I’m giving some reasons why turning on or off location services at the OS level doesn’t appreciably change battery life.

You can turn off higher level location services at the OS level, but at the radio level the cellular network will always need a precise enough location to handle tower handoffs and timing issues between the tower and phone, as well as modern beam forming techniques where the tower “aims” the signal at the phone. The simple act of the phone communicating with a specific tower tells the phone where it is (sometimes with surprisingly high precision).

911/emergency services also use more low level location techniques, but I’m pretty sure those functions don’t get called unless you dial an emergency number.

90GB of both RAM+NAND combined. I’m guessing most of it is actual persistent storage for all the stuff the infotainment system uses (including imagery and offline map data for GPS, which is probably a big one), rather than actual memory in the sense of desktop computing.

Everything else that you said seems to fit the general thesis that they’re making a lot more money selling to AI companies.

If those reasons were still true but the memory companies stood to not make as much money on those deals, I guarantee the memory manufacturers wouldn’t have taken the deal. They only care about money, and the other reasons you list are just the mechanisms for making more money.

It’s a very common complaint among people administering websites. This particular AI poisoning service seems to be directed at those people.

So maybe it’s not the majority of complaints about AI, but it’s a significant portion of the complaints about AI from site administrators.

The Fediverse is designed specifically to publish its data for others to use in an open manner.

Sure, and if the AI companies want to configure their crawlers to actually use APIs and ActivityPub to efficiently scrape that data, great. Problem is that there’s been crawlers that have done things very inefficiently (whether by malice, ignorance, or misconfiguration) and scrape the HTML of sites repeatedly, driving up some hosting costs and effectively DOSing some of the sites.

If you put Honeypot URLs in the mix and keep out polite bots with robots.txt and keep out humans by hiding those links, you can serve poisoned responses only to the URLs that nobody should be visiting and not worry too much about collateral damage to legitimate visitors.

What’s crazy is that they aren’t just doing this because they make more money with AI.

No, they really are making more money by selling whole wafers rather than packaging and soldering onto DIMMs. The AI companies are throwing so much money at this that it’s just much more profitable for the memory companies to sell directly to them.

That’s why “bullshit,” as defined by Harry Frankfurt, is so useful for describing LLMs.

A lie is a false statement that the speaker knows to be false. But bullshit is a statement made by a speaker who doesn’t care if it’s true or false.

If I am reading this correctly, anyone who wants to use this service can just configure their HTTP server to act as the man in the middle of the request, so that the crawler sees your URL but is retrieving poison fountain content from the poison fountain service.

If so, that means the crawlers wouldn’t be able to filter by URL because the actual handler that responds to the HTTP request doesn’t ever see the canonical URL of the poison fountain.

In other words, the handler is “self hosted” at its own URL while the stream itself comes from the same URL that the crawler never sees.

The hot concept around the late 2000’s and early 2010’s was crowdsourcing: leveraging the expertise of volunteers to build consensus. Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and similar sites came up in that time frame where people would freely lend their expertise on a platform because that platform had a pretty good rule set for encouraging that kind of collaboration and consensus building.

Monetizing that goodwill didn’t just ruin the look and feel of the sites: it permanently altered people’s willingness to participate in those communities. Some, of course, don’t mind contributing. But many do choose to sit things out when they see the whole arrangement as enriching an undeserving middleman.

There was a very, very brief moment from about 2005 to 2011 or so where there was money to be made directly by artists on iTunes or the other music stores where the tracks were like 99 cents each.

But people stopped buying as soon as Spotify became popular, and now any artist that wants to release on Spotify without a label still doesn’t make much money.