Extended Warranties.

It’s about market share (“Your first hit is free…” marketing), but you’re probably seeing only one aspect.

They’re already charging very real money for subscription users, especially enterprise.

Uber spent $3.4bn, their entire budget for AI fees for 2026, within the first four months of this year - that’s real money by anyone’s definition.

We (not Uber) set up a monitoring portal (litellm) to manage this. Some users are burning through a surprising amount, hitting what we considered sane daily limits within their first hour. One person asked a single query that cost $30 .

Individual consumers of AI are riding free on this as the big AI players jostle for position and valuation.

Will that bubble burst or gradually deflate? Or keep growing longer? Nobody knows, or if they do they’re investing cleverly and keeping their mouth shut.

Turn the router off and see how long before your family notices.

I enjoy being a linux sysadmin. I still do some web full stack, but largely for my own team and I have full autonomy over what tools I use. Can’t be many other people writing websites in perl today.

I understand why someone might think that, but it’s not true, except perhaps in the most corrupt of countries.

We like things that are similar to ourselves. Humanity has always sought company in the darkest of nights. Anthropormising things makes them less scary.

They’ll ask ChatGPT something—even something that has a simple, definitive answer that doesn’t really need further explanation—rather than just looking it up on a search engine.

To me, that’s a no brainer. Chatgpt will give me the answer I’m looking for much quicker and more efficiently than clicking half a dozen links and wading through a crapload of adverts and SEO weighted nonsense.

Overly restricting and subjective deletions and bans for low quality. (Eg: /r/casualuk)

Hear me out - restricting based on low quality sounds great, right? Until it’s your post that’s blocked. And you know it isn’t low quality, is unique and offers a new perspective. Some mods have genuinely forgotten that it’s (mostly) humans at the other end of their actions, or haven’t forgotten and enjoy being dicks.

Always about money. It’s a shame it draws attention away from the 50 million living people who exist in modern slavery today.

How can I wear a skirt at work

Wear skirt. Go to work.

I don’t know what I’m missing here. Unless there’s a safety reason to the job or a mandatory uniform, why would anyone care? Maybe you’re in a particularly repressive country and I don’t understand the nature of the problem, or why religion comes into it.

The companies make too much money, and the same companies dictate policy to the government.

The USA is not a democracy.

Oh, that sounds brutal. Sorry.

I feel you. I’m much more productive working from home with fewer distractions, but I’m a little luckier in that I get to split that time.

God, you must be even older than I am! We did Basic at school, and our teacher showed us punch cards, and tape, but we never actually used them - BBC B’s being the tool of that time. Those were great times - genuinely pushing the boundaries of the possible, spending hours hand optimising code to save a few bytes or cycles, all with only printed manuals as reference. Understood about corporate structure, and for me also, some individuals can really affect the subject (I detest rudeness in particular)

Individual consequences, maybe, but not for some time. Consequences require law. The USA has made one person untouchable by law who can override any action without consequence, and they have misused that literally hundreds or thousands of times in freeing others convicted by court and jury. To quote Martin Luther King, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” and “It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.” The USA does not have a working justice system. (And given how many apparently guilty people have walked free because they are rich in the past, possibly never has)

As a nation: The US has already weakened itself significantly in just a year, both nationally and internationally. Every historical ally the US had has been repeatedly abused and ridiculed by the person they chose to represent them. The damage from this will take decades to heal, if ever.

What it’s really exposed is how weak America’s much celebrated democracy is. That it can be subverted by a small minority who have systematically removed all effective opposition is surprising, and has made other democracies thoughtfully consider their own systems. The internet and social media has played a big part in this - we’ve seen tools of tribalism and hate used many times before, but never at such scale and speed as is possible now, and it’s caught the entire world unprepared.

I’d rather see all my dogs, cats and horses again.

Some of us gamers have been training for that our whole lives.

Not a Lemmy resource, but if you do want reasonably unbiased news that gets suppressed - especially in certain countries, Wikipedia does cover some of it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Holding in the farts.

Horror

Certainly traumatised me as a child.

You can’t trust an inherantly untrustworthy industry.

The problem is that to make a good AI, you need a lot of input and we know from leaks and reports that many/most of the major players deliberately ignored copyright to train their models. If it was reachable, they used it. Are using it. Will use it. Like Johnny 5, there’s no limit to the data they want, or that their handlers want to feed them with. They’re the Cookie Monster at a biscuit factory.

So when the question of trust comes up, you’d have to be pretty forgiving to overlook that they’re built on foundations of theft, and pretty naive to assume these companies have suddenly grown ethics and won’t use your data and input to train with, even when you’re using commercial systems that promise they won’t.

Even in the event that there is an ethical provider that does their utmost to ensure your data doesn’t migrate (these do exist, at least in intention), this is an incredibly fast moving, ultra-competitive market where huge amounts of data are shifted around constantly and guardrails being notoriously hard to accurately define, let alone enforce. It’s inevitable stuff will leak.