I recently learned this, but the reason Steam offers 2-hour no-questions-asked full refunds was partially because of a lawsuit by the ACCC

I nearly missed that this article was written by Corey Quinn, guy who writes a lot about AWS

Oh wow, this is actually useful

Without AI you'd still need to check everything, no? It's just you reach that stage faster with LLMs doing a lot of the heavy lifting

> Without AI you'd still need to check everything, no?

Yes, but without helping the billionaires turn into trillionaires and my own brain into a useless appendage.

So, it's useful and helpful to people doing the actual work, but you still want to complain.

Collating data from hundreds of sources isn't really what's keeping your brain working

Yet using an LLM seems to make it work less https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1

So does using search, should we go back to borrowing print and handwritten notes?

If you apply the spared capacity to a different task you're still getting your brain workout.

But yeah you'll have trouble quoting from sources you didn't read. Ohh no.

There's a classic joke where it turns out the solution to "it works on my machine" was to ship my machine

A lot of the points also apply to Google as a search engine, yet we're still seeing Google owning about 90% of search engine usage.

Google search requires a lot of resources to crawl, keep indices up to date, and provide user level significance (i.e. different results to different users). Then couple it with their other services (Google Maps, etc).

The competitors have not come even close to Google's level of quality.

With LLMs, it's different. Gemini/Claude are as good, for the most part. And users don't care that much either - most use the standard free ChatGPT, which likely is worse than many competitors' paid models.

It's not just the quality. The are people who do complain about how they perceive it significantly decreased over time. Yet there are many other factors, including presence as default search engine in so many setup out there.

Google was always terrified by the fact that they had no moat in Search. This was clear from interviews and articles at the time. That's why they decided to roll up the ad market instead, and once they had the advertisers Search became a self-fulfilling monopoly.

Google Search would be moatless if not for the AdMob purchase.

Google is a product not a platform. How many companies are still using Google search for their intranets? (yes yes I'm old, don't remind me)

Meanwhile bing search is actually a platform, and is what then powers other "search engines" (duckduckgo, kagi, etc...)

Imagine making money from Prime ripping people off, and then making money reporting on how Prime is ripping people off

Reminds me of Elvis' agent selling "I Hate Elvis" buttons to make money off of them.

I suppose stock buybacks are similar to dividends in that regard

On the contrary, this will end with wells

This won't end wells?

Damnit... upvote

I guess technically speaking, the world's cheapest source of power is nuclear fusion!