> actual proof

You don't think their own opinion of their own life isn't self-evident proof?

When it's poorly explained, no.

Outside of a small handful that do go in-depth, these "switching off of Google" people just repeat the same thing over and over again, and expect everyone to instinctively agree with their views.

This has the classics like: - "Google’s services are actively worse than the alternatives" (not actually listing which services they're talking about. Not showing specific features or design decisions which are worse than the alternative. Youtube is certainly not worse than the alternatives.) - "I do my best to boycott bad things" - "but big tech is bad" - "The old adage of “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” is certainly true here." (do we need to hear this banality for the thousandth time?, also there's plenty of actually free services, like this site we're discussing this on.)

Fastmail and Kagi are not noticeable expenses (to me) but are a noticeable increase in quality of life.

Might not have been true at one point but if you can spare the cost I highly recommend either.

Fastmail user for a decade. Does the job.

Because they know for some problems it's easier to pay for the service than take the CapEx.

As far as I can tell, no. I moved to zed from nvim for fast starts + better AI UX with edit prediction & agents than nvim without start time/RAM of cursor. It delivered on that, but now that I think about it my coding practices have changed so much since that decision (sitting in Claude / https://www.conductor.build) I should probably just go back to nvim!

This is directly addressed in the article.

Not to be glib, but the second law of thermodynamics.

You are attempting to filter out trace amounts valuable dopants and some small amounts of metals with value from, essentially, a pile of sand.

This is not energetically or chemically easy.

The second law of thermodynamics is very forgiving here. It's actually not the problem. Energy depends on the log of the concentration.

The problem is with our technology; we don't know how to recycle things well.

It's vibes all the way down now.

The victim is the person who's likeness was forced into becoming sexualized content without consent.

"You might fail so don't try" is certainly a take, I guess.

You WILL fail so do not try is indeed a sane take.

Friction matters.

The locks on my doors will fail if somebody tries hard enough. They are still valuable.

> They are still valuable.

Only because of the broader context of the legal environment. If there was no prosecution for breaking and entering, they would be effectively worthless. For the analogy to hold, we need laws to throw coercive measures against those trying to bypass guard rails. Theoretically, this already exists in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the US, but that interpretation doesn't exist quite yet.

Goalpost movement alert. The claim was that "AI can be told not to output something". It cannot. It can be told to not output something sometimes, and that might stick, sometimes. This is true. Original statement is not.

If you insist on maximum pedantry, an AI can be told not to output something as this claim says nothing about how the AI responds to this command.

You are correct and you win. I concede. You outpedanted me. Upvoted

Define Fail.

Preventing 100%? Fail.

Reducing the number of such images by 10-25% or even more? I don’t think so.

Not to mention the experience you get to know what you can and what you can’t prevent.

After learning that guaranteed delivery was impossible, the once-promising "Transmission Control Protocol" is now only an obscure relic of a bygone era from the 70s, and a future of inter-connected computer systems was abandoned as merely a delusional, impossible fantasy.