Just wanted to highlight your last point so that it's clear. Microsoft reimplementing the authors project was exactly what they wanted! To see a different implementation. A different "take".
Wow this is as cool as hell!!!! I think I'm going to make the switch to this. I'm a logseq devotee but this is really addressing pain points I have with that application.
Adversarial compatability is not a reason to mock a competitor to an entrenched monopoly.
I have no love for Microsoft, but the idea that a locked in monopoly, responsible for tainting or outright destroying huge swaths of the internet, is a "success"...
Not gonna lie though. Making a fake page that looks like a competitor to show people after they ask you to give them their competitors site is very mockable.
I see the similarities between these situations, but the difference is deception, Not that it's "copying".
IANAL as well. but I have to say, if typing into typing Google into the Bing search and getting a page that looks almost exactly like Google can't be proven as intent to deceive, then the law is broken.
I can't imagine anything clearer to prove intent than a user requesting that they want to go to Google to Bing, Bing responds to that request by showing them a page that looks like Google's. That is so clear. Is that really not able to be proven in court?
Any normal human would be sued into complete oblivion over this. But everyone knows that these laws arn't meant to be used against companies like this. Only us. Only ever us.
Look. I'm a small startup employee. I have a teeny tiny perspective here. But frankly speaking the idea that Netflix could just take some off the shelf widget and stuff it in their network to solve a problem... It's an absurd statement for even me. And if there's anyone it should apply to it would be a little startup company that needs to focus on their core area.
Every off the shelf component on the market needs institutional knowledge to implement, operate, and maintain it. Even Apple's "it just works" mantra is pretty laughable in the cold light of day. Very rarely in my experience do you ever get to just benefit from someone else's hard work in production without having an idea how properly implement, operate, and maintain it.
And that's at my little tiny ant scale. To call the problem of streaming "solved" for Netflix... Given the guess of the context from the GP post?
I just don't think this perspective is realistic at all.
> the idea that Netflix could just take some off the shelf widget and stuff it in their network to solve a problem
Right. They have to hire one of the companies that does this. Each of YouTube, Twitch (Amazon), Facebook and TikTok have, I believe, handled 10+ million streams. The last two don't compete with Netflix.
I believe this is the spirit of the "solved problem" comment: not that the solution is an off-the-shelf widget, but that if it has ever been solved, then that solution could technically be used again, even if organizing the right people is exorbitantly expensive.
There are multiple companies that offer this capability today that would take a few weeks to hide behind company branding. This was a problem of netflix just not being set up for live stream but thinking they could handle it.
It's funny because in a group crowded channel there is feedback so long as you are part of the channel. But I think even in those circumstances, the feedback you get from the noise of everybody else, you don't interpret that as the same thing as you sending just "your one message".
Humans are really bad at understanding distributed harms.
Honestly the idea of a valuable communication channel getting abused for selfish purposes feels like it needs its own law. I'd happily call it csharps law. Maybe it's already got a name. We have the idea of spam, but it's vauge, nebulous, and doesn't concretly identify the systems and forces in place that lead to this innevitable outcome. It casts this outcome as not even a problem of individuals, but something like "the problem is someone sent me a message I didn't want." As if that person had not done that, then this wouldn't be a problem.
I think this is important because it feels like an endless surprise to everyone that this keeps happens. It feels like we have to cover the same ground again and again in discussions about it, and it feels like if we could tackle this problem more generally, the benefits to society at large would be massive.
Product reviews are valuable, producers capture reviewers, spam fake reviews.
Email is valuable. Spam nearly destroyed it until we migrated the entire decentralized system to Google.
Public discussions like these are valuable, and God knows how much work Hacker News does to moderate all this.
None of this feels like it's designed to resist this problem.
I do find chatgpt is helpful in laying out the formulas you should you in the context that they should be used in. Something I personally know I have no business doing.
... At the same time, I also am aware of how hilariously dumb chat GPT can be in deep technical contexts. I've taken to saying that when it comes to a technical topic, chatGPT will confidently tell you the wrong thing to do 50% of the time, but that's fine because it will give you the terms and context you can use to audit its solution yourself. Even if you don't understand the answers you can easily have chat gpt explain the gaps, again, 50%, but giving real information contextualizes the conversation better. I would expect this to improve accuracy, and my personal experience bares this out.
There was a brief window of time where the strongest chess players were chimeras, humans who assessed AI suggestions. Quickly even they found themselves outperformed by engines.
I suspect this is happening here as well. And I also suspect its going to take a good deal longer.
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