While (in general) I agree with arguments against “copywriting hell”, in particular this case it is not about copywriting itself, but about the consequences of GenAI to entire industry.
Journalists exist not without a reason, yes they work with facts and very often — open facts, but they still assemble those facts in certain way to construct a narrative, connect dots and tell us some story (not counting cases when journalist works with their sources and produce a unique inside information). Then OpenAI comes, says “thank you very much” and assemble all of journalists work into one Uber Knowledgeable Journalist who can answer all of your questions.
So far so good, we create a public good service, and copywriters are in shambles.
Until you start making money on it.
That’s where the problem.
If OpenAI would be a non profit organization like Wiki Foundation, who just wants to make internet as better place — not much arguments you can find to support NYT lawsuit. But monetization changes everything.
Basically NYT is not worried about re using its text as itself, it is worried that no one will want to visit NYT no more and will pay Microsoft/Google and get all answers from them.
Let’s put an example. There were a famous story when FT journalist discover a massive fraud in Wirecard accounting and essentially lead to a death of this organization. That articles were a result of multi-year reporting work when journalist piece by piece and step by step collect facts, meet people, and eventually spot the gap. Now, in age of Bard/Bing/ChatGPT, you don’t need to read original article to know all of this. You can ask search engine or Chatbot and get essential re phrasing of an original reporter work. You don’t need no more to go to FT, pay them for paywall, watch their ads, etc. Effectively FT make a huge investment into their people to allow them spend 2 years on this issue and report it and now have a 0 leads to their website because all of them are eaten by Google and Microsoft who will sell you their ads and retain you in their monetized products.
Imagine that you built a for-profit paid library for some task. You make a code available through paywall and ask people to pay you to get to it and solve their problems. Then Microsoft comes, sneak beyond paywall, scrap your code and publish it recompiled and slightly optimized version in open access, so no one longer ever need to go on your website but ask Microsoft to show them your code.
Would you be happy?
All of this cases for me make this case not such easy and straightforward as it seems to be “bad copywriters against progress of humanity”.
At the end of the day, if NYT/FT/New Yorker and others will stop publishing their work and fire all journalists, will ChatGPT tell us same depth level stories as we read there?
I would bet on the growth of notepads and smartphone usage by children 0-2 age. There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents.
Click on some YTube show and baby won’t bother you for the next hour or two.
That is both name-calling and flamebait, and therefore breaks the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Can you please make your substantive points without doing that? Note this guideline also:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Parenting is one of the most emotionally activating topics that exists, and therefore one of the most divisive.
I am a parent myself and I know very good the cost of it, and yes - I think if you enable cartoons on YouTube for your few months old kid - that’s the laziness. You always can find a way to attract and engage your baby without electronics.
A coworker of mine had every intention of not having any screentime for their toddler. But lockdown meant two parents working from home + no daycare. The solutions were either one of them quits their job or they buy an iPad. Economy necessity dictated the latter.
With my toddler, we retained zero screentime simply because my wife is freelance and can get away with ~10 hours of actual work per week.
The entire point of this sub-thread was to analyze the trend pre-lockdown. (FWIW, I'm then not wanting to comment on whether this is lazy behavior or not, but just that this defense is out of place.)
I had same intention. Even practically largely managed. And then, when I shown toddler first fairy tale, toddler started to have way more varied and imaginative games.
Turns out, it does not destroys them at all. It can actually add quite a lot.
The harm can happen if you overdo it a lot. But some watching or playing is not destroying them at all.
no chance this guy has kids. ppl said this same thing about television. if you read newspaper clippings from the early 20th century you can find letters to the editor about parents concerned their kids read too many books
And I think it is a valid concern even today. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad or dangerous with books, videos or computer games. But too much of anything steal time that is needed for other parts of a well rounded upbringing. If you spend too much time in front of a screen or books, you won’t spend enough time being outdoors and being physically active, or being with friends practicing social skills and conflict resolution. And the opposite is of course also true: if you spend all days doing sports or just hanging out with friends, there won’t be enough time for reading or other types of experiences.
Some behaviours are more immediately rewarding than other. It’s rare to find anyone eating too much broccoli or having problems stop rehearsing German irregular verbs.
But surprise for you — I have. And I know that it is more than possible to develop your young ones without engaging them to electronics until they reach at least 2 years old.
> There are evidences that electronics and smart screens are destructive for the cognitive development of infants, while they are super easy to adopt by lazy parents.
I know this is a poor form but fuck you. We work our asses off to give our kids what is generally accepted as a “good” upbringing and it’s hard. Hard during any normal period of time and even harder when dealing the pressures of the pandemic’s affect on work, day care, extracurricular activities, etc.
Happy to read whatever evidence you have on this topic. I’m keenly interested and sure as shit not “lazy” for allowing our children time to play age appropriate games on a tablet.
There is no law in Russia which forces him to ban that channel, and no concept of “silent days” anymore.
Russian authorities has NEVER asked Telegram to remove anything. They pushed Google and Apple to remove links to Navalny application from search and from Apple Store (and Apple removes it only for Russia users, btw, unlike Telegram removes it for everyone), and Telegram was absolutely never in the picture and never asked to do a thing publicly. Just search Russian authorities speakers. They never bring Telegram into the picture.
Durov shamelessly lies. He pretends his application is a speech freedom, but it is not.
When there was a Telegram channel posting information about Belarus policemen who torture their own people — they ban it. When there is still a channel where white men posting personal details of women and attack them — no action.
Why Durov lies?
Because after SEC issued a claim that TON is a security and killed TON as a project, he owed ton of money to investors, including American. He had a real risk of being sued.
Where did he find money to pay investors back? He found them in Dubai, Qatar and Russia. He issued Telegram bonds and buyers of those bonds are affiliated with Russia structures like VTB Capital bank or Russian Government investment fund named “Russian Fund of Direct Investments”.
Moreover, few years ago, Russian authorities tried to ban Telegram. There was a massive campaign against the application, but then all things I mentioned happened, and SURPRISE Russia officially removed Telegram from the list of inappropriate applications and stoped attempts to ban it. Even now after the election, Russia published a list of websites whom they are going to ban because they didn’t stop spread of Navalny information. There WhatsApp and Viber in the list. But no Telegram.
For me it sounds very very directly: Durov lies. He takes money from Russia government to cover his costs from TON failure and in return he, for example, bans Navalny Telegram Bot even while he a) wasn’t asked; b) Apple and Google wasn’t asked to ask Telegram; c) law he mentioned doesn’t exist anymore.
There is no more free Telegram. Remove it now and stay safe
The law that prohibits campaigning during the election is still very much there, just like in many other countries, just not one day in advance like it used to be - this is debunked in the other thread - https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4800223
Btw, strange you didn't quote any sources for your claim - just a claim.
> Russian authorities has NEVER asked Telegram to remove anything
Yes, he starts the article by saying "has to follow rules set by Apple and Google", so he is not even talking about the Russian authorities. Apple and Google have been well known for swiftly taking down the apps that they think are troublesome for them.
Finally, Telegram was a massive channel for Belarus protests - in fact, Telegram was probably the main coordination mechanism for those - have you ever heard about Nexta?
>and buyers of those bonds are affiliated with Russia structures like VTB Capital bank or Russian Government investment fund named “Russian Fund of Direct Investments”.
As far as i know, it's not true(meaning there are no signs/proof of that). It's entirely possible, durov does have connections in russian elite, after all he was the creator of vk.com russian most popular social network. Vk was owned by russian oligarchs most of it's life at least partly. At the end of durov involvement with vk, he had some harsh clashes with oligarchs/regime, but ended up making a deal(and got paid well, even if not as well as he should've been). So he certainly knows how to deal with them, but i seriously doubt he enjoyed it, so he must have been really desperate if he got in bed with them again.
The biggest promise of telegram was that it would become a point of entrance to a decentralized economy based on TON blockchain and it's masternode hosted services. If they succeed to launch and than move telegram itself onto ton masternode hosting, telegram would've become the greatest/freest/(and potentially most secure, if they would implement e2ee key synchronization) messaging service ever
End of TON project, ment an end of telegram's future as a not data harvesting company.
They created a very elegant scheme when through a fictional Arabic investment fund they put russian government money (Government fund invests into Arabic fund which invests into bonds). It is kind of Russian classic and they did it a lot in the last.
Nowadays Telegram Bonds are traded at Saint-Petersburg stock exchange and there are a lot of rumors that Durov attends a lot of private parties in Russia for kids of oligarchs.
I'm russian as well, and rbc.ru is not the most independent source at the time of publishing, but even according to them, RDIF(РФПИ) invested about $2mil, that's a drop in the bucket, and since it was secondary market, it proves nothing but active propaganda from both sides(russian government has an agenda to promote as well as telegram)
bonds being traded wherever they are traded isn't really a proof of anything as well, wouldn't be even if it was shares of a company, but as bonds it's not that much of an influence, especially if accumulating big share of them would cost a fortune.
As to rumors, i would love to see any of it, again it's entirely possible, after Telegram official's attendance of government pr public forum(will use the same source, but it was all over the internet https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/09/07/2020/5f0730bf9... ) it would be surprising if telegram isn't dealing with them in any way.
It's funny how standard business dealings of having subsidiaries and offshore investment vehicles are being viewed by the Russians as a "Russian classic" just because critical thinking overload. :-)
The article does not really describe anything controversial or out of the ordinary.
I'm sure many countries do similar investments and arrangements. For example, IDA Ireland has offices in the US, and runs ads on Bloomberg TV. How's RDIF that much different?
In my country, we use telegram to communicate, rather than WhatsApp or SMS. Older people might use Viber, but Viber is a total nightmare. Just having it installed, I get dozens of spam messages per week from shops where I’ve bought things.
SMS is very expensive here.
Comparing telegram to WhatsApp or other competing apps isn’t even worth doing - there is no other app as user friendly or as functional and well thought out as telegram. It’s niche features like scheduled messages are a Godsend.
During the events of Jan 6, I was very worried that Apple would pull TG from the App Store. Thankfully they didn’t, but it’s not white supremicist groups that they would be hurting - it’s ordinary young people in foreign countries.
do you think a lot of people would be willing to donate to telegram? what would be an average annual donation per user? I bet it would be a lot less than what big tech makes, and there is no reason to believe durov would settle for that
completely disagree, he is definitely focused on making telegram some huge IT project that would put him on the same level as great IT entrepreneurs of our time. The whole TON project was all about making tons of money from becoming the main beneficiary from first decentralized consumer economy. It's a mystery how he is going to achieve anything similar now, but that goal was so ambitious, it's unlikely he will settle for something as small as this
> When there is still a channel where white men posting personal details of women and attack them — no action.
I’m not familiar with the situation you are referring to, but I’m curious why you specifically mentioned the race of these men. How is their race relevant?
Telegram remains the only mainstream free speech platform on the web today, with the least amount of censorship and the most resiliency against being taken down.
there is matrix, the best option, both secure and reasonably well made(element and alternative clients), but it miles behind telegram in terms of UI/UX even though it's on par with whatsapp/signal/etc
The grandparent said mainstream and Matrix is far away from that. You _might_ count Signal, but its market share is still way behind and in an area with so many network effects, this is everything.
Is it? I just tried Telegram again today and something as basic as joining a public channel from the app itself (as opposed to clicking on a link) was seemingly unavailable, or at least hidden well enough that I was unable to find it.
Sorry but this is you first post here and what you claim doesn't make much sense.
He didn't have to pay back the TON investors because the deal included that if the network does not go live by a set date (and the reason isn't telegrams fault) he would return the remaining of the investment not the part used for the development. This is the risk the investors took and they lost. telegram itself only had to pay the sec fine which was peanuts for Durov.
Don't know anything about you other claims so I cant debunk but please post sources so we can check for our self.
