On-premming your Internet services just seems like an exercise in self-flagellation.
Unless you have a heavy-duty pipe to your prem you're just risking all kinds of headaches, and you're going to have to put your stuff behind Cloudflare anyway and if you're doing that why not use a VPS?
It's just not practical for someone to run a little blog or app that way.
It's not that much headache, and this isn't necessarily about public-facing sites and apps.
Take file storage: Some folks find Google Drive and similar services unpalatable because they can and will scan your content. Setting up Nextcloud or even just using file sharing built into a consumer router is pretty easy.
You don't need to rely on Cloudflare, either. Some routers come with VPN functionality or can have it added.
The self-hosting most people talk about when they talk about self-hosting is very practical.
I’m at Big tech and our org has our sights on automating product manager work. Idea generation grounded with business metrics and context that you can feed to an LLM is a simpler problem to solve than trying to automate end to end engineering workflows.
> I assume that AI assistance in creative writing is now mainstream, and an accepted tool for most writers.
It absolutely is not. In fact the Nebula awards just banned entries from having _any_ AI use involved with them whatsoever. You can't even use them for grammar correction.
I'm not sure quite how that works. Google Docs will suggest various changes which I take into account or don't. And they certainly correct misspellings. You can choose to decide that's not AI but it's a grey line.
For writing I've sometimes used LLMs to speed up some essentially boilerplate. Never used for something that's not pretty much routine that I could easily do but would probably spend some time doing so.
For anything that might be a Nebula submission, it's hard to imagine LLMs doing anything beyond the copyediting level (which may not be well-defined but seems a reasonable threshold).
Well, they want to preserve a role for the editor; because the editor is not just checking the grammar but also the content, and weighing in with their relative objectivity on the current state of the story, what should be improved, what was good and what didn't work, etc. and if we have AI glazing us continuously we will just produce slop; it may look like good fiction but it will not read like it, and people can tell the difference!
Not even grammar correction? That's lame and kinda evil.
When you submit your manuscript to a big publisher I guarantee they're using AI to check it (now). At the very least, AI is the only tool that can detect a great number of issues that even the best editors miss. To NOT take advantage of that is a huge waste.
It sounds to me like they're just trying to push out independents and small publishers. Because you know they're not going to ask big publishers if they use AI (who will likely deny it anyway... Liars).
FYI: AI is both the best grammar checker ever as well as the best consistency checker. It'll be able to generate intelligent lexical density report that will know that you used "evasive", "evaded", and "evading" too much (because it knows they're all the same base word). They're also fantastic at noticing ambiguities that humans often miss because they're like-minded and "know what you mean." (Our brains are wired like that to improve the efficiency of our repetitive tasks like reading words).
AI tools can help you improve as a writer and enhance your craft in a lot of ways. To not take advantage of that—to me—feels like burying your head in the sand and screaming, "LA LA LA LA! I don't want to think about AI because it can be used for bad things!"
I've chatted with many writers about AI and nearly all of them don't understand the technology and assume it's literally just taking chunks of other writers works and spewing them out one sentence at a time.
I literally had a conversation with a writer that thought you could take ten sentences written by AI and trace them back to ten books.
That literally *is* what they’re doing though, just not at sentence granularity—they’re doing it at both larger and smaller scales. Sometimes they may give you a plagiarized paragraph, sometimes they’ll give you a plagiarized phrase, sometimes they’ll give you a structure that they fill in with “their own” words where the structure itself was taken from something… They do nothing original.
An intersection without power is supposed to be treated as a 4-way stop. An unfortunately high, nontrivial number of drivers last night were not following that rule.
The outrage people would rightly have at Waymo allowing a number of its vehicles to blow the lights would be huge. People running blacked out lights is unacceptable.
That's because it's a two-way street, a multi-modal model that is highly proficient at real-life image generation is also highly proficient at interpreting real-life image input, which is something sorely needed for robotics.
The next step is to take this beyond AI generations and to license rights to characters and IP on social media directly.
The next salvo will be where YouTube has to take down all major IP-related content if they don't pay a licensing fee. Regardless of how it was created. Movie reviews, fan animations, video game let's plays.
I've got a strong feeling that day is coming soon.
Blockbuster went out of business because they made the video rental market incredibly boring and had no vision for the future. Once they got market dominance it became just 500 copies of the first fast and furious as a guaranteed rental, and all the cool and interesting stuff gone.
Observationally, their model was roughly like this:
* For hit movies buy an obscene number of copies to rent month 1
* Sell off some for a discount as the rentals dwindled
* Discount anything over a reasonable backlog / duplicates set shortly after
Offhand I think they tried to time this to end well enough before the release windows slid to TV + Ads distribution.
* Rent the backlog until dead or until they sold in a discount bin
Some independent shops also competed. I recall my parents kindly rented a few less popular games they happened to carry. Not sure about videos, might have been better for stuff not mainstream enough at the big national chain.
Unless you have a heavy-duty pipe to your prem you're just risking all kinds of headaches, and you're going to have to put your stuff behind Cloudflare anyway and if you're doing that why not use a VPS?
It's just not practical for someone to run a little blog or app that way.
reply