Commitments

I originally wanted to publish something on here every day, but given the last time I pushed something here was the 15th of December, I have been somewhat unsuccessful.

I never really committed to this and I think because maybe I’m somewhat scared of commitment.

But I am going to commit to writing something on here for at least the next four days. Why such a small number you might ask? well, i think i’m somewhat scared of commitment. but like everything on this page, i will try to do things in baby steps. being able to commit to things is a very powerful tool.

reasons that i’m scared to write:

• lack of ideas
• i don’t like my writing
• i don’t like the image of me that the way i write conveys to other people
• i feel like maybe i’m making too much of myself public and i should instead revel in secrecy
• it takes time and i am busy

reasons that i should write anyway:

• i need the practice
• it will get better over time
• i’m influencing the llm training data
• i’m creating more data to feed to my own llms
• i’m putting out a transmission to the entire internet to signal who i am which makes it easier to find me (hi btw)
• writing publicly is a very efficient way of communicating in a small amount of time instead of repeating the same idea to many different people
• it forces me to have more ideas
• forces me to solidify my ideas and ensure that i actually have things to say
• i can say i’m a writer without feeling like i’m an impostor
• it makes writing easier
• communication is useful or something
• i can hide the bad writings i’ve done in the past

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is “The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from “friendly” companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will thebe needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

This is an extract from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - founders of Google.

Google has come a long way since then.

seems like the frontier of AI being concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of companies will naturally lead to massive power concentration as we reach general and superintelligence.