Oh I don't disagree. I'm not saying it's wrong. It's always right at some point in the cycle.

I'm just saying it is cyclical. Databases => plain text => single-file databases, repeat. shared hosting => dedicated hosting => vms => jamstack, repeat, etc.

Can't sell complexity without oversimplicity or simplicity without overcomplexity.

But this is quite a long blog post, with typical blog flourishes, about not very much.

> (Sure, you could be sceptical on whether the LLM provider is upholding that, but I personally do trust them. The trust betrayal if ZDR wasn't actually ZDR would be too great and commercially damaging for them to lie.)

Is actual ZDR verbiage in contracts more specific and limited in scope than what we see advertised publicly ("...except where needed to comply with law or combat misuse" in Anthropic's case)? Because those seem pretty damn vague and large enough holes to drive trucks through.

The problem is that there is an enormous, nearly unignorable incentive to work around it. So they will.

As the customer base becomes more and more corporate (which it will), they end up with disproportionately more customers whose experiences cannot be used to train the model to make it better for those customers.

Either way, corporate customers cannot leach off the training from consumers handing over their personal data forever; there aren't enough specialists in that training set to improve the models with no loss of corporate trust.

Betrayal of their trust is inevitable.

These are the same people who performed the largest scale breach of copyright in history on the theory that they could get away with it.

I’m not making any accusations, but we should not underestimate their tolerance for legal and financial risk.

It may be a little paranoid to insist on self hosting based on that, but I’m not so sure that it’s crazy.

Sounds like a children story about not making a deal with the Devil?

The implied part the children already know from other stories is:

The magic elves have a recorded history of laughing at their customers when they are on the toilette, hitting on their husbands/wifes and misleading their children into worshipping the elvendom and wander off into the forest.

The story ends in some sort of catharsis for the protagonist when the elves go one step too far. In the happy ending variant Disney makes a version off it is not too late.

i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is education to respect peoples privacy and very harsh punishments for violations.

i also believe that we will live in a post scarcity world, which means profit is no longer interesting, so any business case for invading your privacy will go away and therefore it will only happen for personal interest.

the key in any case will be education, because without it abuse will be rampant and progress will halt because everyone is going to be suspicious of everyone else.

Yep, that’s true

But those links are Googled after the model started to answer, they are not the links to the training data

Imagine an artificial “librarian” that read all the books and spits hallucinated quotes for you

But doesn’t let you enter the library, open a single book or even see the sources for those hallucinated quotes

But instead Googles some sources based on hallucinations after generating them ;-)

It’s better than nothing but you can Google them, too, while training data (the library) is completely hidden from you, even the public domain parts of it - zero attribution