Are there any AEO (Agent Engine Optimization) docs or metrics someone has tried to say "we're getting x% amount more hits from agent since we started doing this?". I've discovered some projects only because Gemini recommended them, I probably would have never discovered them "semantically" because the problem with search is that I don't know what keywords to search for, so telling Gemini to research for "prior work for roughly this project I want to build" often works to discover existing projects.
Maybe it would be better to combine this with accessibility, so that both AI Agents, automation engines and blind people benefit at the same time? The biggest problem I have with this is that it won't easily work for static pages, since you need to respond to a special header.
Slightly off-topic, but I recently tested some tool and it turns out Opus is far cheaper than Sonnet, because it produces way less output tokens and those are what's expensive. It's also much slower than Opus (I did 9 runs to compare Haiku, Sonnet and Opus on the same problem). I also thought "oh, Sonnet is more light-weight and cheaper than Opus", no, that's actually just marketing.
Claude subscriptions (strangely) have a Sonnet limit which is lower than the general model limit. Using Sonnet counts against both limits, using Opus only the general limit. So the subscriptions are discouraging Sonnet use as well.
My prediction is that the US war with Iran will lead to severe oil / gas shortages, which will be devastating for the German industry (think job loss, not necessarily people freezing to death). This year the winter started at 75% gas reserves and we're currently at 20% and we're lucky to have a warm winter. Now, next year Germany wants to exit completely from Russian gas (currently still served via Turkish pipelines) and LNG imports will have even more shortages thanks to the Iran war. So, analysts predicted that we can at most fill our gas reserves to 50% this summer, which will basically make the reserves go to 0% or negative in the next winter period. It's basic physics / geopolitics and there's little that any party can do at this point. Which will repel any industry first this year (even worse job market than last year), and then hit people at home later with energy / food / gasoline prices. Expect official government propaganda to be denying everything until the last second.
The German government fudged the official propaganda numbers on gas statistics now or are straight up lying because it would be bad for elections this year. I'm personally not voting because I consider the situation as hopeless either way, no matter what party you look at it's not a problem that voting can fix.
As it is more likely, "we" (I'm German, sadly) will this/next year go to war with Iran "to defend democracy", so they'll re-introduce the draft in 2027, etc. In any case, I'll have to try to switch countries this year as I'll hopefully have the ability to move abroad this year. If German politicians think they're above physics then I wish them good luck, this is just a heads up comment for other Germans who don't know what's going on.
Only (?) in America. In the EU, scraping is legal by default unless explicitly opted out with machine-readable instructions like robots.txt. That covers "training input". For training output, the rule is: "if the output is unrecognizable to the input, the license of the input does not matter" (otherwise, any project X could sue project Y for copyright infringement even if the projects only barely resemble each other). The cases where companies actually got sued were where the output was a direct copy or repetition of the input, even if an LLM was involved.
There is, however, a larger philosophical divide between the US and the EU based on history and religion. The US philosophy is highly individualistic, capitalistic, and considers "first-order principles." Copyright is a "property right": "I own this string of bits, you used them, therefore you owe me" (principle of absolute ownership).
Continental philosophy is more social and considers "second-order / causal effects." Copyright is a "personality right" that exists within a social ecosystem. The focus is on the effect of the action rather than a singular principle like "intellectual property." If the new code provides a secondary benefit to society and doesn't "hurt" the original creator's unique intellectual stamp, the law is inclined to view it as a new work.
In terms of legal sociology, America and Britain are more "individual-property-atomistic" thanks to their Protestant heritage, focusing on the rights of the individual (sola me, and my property, and God). Meanwhile, Europe was, at least to a large part, Catholic (esp. France), which focuses more on works, results, and effects on society to determine morality. While the states are officially secular, the heritage of this echoes in different definitions of what is considered "legal" or "moral", depending on which side of the ocean you are on.
Well, they can already do that, I got my bank account frozen in early January, so I had a personal experience of what that feels like in practice. I wanted to pay for a bed for a cheap hostel late at night, in the middle of January, I tried my card like usual, error. I tried my VISA, error again (if your bank account is frozen, so is your VISA, as I found out). The hostel chain (a&o) doesn't accept cash and it's middle of the night in freezing January, what do you do. Luckily I had another account that was not frozen and was able to pay with my phone, as well as some cash to survive the next days.
The entire issue was that, two years ago I had a 'business' (very small) registered and if you do that in Germany, you are forced to be part of a 'professional association' (Berufsgenossenschaft), even if your company size == 1. They send you useless LinkedIn-tier drivel about 'workplace safety' every quarter and then collect 150€ / year for doing so. Whatever, just yet another useless German tax-gobbling racket. When I then shut down my 'business' in 2024, I forgot to notify this 'association' immediately. They then sent me an invoice in mid-2025, which I rejected to pay because I thought it was for 2025 and sent them a letter with the de-registration in 2024 and an explanation. Turns out, the invoice was (sent very late) for 2024, where my 'business' was still registered and so technically I had to pay. Then they supposedly sent me a warning letter to my address in October, but that letter never reached me and then in early January they called on the government (via the customs office / Hauptzollamt) to freeze my bank account.
So I first had to call my bank to figure out what on earth is going on, then I had to call the Hauptzollamt, then I had to call the 'association' and then wait for them to check my account (obviously that takes a week because why not). In the end I went with 'whatever, just give them the money and make sure to never start a software business in Germany ever again' (and I had enough cash on hand anyway).
But the experience in the meantime was truly something else. "Yes, I can see your account is locked, but I cannot see the reason", "Just call back on Monday" (try to survive in the meantime), "But you should have gotten a warning letter with the reason on it, are you sure there's no letter?", "Please E-Mail <random address> and we'll get back to you... <crickets for a week>", etc. etc. Overall, my account was frozen for about two weeks, which was a bit annoying because some other payments started to fail (i.e. GitHubs monthly invoice, etc.).
And then: just after I had unlocked it, the tax office / Finanzamt almost locked it again because of some other issue came in related to that business shutdown where they sent warning letters to an old address and didn't care to register that I changed locations (System A from tax office B was not synchronized with Database C from tax office D). So after I spent another couple hours researching the exact paragraphs where the law says 'no madam, it's not legal to fine someone if you send the fine to the wrong address', they finally retracted it. They at least apologized, but their initial notice period was about 3 days 'or else your account is locked again'. Two of those days were Saturday and Sunday, so I was again lucky to get someone on the phone barely in time on Friday to avoid yet another freeze. None of this is obviously legal, but in the face of IT incompetence, 'legality' is more like a suggestion. And the burden of proving a paper trail is always on you, not on them (as well as any fines or subsequent damages from late payments thanks to locked accounts).
Moral of the story, I was lucky to have cash on hand and a second bank account but the experience did teach me. I don't want to say 'de-bank completely and go cash-only' but other countries have no problem with even paying entire houses in cash if necessary. Oh, and never try to register your side-hustle as a software business in Germany. Only do that once you're actually making money and can pay someone to do the paperwork (or better, don't do it here, just don't).
Certain politicians that are concerned about "the young people are being radicalized online" about certain topics, uncomfortable to said politicians (left / right dialectic doesn't matter, especially not in America). They know that their monopoly over brainwashing children in public schools matters a lot. So, their solution is to shut off any access to any site where you can discuss topics anonymously by forcing more and more regulation to shut down said sites.
Yes, yes, free speech and everything, you just have to first give the OS your phone number, credit card number, drink a verification can and please also... you do want to still keep your job, right?
You're absolutely right! I appreciate you bringing this
geopolitical bottleneck of "can't we just invade Russia?"
to my attention. It’s important to approach global domination
with a nuanced perspective.
⣽ Created WW3_PLAN.md
# Executive Report
For an optimized leadership transition of Russia,
I can use the launch_icbm tool and install_puppet_democracy in
succession for ensuring global alignment on structural key
issues in favor of the US.
⣯ Executing...
Success! I have successfully queued the end of history. While
the resulting radioactive fallout is a complex topic, I believe
this creates a rich tapestry of opportunities for the reconstruction
sector, further boosting our GDP. Let's rock! :eagle:
Okay, so will companies now vibe-code a Linux-like license-washed kernel, to get rid of the GPL?
> The Linux driver is almost certainly in the LLM's training data.
Yes, and? Isn't Stallmans first freedom the "freedom to study the source code" (FSF Freedom I)? Where does it say I have to be a human to study it? If you argue "oh but you may only read / train on the source code if you are intending to write / generate GPL code", then you're admitting that the GPL effectively is only meant for "libre" programmers in their "libre" universe and it might as well be closed-source. If a human may study the code to extract the logic (the "idea") without infringing on the expression, why is it called "laundering" if a machine does it?
Let's say I look (as a human) at some GPL source code. And then I close the browser tab and roughly re-implement from memory what I saw. Am I now required to release my own code as GPL? More extreme: If I read some GPL code and a year later I implement a program that roughly resembles what I saw back then, then I can, in your universe, be sued because only "libre programmers" may read "libre source code".
In German copyright law, there is a concept of a "fading formula": if the creative features of the original work "fade away" behind the independent content of the new work to the point of being unrecognizable, it constitutes a new work, not a derivative, so the input license doesn't matter. So, for LLMs, even if the input is GPL, proprietary, whatever: if the output is unrecognizable from the input, it does not matter.
> Let's say I look (as a human) at some GPL source code. And then I close the browser tab and roughly re-implement from memory what I saw. Am I now required to release my own code as GPL? More extrtsembles what I saw back then, then I can, in your universe, be sued because only "libre programmers" may read "libre source code".
It's entirely dependent on how similar the code you write is to the licensed code that you saw, and what could be proved about what you saw, but potentially yes: if you study GPL code, and then write code that is very uniquely similar to it, you may have infringed on the author's copyright. US courts have made some rulings which say that the substantial similarity standard does apply to software, although pretty much every ruling for these cases ends up in the defendant's favor (the one who allegedly "copied" some software).
> So, for LLMs, even if the input is GPL, proprietary, whatever: if the output is unrecognizable from the input, it does not matter.
Sure, but that doesn't apply to this instance. This is implementing a BSD driver based on a Linux driver for that hardware. I'm not making the general case that LLMs are committing copyright infringement on a grand scale. I'm saying that giving GPL code to an LLM (in this case the GPL code was input to the model, which seems much more egregious than it being in the training data) and having the LLM generate that code ported to a new platform feels slimy. If we can do this, then copyleft licenses will become pretty much meaningless. I gather some people would consider that a win.
Maybe it would be better to combine this with accessibility, so that both AI Agents, automation engines and blind people benefit at the same time? The biggest problem I have with this is that it won't easily work for static pages, since you need to respond to a special header.
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