It would use information from the pixels around it though.
> Not to mention deeply and disturbingly unethical
Is it really deeply disturbingly unethical? Just FYI, it isn't their identities that are censored, but their genitals are pixelated due to Japanese laws.
> By contrast, on macOS it's Cmd-Q; on Windows, it's Alt-F4; and so on. Innovation happens on stable foundations, not by pulling rugs.
That's the window manager of the respective systems though. On i3, I can also kill any window by pressing Option-Shift-q. But that's more like the sledgehammer approach and not how I'd close a text editor on any system ...
Agreed, macOS has different and distinct paradigms from Windows, KDE, or Gnome. But they're (for the most part) more internally consistent.
Say I want to keep the music playing when I close the player window. Other systems have to hack around it by e.g. using the status bar; on macOS it follows from the first principles.
Would be illegal in Germany ('Schleichwerbung') and perhaps the EU?
I think it is actually covered in EU AI act article 5 (a):
> [...] an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques, with the objective, or the effect of materially distorting the behaviour of a person or a group of persons by appreciably impairing their ability to make an informed decision, thereby causing them to take a decision that they would not have otherwise taken [...]
It is very broad but I'm pretty sure it would be used against such marketing strategies.
Hmm yeah I guess I wasn't completely aware of that term and its implications. That seems like a pretty weird qualifier for such a law. Now it kind of makes it sound like the law wants to prevent people using AI in a way that makes your grandma transfer her life savings to them.
Clearly, most LLMs would work in small increments with compounding effects.
It is sort of funny to me how the sentiment about whoever seems to be leading in ML changes so frequently (in particular here on HN.) A couple months ago it felt like people were sure that Google completely fucked it up for themselves (especially due to the fact that they invented the transformer but didn't productize it themselves at first.)
For a short while, Claude was the best thing since sliced cheese, then Deepseek was the shit, and now seemingly OpenAI really falls out of favor. It kinda feels to me like people cast their judgement too early (perhaps again in this case.) I guess these are the hypecycles...
Google is killing it right now, I agree. But the world might appear completely different in three months.
Personally, I don't really think there's a team at Google, nor at OpenAI, paying for "astroturfing" on sites like HN.
What are the rough steps through which you see this working? I see people talking about "astroturfing" all the time without much explanation on the mechanisms. So roughly, there are employees paid solely to post on social media like HN trying to push the needle in one direction or another?
Right, so who's doing the jumping in to sway conversation?
Full disclosure, I am Xoogler, but if anything I think that makes my skepticism even more justified. If there were people there paid to post nice things about Google on HN and Twitter then I'd love to apply for that team!
There doesn't need to be a team. Individuals can act according to personal incentives and still create coordinated behavior. Look at flocks of birds. Each bird acts for itself; together they move in unison.
Usually when I read "astroturfed" I assume there's some higher level coordination involved. I think the flock of birds metaphor is probably a reasonable comparison to the behavior we see on social media all the time - members acting individually on their own self interests in a means which appears coordinated when you zoom out.
This is a great example of a strawman argument. I didn't say anything about teams, or "employees paid solely to post on social media". You injected those details, because you think that they make the idea of an astroturf campaign seem farfetched. But we know that such campaigns happen in other contexts, sponsored by entities with less money to throw around. Why not here? And why do we need to know the mechanics, if all we care about is whether or not it's happening (and maybe, if it's not self-evident, what the goal of such a campaign is)? We don't, really.
Sure, so it sounds like we've got a different idea in mind for what this sort of work would look like. Totally understandable!
In your opinion then, what would a Google-run astroturfing campaign roughly look like? Sounds like this article is an example, right? I'm not asking for insider info, I'm just curious about your mental model on the basic mechanics.
Personally, I think the case "other entities with comparable resources do this, so Google probably does too" isn't super convincing to me. IMO, the null hypothesis "Google has lots of nerdy fans who'll happily post positively about it for free" is a lot reasonable, but perhaps there's something I'm missing.
Yeah... I wish there were laws that would require disclosure of such behavior. Might be tricky to implement though, and probably contradicts the interests of politicians.
AI is changing fast! And to be fair to the model companies, they have been releasing products of (mostly) increasing quality.
It really depends what your use case is. Over the range of all possible use cases this has been the narrative.
I tried Google's model for coding but it kept giving me wrong code. Currently Claude for coding and ChatGPT for more general questions is working for me. The more exotic your use case, the more hit or miss it's going to be.
The sentiment changes this fast because SOTA changes this fast. E.g. Google models were objectively crappy compared to OpenAI, but Gemini 2.5 really turned the tables (and I'm not talking about synthetic benchmarks here but real world coding).
The state of affairs with local models is similarly very much in flux, by the way.
> Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees.
Unless you do your Ausbildung in a job where you can learn mostly all the skills within a couple months, after which you'll just be shamelessly exploited by your employer for the remaining duration of it.
> Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure,
Yeah, our train systems are pretty cool (can reach most places.) But if your expectation is anything more than 'hopefully arrive by the end of day', you'll regularly be disappointed.
> and don't suffer from the manufactured scarcity that plagues American housing
Have you tried renting in any bigger city in the past 10 or so years?
> Critically, Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. While America expands surveillance powers, militarizes police forces, and faces growing authoritarianism, Germany's post-war constitutional framework continues to prioritize civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms.
I disagree with the claim that Germany is currently on a path strictly "prioritiz[ing] civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms."
Not only did German politicians in 2021 broaden the scope of §188 StGB to include insults against politicians, even at the local level[1], the new coalition contract also has some pretty dystopian views on how to approach opinions/statements they categorize as 'disinformation'[2] (ministry of truth anyone? - ah nevermind, they sidestep that by letting NGOs do the dirty work for them.)
Pair that with the fact that they plan to (again) try to introduce data retention laws without cause[3], I do not personally believe that claiming we strictly prioritize civil liberties etc is a correct assessment of the overall situation here in Germany.
Overall I suspect the post has been written with the aid of LLM, I wonder who/why would do such a thing though. There's just something off about the tone.
> Have you tried renting in any bigger city in the past 10 or so years?
I am German myself and I get where you're coming from, but there are worlds between German rent prices and American or even London, Amsterdam or Dublin rent prices.
I'm not sure about that. 2 bedroom apartment in Munich for ~1500 euro on maybe a 75k eur salary vs ~4000 usd in SF on a 180k usd salary. They're pretty similar numbers, relatively.
> Not to mention deeply and disturbingly unethical
Is it really deeply disturbingly unethical? Just FYI, it isn't their identities that are censored, but their genitals are pixelated due to Japanese laws.