That would make a great title for a write-up of your experience.

I assume the most problematic scenarios are private. Private meetings. Private conversations. Private encounters of every kind in general. Environment in which ordinary people used to have good enough confidence that, unless they see a phone or a camera, they are not being recorded. It no longer is that simple.

Confirming, at least to some extent, that there is no recording going on may now require confronting the other person. And asking them to remove their glasses or hand them over for inspection might be considered rude.

As a result, I think that it might make people more suspicious and less trusting, especially when meeting new people for the first time.

Yes. You can of course always close it to the public if the public usage bothers you. Or require those using it to agree to your terms and conditions where you restrict the speed, the weight, the time of the day, etc. Anything you want.

But if you choose to make it public with no restrictions, you have to be prepared to face the consequences.

Of course. You listed complex examples from the real world. A park where walking is allowed but damaging the plants is not, for instance. There it makes sense to distinguish various activities that can be done in there and treat them separately.

But a website offers not much activities that you can do with it. You can read it. And that is about it.

Having terms and conditions in itself is irrelevant. Because in order for them to have any legal meaning, it is necessary for the other party to agree to them.

An agreement can be implicitly enforced by law. Or explicitly enforced by the website itself before giving access to the data. If neither of those are present, there is no enforced agreement. And agreeing to it becomes optional. Such sites should be considered, in my opinion, publicly accessible.

> If I have a bike and you start renting it out without my permission, surely you are committing theft of some sort.

Of course. But that is a bad analogy. No one is "renting" or "taking" anything from those websites. The bots are just reading it.

Therefore, a better analogy would be that you have a bike, parked out in the public, and people are looking at it. By looking at it they steal nothing from you. And the bike and all of its parts remain yours at all times. That is a suitable analogy, in my opinion, to what those bots are doing.

Publicly. Accessible.

Of course there are some parts of the publicly accessible internet which host content that may be considered illegal or has been obtained illegally. If those AI bots used such content as well, it is fair to call it out as wrong, in my opinion. But that is a separate topic.

Blindly calling scraping of publicly accessible internet a "theft" is, in my opinion, disingenuous. Especially when coming from a company operating a web search engine. Which itself has its own bots scraping the same parts of the internet 24/7.

In a similar way, I would not consider AI to be the "author" of the output they produce. Rather, the person prompting it should be considered the author, in my opinion.

They used to have an excellent relationship with Canada, the UK, with the EU and with other civilized and democratic parts of the world. Until Trump started to undermine everything. And have selfish and unfair demands against everyone.

Now the US has a "comradeship" with Venezuela, Russia and North Korea.

I know that the above is perhaps an exaggeration. But the fact that the US now has worse relationships with almost all the civilized, democratic parts of the world and is bowing down to dictators and authoritarians does not come from external factors. It is all self-inflicted. Including the Iran war and its consequences.

For example this article: https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-net-investme...

The specific mechanism may vary by country. It often involves personal service companies through which the people are paid rather than being paid directly as employees. This usually means that they pay significantly less social insurance and health insurance than what they would have paid if they were regular employees.

To clarify, I am using the term taxes in a very generic way where it covers not only the income taxes but also all kinds of fees collectable by the government. Including social insurance and health insurance.

In other words, yes, they may pay 5x the price for a meal in an amusement park that they visit once a year. That does not mean they are willing to pay anything close to that for a meal every week or every day.

If a base rate that the society agrees on is e.g. n %, then, in my opinion, everyone should pay that n %. But in reality the poor people pay n % because they have no time to even think about optimizing it. As they often work around the clock to make ends meet. While the richer people hire professionals to take care of their taxes and optimize them to the extent that they pay significantly less than n %. And then there are super rich, some of whom, such as Donald Trump, pay almost no taxes at all.

This is, in my opinion, wrong and significantly contributes to wealth inequality. And therefore I believe that it needs fixing.

A user just opens the original X link in xcancel or some of the similar web service. And it will display the actual content only. Without ads and without other user-alienating features.

I think that it is also way simpler than "creating an account".

In my opinion, that is quite far from "functional".

Such a behavior alone is a sufficient justification, in my opinion, for the services like xcancel to exist.

And if the X social network does not want their content to be publicly available, fine. They are free to gate it behind a login.

Thanks to the fact that there are no widespread stories about this actually occurring in practice, at least not yet, people do not take it as a relevant risk at the moment.

> You have little ability to validate that the work is being performed as expected and isn't being silently nerfed or outright subverted based on competitive considerations, bribes, overactive 'safety', or cost management.

Yes, I agree that this is a real concern that many people might rightfully have. And I am unaware of any way to mitigate this concern while using black box AI models. Because the only thing that their creators can do is to tell their customers: "trust us". But there is no way to objectively verify whether they serve tainted AI model responses or not.

> this keeps only strengthening the AfD

I am unfamiliar with the details of German politics but if what you say is true, I am not surprised at all. I do not think that one can "win" against those parties by using their methods or adopting their positions. Because they are genuine at it. While the others would only fake it.

If the voters have a choice between a fake populist and a genuine populist, they would, in my opinion, naturally pick the genuine one.

I think that one of the reasons is that the "fakeness" is not very appealing to anyone. So they prefer the "real deal".

That issue is just one of many that they use and abuse to gain popularity. They have also spread lies about vaccines. They promote antisemitism, xenophobia, hate against the LGBTI people, historical revisionism (e.g. they say nice things about the Nazis), etc. They are even fighting against the wind turbines (or, as Donald Trump calls them, the "wind mills"). You cannot satisfy their demands by "fixing" one issue. Because they will always find another. The more absurd one, the better, it seems. I think that the reason is that those absurd causes are supported by people who are easy to manipulate. They know it. And they abuse it.

> Why wait for these parties to use this issue to fuel their growth?

No one wants to wait. But at the same time, I have not yet seen a successful recipe on how to root out their populist practices and render them ineffective against the general population at large. Because, unfortunately, there is still a considerable number of people who are falling for it. And it seems to me that no politician or party so far has been able to figure out a reliable way to protect those who are most vulnerable from being manipulated this way.

So that they can secure more and more fanatic followers who will vote for them no matter what. And so that they can remain in power for as long as possible.

To them, the "illegal immigration issue" is just a vehicle to gain power. Nothing more.

Because, from what I can see, their only and actual goal is to get in power. No matter the cost. Then abuse it to the benefit of them and their friends. And never ever give it up ever again.

Could you explain why you think so?

I am unfamiliar with these matters and I am also unsure what specifically you are referring to.

But in general, if big companies get away with wrongdoings by receiving a gentle slap on their fingers, figuratively speaking, it will, in my opinion, lead to no change whatsoever.

Because if there are no material consequences for wrongdoings, they probably would not care. And there are very few kinds of actually material consequences for big companies. One of them being a really hefty fine.