GSoC 4 years ago removed the need for their to be actual students to apply. We got flooded with middle aged men working 9-5s applying. It was dumb and we stopped participating. Their incentives were literally "extra income" instead of learning or participating beyond that.

If you take a look at marketshare, Americans are animals that spend well beyond their means in bulk. Apple products or Samsung products dominate the smartphone market and it's the expensive ones.

To be fair I know a nontrivial number of people who bought their iPhones used. I’m sure that happens in the android market, but it doesn’t seem to be as common in the US. I think the fact that iPhones have offered acceptable support for much longer than android has helps a lot there.

And the cars! JFC every time I come back to the States I'm amazed/shocked/appalled at these suburban land tanks everywhere. Just buy a normal car!

Advertising alternatives to trademarked names is completely legal in every sense. It's known as comparative advertising and is established for more than a century.

You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business and you cannot disparage that trademark.

Trademarks differentiate products. App Store is full of shady clones with near identical icons, screenshots and names that differ from the original by a few letters.

> You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business

Some fraction of consumers are duped. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many knockoffs.

If I enter Acme Orbital Thrusters into a search engine, the exact match, their actual website, must be the top hit. Otherwise it's a racket, not a search engine.

How much did you pay for that search engine?

You worried Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple will cease to exist if they stop tricking their audience?

O wow, capitalism in action.

As someone that runs the infrastructure for a large OSS project. Mostly Chinese AI firms. All the big name brand AI firms play reasonably nice and respect robots.txt.

The Chinese ones are hyper aggressive, with no rate limit and pure greed scraping. They'll scrape the same content hundreds of times the same day

The Chinese are also sloppy. They will run those scrapers until they get banned and not give a fuck.

In my experience, they do not bother putting in the effort to obfuscate source or evade bans in the first place. They might try again later, but this particular setup was specifically engineered for resiliency.

Is this an example of that "chabuduo" we read about now and then?

Chinese AI is doing large amounts of request in the past weeks.

how is this showing up for you? site you host or bigger scale? I'm not surprised but rather curious.

It's what happens when you load a company up with MBA grads who only know cookie cutter business plans with no actual business acumen or experience.

They'll be hard pressed to find something that isn't running into medical regulation territory.

But will medical regulation be an obstacle? All sorts of laws feel like they aren't the protection they used to be.

The problem here is "money".

The AI goldrush has proven that intellectual property laws are null and void. Money is all that matters.

> The AI goldrush has proven that intellectual property laws are null and void. Money is all that matters.

Indeed they never really mattered. They were a tool for large corporations to make money and they will go away if they can no longer serve such purpose. Anyone that thought there was a real moral or ethical basis to "intellectual property" laws fell for propaganda and got scammed as a result.

Except authoritarians can only clamp down in protests so much, working against them is economic and even regional social collapse due to running out of water. There's a lot building against them.

I actually hope western countries stay out, lest it gives support for nationalists to rally