, more control, and more money. Me blocking ads on YouTube not only costs them effectively nothing, it's also the act of a flea against a polar bear.

If Alphabet showed any signs of actually wanting to create a sustainable alternative to the surveillance economy, I might have some sympathy for them. But not only do they not do this, they are the ones who created it in the first place.

Sure, it would be great if we could have nice things like that, but all too often we need to work with the infrastructure we have.

And my (rough, limited) understanding is that based on much more recent projections, it would take several orders of magnitude more computing power to genuinely simulate a human brain than what we have.

And no bubble can last forever.

And the longer they go, and the larger they get, the worse the fallout is when they finally pop.