The stock market is not about future results, it's about gambling, especially over the last decade.

If you buy the "AI DCs in space" pitch, you deserve to be parted from your money.

I am baffled by how many people are buying in

All good points, but I think their main point of poor governance is still the pure motivation.

The governance issues seem much worse than the other issues with pricing and inclusion.

You can change the audio track back to the original.

Not sure if it remembers your preference, though, so if it doesn't that probably grates.

It doesn't remember my preference. Or rather, it seems to remember me picking a specific language, and then loads the dub in that language next time I click a video. It doesn't remember "don't duh videos".

It does remember it. At least on Firefox/Linux.

Why is it their job to evaluate a 1m+ line code rewrite?

I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some sort of legal action against Google, the monopoly, to make the distinction in how their crawlers use scraped content.

That's almost certainly illegal in many jurisdictions, and they'd definitely not be able to hide that they're doing it indefinitely. A sure way to be massively sued.

Well, won't it be hard to test?

The customers could be paying for "increased visibility" in LLM results, but nothing specific.

Also, the ad platform could simply hint towards a customer, instead of directly mentioning, thus not being a true direct ad.

(NB: customer = the one buying the increased LLM visibility)

For example, a user could ask for "prebuild computers", and the ad platform could state: "the best ones for your use-case are those with AMD CPU, NVidia GPU, 2TB of RAM and a Z960X motherboard", and when you search for it, surprise-surprise, there is only one company in your location selling this specific setup. Or maybe, instead of linking directly to the company, it links to keywords/ideas that link to that company.

You get the gist, by using dynamically generated plain text and having more control over the user journey, you could actually steer the user into a specific direction without ever mentioning it.

All it takes is one determined journalist running experiments, or one whistleblower inside the company exposing these systems.

Plus, you'd have to offer this service somehow, meaning you'd have to describe it to potential customers... just another bunch of people you'd have to swear to perpetual secrecy.

I'm not denying it could (or even will) happen, though. Anything for a buck for these companies.

Being a monopoly is already illegal in many jurisdictions and that doesn't seem to stop Google.

A lot of the time they hallucinate the sources, too.

Are you forgetting that you need to launch from one of those "suffocating regulatory states"?