> Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.
There are lots smaller local websites which can produce useful local content because of ad support. Those may not have enough subscribers to continue behind a paywall.
What I notice here in Brazil is that most local news channels get the bulk of their money from TV ads. They all have a badly done website-blog with news that are very superficial (like 2 paragraphs) just to fill them with ads up and down and try to get something from it.
The big channels nowadays usually have 2 websites: one that is free and full of ads and pop-ups with very superficial news (seemingly written by interns) and one with actual quality analysis, journalism etc. that allow you access of 3 articles a month before you need to pay or something of that sorts.
I think the “serving ads” business hasn’t worked for a while.
How can we adapt that to LLMs? Do LLM providers pay for access to these articles?
Do I as a user have to do a micro transaction whenever an LLM generates an answer on one of those paywalled articles? Because as a user, I do not wish to read the quality journalist analysis, I wish for it to be part of the LLM answer that is tailored towards me.
I think the micro transactions thing would be ideal, and should be something between the LLM providers and the websites, the users should pay solely for the subscription of LLMs being able to search.
But this is a huge simplification of course, and another thousand problems arise from this model. So I have no idea what’s the “good enough” solution we’ll head towards, or whether the web will change completely from this.
> Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers
The question is: is there content which is useful, but not provided by volunteers? We see more and more content behind paywalls, and it is a loss for many people who can't pay, because they won't be able to access the same content for free supported by ads.
So the result is poor people are going to lose access to certain contents, while well to do people will still have access.
As the world always has been. There is no human right that we must have free content supported by ads. And ad supported content has tons of its own issues.
The answer to that question is absolutely yes. Investigative journalism, which is some of the most useful content in existence can not sustainably be provided by volunteers.
> many people who can't pay
Everybody is already paying for Spotify and for Netflix. They can pay for mass syndication of textual content. But it needs to be like Spotify or YouTube, where everything and anything goes. Poor people always had access to read newspapers.
" it will be interesting to see what the business model for Anthropic will be if I can run a solid code generation model on my local machine "
Most people won't bother with buying powerful hardware for this, they will keep using SAAS solutions, so Anthropic can be in trouble if cheaper SAAS solutions come out.
> but unless you're deeply, deeply into repetitive religious tracts of 600 years ago, most of the collection is more of a curiosity than a valuable resource to modern scholars.
It's an abbey, so they are probably into religious tracts and it has cultural and sentimental value to them. E.g. if it has a Bible from the 13th century then it's worth preserving even if it's just the usual stuff.
Potentially some of the books are also palimpsest, and perhaps if examined closely might have more ancient writings on them like lost Greek histories, poetry, or philosophy. I understand that the repurposing of paper was quite common back then.
Keybindings are the least interesting part of emacs. I modify the default keybindings heavily, because I find them uncomfortable.
Emacs's strength is being a portable programming platform which once you learned it allows you to very quickly create mini applications which help with everyday tasks.
Programming a VS Code extension is pretty cumbersome compared to creating a quick Emacs extension.
How do you make money without skewing the results?
And can LLMs be subtle enough?
Last time I picked a restaurant via reading between the lines, it was a negative review that made me decide to go there. The person leaving it was either used to fast food like service or was in a real hurry, but between the lines the food was great, they just took a while to serve it. I was in no particular hurry so I was happy with the place.
Can a LLM figure that out? And what about the day when I am in a hurry and I am looking for fast food like service?
> I saw some shady third-party tool that scrapes the data, but it's against the Terms of Service and I don't want to worry about being banned from my entire Google ecosystem.
I'm pretty sure Google Terms prohibits using data from its Maps API otherwise than in connection with displaying/using a Google Maps service, but maybe they won't go after this, because it's not much data.
Why can't at least tech people use only traditional forums which are easily searchable, readable without login, etc?