> Phishing emails disguised as support inquiries are getting more sophisticated, too. They read naturally, but something always feels just a little off — the logic doesn’t quite line up, or the tone feels odd.

The phrase "To better prove you are not a robot" used in this attack is a great example. Easy to glance over if you're reading quickly, but a clear red flag.

"I don't have to prove anything. Fuck off." is my normal response to being presented with CAPTCHAs or other "challenges" unexpectedly.

Interesting. I wonder how you even manage to utilize the modern web.

"Hey ChatGPT, do this for me...", because somehow AI is immune to captchas, but humans aren't. What a time to be alive.

What effects do you think lifting weights regularly has on one's mentality, and why don't you think that those are not good effects?

I think that this is a big reason that agents aren’t prevalent as one might otherwise expect. Quality control is very important in my job (legal space, but IANAL), and I think while LLMs could do a lot of what we do, having someone whose reputation and career progression is effectively on the line is the biggest incentive to keep the work error free - that dynamic just isn’t there with LLMs.

Right: the one thing an LLM will never be able to do is stake their credibility on the quality or accuracy of their output.

I want another human to say "to the best of my knowledge this information is worth my time". Then if they waste my time I can pay them less attention in the future.

This is a highly underrated point. It's the same reason AI might replace paralegals but won't replace lawyers.

They do this all the time. There's a reason we have the term "AI slop". LLM output definitely has a reputation.

> accuracy is measured with the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm

> Crucially, we’ve seen very few instances where specific numerical values are actually misread. This suggests that most of Gemini’s “errors” are superficial formatting choices rather than substantive inaccuracies. We attach examples of these failure cases below [1].

> Beyond table parsing, Gemini consistently delivers near-perfect accuracy across all other facets of PDF-to-markdown conversion.

That seems fairly useful to me, no? Maybe not for mission critical applications, but for a lot of use cases, this seems to be good enough. I'm excited to try these prompts on my own later.

In what sense were these local rates "created artificially"? Are you suggesting that these people are being forced to work agaisnt their will?

In the sense that I named twice above. ;)

Nah bro you’re misunderstanding me, because if the worker said "no" then the answer obviously is "no,”

But the thing is she's not gonna say "no", she would never say "no" because of the implication.

Relevant market definition is not so straightforward in antitrust matters. I'm not a product area expert (but do have experience in antitrust litigation) and am certain that Microsoft's attorney's would say that such a market is too narrowly defined.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines/tools/market-d...

I think a year for the remedies is optimistic - could drag on for a while. Also worth mentioning that it is not an exclusivity agreement - it is a default agreement.

> it is not an exclusivity agreement - it is a default agreement.

But it kind of is an exclusivity agreement. Have you ever tried to change the default search on an iPhone? There is only a very small list of curated searches you are allowed to pick from, and you cant add your own.

You’re right, my bad on the terminology. A year is definitely optimistic, I just hope that’s the first draft pending appeals. the longer it stretches on, the greater chance there is of directives being changed, lobbyists influencing politicians, etc.

A company need not have 100% market share to have monopoly power in a market.

From the amount of utility you derive from a phone, and the life span of phones these days, $429 seems cheap to me. But it’s all relative I suppose.

Exclusive deals can present antitrust issues, but the kicker is that this isn't even an exclusive deal, it's a default deal! Users can still can still use other search engines on iOS devices.

You can change the default of Safari, but not for Siri. "Search the Internet" voice command always uses Google. I'm personally hoping that either part of this lawsuit or part of their Siri upgrade allows us to change it.

Does Siri show ads?

Microsoft lost cases against the EU because they made Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player the default on Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission

I believe it's because they were using their monopoly power to give that software away for free, while their competitors couldn't and ended up selling or going out of business.

The DOJ should really be looking at things like YouTube, which doesn't make any profit (I don't believe) but since Google proper supports it, no one can compete with it. That might be why Google is pushing so hard against ad blockers, they need to make YouTube profitable to avoid prosecution.

YouTube makes a profit. Or it did at least, not sure what’s going on with the adblocker stuff.

How come YouTube doesn't turn a revenue? Is it even possible, it uses so much bandwidth? Any sources?

Or you know, revenue growth to serve the only stakeholders that means anything to them - their shareholders.

Google bought YouTube in 2006. Coincidence they care about YouTube ad revenue so much all of a sudden? I guess they were getting around to it eventually.

using Kagi is pretty clumsy. We iOS users get to pick from a pretty limited list. In reality we should be able to set search to any endpiont that handles the ‘q’ param

It's a widespread assumption that defaults matter. But to what degree? I came across it first when I saw Dan Ariely's talk and his work on defaults (may not be the proponent)[1] but my takeaway is that it matters when you don't care about the as much.

For everyone with Windows, you start off with Edge/IE and then Bing as a default search engine. Yet, most switch to Chrome + Google almost instantly. People care about their browsing experience more than we give them credit for. Remember in 2009-10 when Chrome was new, it managed to win market share cos of superior product when it was not the default on Windows/Linux/MacOSX. On mobile too, the behavior is likely going to be there to a certain degree. While Google pays Apple a massive fee, there was an admission earlier in the trial that both Mozilla and Apple would still go ahead w Google (even without the deals) because of superior UX. Not sure if both said it, but one of them certainly did.

[1] https://danariely.com/the-power-of-defaults-in-how-we-eat/

Maybe look at some of the trial exhibits that have been posted on the DOJ website. Google sure as hell thinks defaults matter a lot. And intent matters at trial.

From the trial itself, Google has argued and questioned the expert witness from DOJ if defaults really matter. Whole Microsoft question was raised by them too. Exhibits are good with context, but without supplementing the context they are misleading. Hard to argue for something DOJ did not think would make their case stronger and did not refer to in the trial.

In Europe Androids have had user decided default browser/search engine selection in the out of box set up for years. Google still wins massively because users know it is simply a superior product.

Part of the antitrust issue is that Apple never developed their own search engine because of these payments. Google paid Apple to not compete.

I doubt that the same number of people willingly choose Google, otherwise they wouldn't be paying so much money to be the default. That's a lot of money to throw away.

There would be no choice without that deal either, Apple would simply sell its users to the next highest bidder.

Or Apple would develop a search engine instead, which is exactly what they did with Maps.

How is this different from any typical outsourcing arrangement other than the size?

Outsourcing arrangements many different motivations, it’s not just money. Otherwise, basically any outsourcing arrangement can be said to be “throwing away money” for one party.

Right, which is also arguably why we’ve seen competition from other search engines.