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And it's all because of ads. The incentives in an ad-funded internet are just always going to lead to this sort of thing. The most important thing is getting the user to load your page, not actually satisfying their query.

Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits, because any that move to ad revenue will become useless for real work.

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> Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits

LLM vendors make this hard because you can't trust them with your session data. Yesterday you were opted out of training, then suddenly today you're opted in.

It's an extension of the idea that they don't need to care about anybody's copyright. They don't care about preserving the security or privacy of customer data, because there is negligible incentive to do so.

For now, there's no substitute but as LLMs get commoditized trusting LLM SAAS vendors becomes an unacceptable business risk.


But don't you want Technojesus to come save you from never having learned how to invert a binary tree?

If you don’t know how to do that now, the fastest way to learn (for most people, surely) is to have an LLM teach you and critique your efforts. And then you’ll realize that it’s unlikely you’ll get practice at doing it from scratch, since the AI is faster and probably better.

Human learning is slow, AI production is fast. Very hard to steer a middle path.


> And it's all because of ads.

Not really. A while ago there was a news piece stating that Israel was behind a series of fake think-tanks with very accessible websites which were created with the express purpose of feeding AI agents with alternative facts aligned with their foreign policy.

If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.




Ah nice, the site uses nextjs/vercel and is hosted by AWS ...

Why is this significant? Many sites are setup like that.

Because the pro-Palestine folks just love to drag their pet peeve into literally everything [1].

[1] https://techforpalestine.org/vercel


Not liking companies that support genocide is a pet peeve?

It isn't even a settled question that there is a genocide.

Anyway, my issue with them is that they love to derail every debate on the internet by injecting their personal gripes regarding the conflict.

Sure, there are a bunch of morons on the Zionist side as well, but in general, barely anyone spams about the topic on Mamdani related news for example.

In a thread about the conflict, yeah, debating the conflict is on topic. But in a thread that has zero business dealing with the conflict at all and just casually mentions a company that happens to be active in Israel? Now that is (for me) pure derailing.


> It isn't even a settled question that there is a genocide.

Israel themselves seem pretty settled on it:

https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20260902-israel-orga...


That's election blathering, it's less than two months and as the Israeli (far-)right is looking for a serious defeat [1], they are trying to mobilize their respective bases.

Especially the ultraorthodox crowd is going to get hit hard, the rest of Israel is extremely pissed off at them due to their insistence on not having to serve in the military.

And let me be clear: all of those currently in power in Israel deserve a court trial and a lengthy prison term for incitement of racial hatred, and everyone in charge of the military and police a war crimes investigation.

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/09/02/i...


> That's election blathering

Your degree if denialism is really impressive. You dismiss, the mass killings, the push to erase a nation, and you even dismiss representatives outright admitting and acknowledging doing it.

Where exactly do you place the bar that would lead you to say "Yes, Israel is committing genocide".


> Where exactly do you place the bar…

At the very least you’d expect the population being genocided to decline.

Palestinian population growth has been exponential throughout Israel’s history (if you’re one of those who claim the “genocide” started a long time ago), and even the population of Gaza has not declined after 3 years of war (reported births are still more than reported deaths).


> At the very least you’d expect the population being genocided to decline.

Imagine being a European in 1940 and claiming there’s no genocide against the Jews because "at the very least you’d expect the population being genocided to decline" (at that point "only" around 100,000 had been killed).


We’re not in 2023. By 1942, when the Red Cross refused to say there’s a genocide, 4.5 million Jews had been killed - 3 million in 1942 alone.

The total killed in Gaza in 2026 is about 920 (mostly targeted attacks of individuals who participated in the Oct 7 massacre).


because nextjs is a bloated pile of shit.

Some of us have been predicting this for a while.

People with an axe to grind or states with an agenda are already devoting tremendous effort toward affecting LLM models and it is very difficult to determine real from astroturf for humans let alone an LLM trying to train.

Much like PageRank now that the cat's out of the bag all the current approaches may prove to be useless in the long run.


If by "not really" you mean it's not all because of ads, some governments dabble in it too, you're right. But it's still overwhelmingly because of ads.

It's just incentives in general. Humans are self-motivated creatures, and in the absence of meaningful consequences they'll often do what they're incentivized to do, even if it harms others.

The internet is uniquely devoid of consequences (esp. reputational consequences, social faux pas, etc.) and makes effort expenditure minimal. So you get lots of bad behavior.

I think "ads vs not ads" is maybe the wrong way to model it. Ultimately people are just doing what benefits themselves across every dimension possible.


Campaign funding and lobbying being legal activities implies that governments participate in advertising. I can't separate those.

But you're right, I think that's what they meant.


Sure maybe, but the online ad market is USD 400b give or take, which vastly outmatches any such budgets.

Imagine what humanity could accomplish if marketing were taboo.

How are you going to learn about useful new goods and services?

It is already legal for companies not to do any marketing.


>If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank...


There are incentives other than marketing, but I doubt the SEO company referred to by the ancestor comment is planning to do lots of business in the political propaganda space.

> alternative facts

Let’s please not revive that term, it has done enough harm. From its inception, it has just been a way to make falsehoods sounds legitimate. Even the person who came up with it seemed to be swallowing a whole toad while speaking it for the first time.


Then call them what they are - lies.

That sounds very plausible too. Propaganda/spin has always been a component of mass media.

You wrote "not really" and then described a literal ad.

Same difference tbh

The sad thing is this is unavoidable, or will be for a long time

Look at cable tv - even after going premium, you eventually wound up paying for ads anyway

In that case, you could make the argument that you could still purchase premium channels like hbo to avoid ads, but the internet doesn’t work that way - you depend on all the content generated by those ad funded channels

You could argue that Netflix changed that, and that’s why I said won’t change for a long time. I don’t think anyone’s discovered the business model yet that will keep content free for consumers while still generating revenue for companies


Can we just ban advertisements and "marketing" at a political level please?

For this advertisement for your activist campaign, you are hereby fined 100 credits for a violation of the anti-advertising statute. Further violations will result in loss of privileges.

In some countries it is, to some extent. In Norway for example, it is illegal to broadcast ads for political parties, alcohol, tobacco, plus basically any ads specifically targeting children (though the last one is often violated).



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