People haven’t really changed. As always, power corrupts. When the rewards are great enough, it seems people are often enough willing to compromise their integrity.

Have you tried recent models? They’re not perfect no, but they can usually get you most of the way there if not all the way. If you know how to structure the problem and prompt, granted.

The idea that “it’s ok cause we’d do the same” is ridiculous. There is no comparison: China is an authoritarian government and the parent company is practically an arm of the state. There are legitimate criticisms of American tech companies obviously, but they’re ultimately subject to the market and democratic governments. We shouldn’t be doing any business with authoritarians in the first place, much less inviting them to control a significant social media app in the guise of a legitimate business.

It runs great now. Most importantly, it supports extensions like ublock.

This is a classic problem for machine learning systems, sometimes called over fitting or memorization. By analogy, it’s the difference between knowing how to do multiplication vs just memorizing the times tables. With enough training data and large enough storage AI can feign higher “intelligence”, and that is demonstrably what’s going on here. It’s a spectrum as well. In theory, nearly identical recall is undesirable, and there are known ways of shifting away from that end of the spectrum. Literal AI 101 content.

Edit: I don’t mean to say that machine learning as a technique has problems, I mean that implementations of machine learning can run into these problems. And no, I wouldn’t describe these as being intelligent any more than a chess algorithm is intelligent. They just have a much more broad problem space and the natural language processing leads us to anthropomorphize it.

Normal people don’t, but when you get into absolutely massive enterprise archiving there’s no rival for the density and cost effectiveness. It sucks for general purpose storage, but for write once, hopefully never read use, they’re ideal.