I am unaware of such a capability of Cloudflare.

I believe it is the site administrators who have inserted Cloudflare in between their sites and their users.

Usually it is done for rational reasons of establishing a protection against bots. But what is less rational, in my opinion, is when everyone uses the same provider for that.

Because it indirectly turns Cloudflare into a monopoly. And monopolies often converge to a state when they start to abuse their position.

Please do not use the term communist lightly, i.e. as an umbrella term for people who express ideas that e.g. more government control or regulation is in some circumstances reasonable.

The only forms of communism that have ever actually materialized in society have all been authoritarian regimes or outright dictatorships. Where the only "truth" is dictated by the governing leader or party. Where you cannot express your opinion freely. Where you cannot e.g. go to a university or have a slightly better job unless you are loyal to the party establishment. Where people are afraid to talk to their neighbors about politics because they cannot know who is going to report them for anti-government opinions. Where people are persecuted, imprisoned or even killed for their opinions.

To the best of my knowledge, Bernie Sanders has never expressed such ideas.

One might argue that here we are talking about the purely academic definition of communism. But unfortunately, in the real world, there is no such thing as academic communism. So far it has always come with the dictatorship and with people who abuse it. Always.

Perhaps the assumption is that these large AI companies need large datacenters to operate and that is how they will be regulated. But what about the datacenters outside the US jurisdiction? And what about local AI?

In the old days, the computers were huge and there was one per city. Now, several decades later, we all have plenty of our own computers. I cannot imagine why the trend would not continue with AI. Over time, it is in my opinion plausible that most of our common needs would be satisfied by local AI running on one's home servers or even phones.

How is that going to be regulated by owning a controlling stake in a few US AI companies?

I do not see into the details of what Mr. Bernie Sanders is suggesting. It seems to me though that his idea of somehow regulating the AI needs further development. Because the currently discussed approaches seem to me like a hot take that has not been thought over very well.

No one pretends that everything else is fine.

It is in my opinion reasonable to call out any violations of any law or any violations of the users' or companies' privacy as they are spotted. And everyone is best suited to spot issues in areas or fields in which they operate.

I think that there is a way to change that.

If an application runs significantly better on lower end hardware while delivering the same results, the customers should prefer it. It is just a matter of promoting it that way.

That would be an intentional poisoning of the models with biased or outright untruthful data.

I believe that many people would be unwilling to use such models.

Why do you believe so?

As long as there is a clear indication somewhere on the webpage (in the metadata or in the text itself) that a specific portion of a text is an ad, a browser extension will be able to block it.

And I assume that there are laws mandating that the ads must be clearly marked in order to be distinguishable from the genuine content.

Enshittification of the AI tools has officially begun.

Maybe we will soon find e.g. AI-generated pictures of ourselves in branded clothes or using branded products to appear among our photos, discretely disguised as genuine photos with a little badge in the corner indicating that it is actually a paid "promotion".

And so on. And that would still be, in my opinion, just the beginning.

How is that relevant to the topic of this discussion?

Compilation from higher order languages to the machine code is deterministic. It is sufficient to review and well-test the tool which does the translation. Given the same input, the output will always be the same.

Transformation of a natural language prompt to code by an AI tool is non-deterministic. The outputs will vary between runs. Therefore, it is always necessary to verify them.

That is the difference.

Agents might get better. But who will own the code and take responsibility for it? The AI agent? The company who created the AI agent?

If e.g. a car crashes and does not deploy its airbags because the AI agent made a mistake in the airbag code, will the manufacturer be able to shift the blame to OpenAI or Anthropic?

I do not think so.

And therefore I believe that no matter how good the AI agents will ever become, the ultimate responsibility for the code will always remain with the companies that create the code. Regardless of which AI tools they use.

I see no other way to bear that responsibility by the company than to have people internally who will be responsible. And those people, if they actually want to own that responsibility, would need to understand that code themselves, in my opinion. Because relying on a non-deterministic AI agent's vetting is fundamentally unreliable, in my opinion.

Have you measured the impact of that on your ability to create good code? From my experience, relying on AI tends to degrade that ability.

Also, you seem to be able to do all of what you say and benefit from AI tools because you seem to understand the overall bigger picture well enough to be able to drive the AI agents to do their work properly. In other words, you operate in a familiar territory where you do not need to learn much new things.

But what about the junior people with little experience? Will they be able to manage such AI workflow? And more importantly, if junior people are given such AI tools, how will they learn?

These are all questions which may not matter in the short term and one might ignore them if they just want to see the profits and efficiency gains during the next cycle. But what about the long term?

> you're pushing a behavior-modification scheme onto users

In general I think that your comment is reasonable. I just would like to point out that such "behavior-modification" schemes are sometimes introduced for genuinely good and ethical reasons.

For instance, it is in my opinion desirable to make it more difficult for users to delete all their photos by e.g. having to confirm their decision in a dialog first. Because it prevents them from accidentally doing something they might not want to do and which is potentially impossible to revert.

I think that we should not carelessly invent laws that just "sound good" to some lawmakers but have no real fact checking done to support them and are not backed by science.

Because, in my opinion, then there is a high risk that these "good intentions" will backfire spectacularly. While not getting even close to achieve the desired effect.

Ok. But that is in my opinion a distinction without a difference.

It does not matter whether the ads are built by the AI itself and seamlessly embedded into the regular responses. Or just made separately and placed into the same window as the AI's output.

The bulk of the controversies in relation to doing this are still roughly the same, whatever the origin of the ads may be.

No. The distinction between the unpaid vs. cheap vs. expensive plans is irrelevant here.

The main controversial point about this topic is to include ads in the output of an LLM-backed AI tool responses. It does not matter at all in which tier it occurs.

The discussion is about the fact that it occurs in the first place.

I think that in general blocking all ads is always a good idea.

The reason is that there is no negative consequence in doing so. A person has absolutely no obligation, not even an implied one, to watch or otherwise consume any ad. I think that as long as there are ways to remove or block ads, people should use them.

That being said, if the companies wish to intertwine their products with ads that are indistinguishable from the actual content and therefore unblockable, it is okay. They have the right to do that if they want.

But, in the same fashion, the customers have every right to turn away from all such products. And never consider using them ever again.

Such a conclusion cannot reasonably be made from the data you have presented. It merely means that your web app was not preferred over your native app.

According to which criteria?

There are values beyond "basic convenience" that are important as well. Being independent from a subscription service is one of them. Having full control over your own media being another.

Moreover, subscriptions in general have disadvantages. For example:

1. If a subscription service decides to increase their prices tenfold, there is nothing a customer can do to stop them.

2. If they decide to stop operating completely, a customer also has no say into the matter.

3. If the subscription service decides to just unilaterally stop offering the service to a particular user, they can do so at their own discretion, at any time.

This all means that whatever value is being "obtained" by using a subscription service, it is only going to last for as long as the provider wants it to last.