The person absolutely does have the advantage of having empirical awareness and the ability to test their conclusions against external reality. But lots of people do engage in "research" and build mental models of various topics with little or no empirical context, and rely mainly on digesting calcified knowledge from other people.

(We can even observe this in the resulting text: we immediately grasp the level of competence of the author, just by the way they take their path trough and at the matter. With LLMs, well, there's this even temperature, ready-made feeling, regulated by probability thresholds and RLHF sanctioned phrasing, also known as "slop" – even rhythmic intensifications, like "not this, not that, but…", which is actually a figure for a synthetic construct, don't help –, since the text isn't the trace or product of an actual organized thought – or, at least, an attempt at an organized thought.)

PS: "empirical a priori judgement" was meant as translation of synthetisches Urteil a priori (Kant). I.e., our ability to mentally prove concepts like congruency, which are not a priori, but can be inferred without regression to empirical knowledge. Typically, this requires both our inner sense (time, sequence, etc.) and outer senses (space, configuration, etc.)

Drawing different sources of information together into a single understanding is quite literally the definition of "synthesis" in this context. If that process is what you're referring to as "re-sequencing content", then it does fit the definition of "synthesis" in this discussion.

If you're using the phrase "re-sequencing content" as a way of indirectly suggesting that LLMs aren't relating together multiple sources of information and combining them into a single expression, then that itself is the point of contention that we are arguing about.

Perhaps you're trying to apply a philosophical concept of synthesis, e.g. that of Fichte or Hegel, but that definition applies to a specific type of philosophical analysis, and isn't quite the concept we're using in this discussion.

The very purpose of text is to transfer meaning, concepts, observations and complex thoughts to human readers for them to process. And we have built a complex framework around this and for this. The fact that many feel that this framework is violated should hint at there being a problem, a conceptual discrepancy. (And be it just that there's a man-in-the middle, who hasn't authorship, standing in between me as an author and those receiving what remains of the text. In its essential lack of agency, it's less of a mediating recommendation and more of an appropriation. But, maybe, if we're talking about a slip into a new dogmatic slumber, manufactured via an unseen authority that hasn't any authority nor position as an author, the problem goes deeper than this. And, maybe, the masquerading of LLM output as human cummunication and phrasing is part of the problem.)

Aggregating information, extracting underlying concepts, and combining those concepts into a unified expression is indeed the vernacular meaning of "synthesis" applicable to this discussion.

"Emulgating" is not a conventional English word. Is it a misspelling of "emulating"? I ask because using the term "emulating" here would again represent an instance of question begging, i.e. implicitly asserting the position that what's being discussed is merely the paraphrasing of singularly sourced information, and not the unification of concepts expressed in multiple sources, which I again believe is the very thing we are debating.

> And we have built a complex framework around this and for this. The fact that many feel that this framework is violated should hint at there being a problem, a conceptual discrepancy.

I don't think there necessarily is a problem or conceptual discrepancy here, any more than there has been for all of the centuries that people have been debating epistemology. The problem here is the same as for humans, and reduces to a rationalism vs. empiricism debate. AI tools are pure rationalists, and are solely capable of reasoning. However, many people behave this way as well, and exhibit a rationalist epistomology, even having emotional entanglements with their axioms to the point that they'll bend over backwards to reject evidence that falsifies empirical conclusions drawn from those axioms.

My biggest fear from AI is not that it isn't capable of inductive reasoning -- that's all it's capable of, as I see it -- but rather that the fact that its reasoning has no empirical anchor will lead people who are mired in rationalist epistemology to accept its conclusions uncritically.

In other words, the danger doesn't come from the fact that AI has no semantic awareness, but that people using it aren't seeking semantic validation in the first place, which is a problem already pervasive in our society.

> AI tools are pure rationalists, and are solely capable of reasoning.

Mind that the world isn't in the language, nor our connection with the world. (We know this for about 120 years, since we expelled the referens from linguistics.) Which brings us back to the synthetic judgement a priori… You may emulate this, as a superficial trait drawn from other traces of communication, but it's not what this is all about. E.g., I wouldn't expect true "lateral thinking" from an LLM output.

> My biggest fear from AI…

I'd add to this, it's not just empirical vs rationalist epistemology, it's also about empathy, anything referring to the conditio humana, which is really what any text is about, even a scientific one (why is it that we do want to know, what are the motivations, the regulating circumstances, etc.?).

Artificial lock-in simply doesn't work in the long run: the incentive structures will always motivate customers to cut out middlemen, and peripheral markets to develop around providing the tools for doing exactly that. Anthropic and OpenAI may well end up being the Data General and Honeywell of our era.

The greatest risk to this is the possibility of political intervention creating artificial hurdles that prevents decentralized AI from challenging the big players. With than in mind, it's worthwhile to subject every proposal to regulate AI to intense scrutiny.

The mechanisms of democratic accountability in political institutions are today are demonstrably dysfunctional and broken, if they ever really worked at all, whereas multinational companies are at least somewhat beholden to market pressures. Sure, they can engage in jurisdiction shopping when that's viable for them, but it's more often the case that they seek to influence those very governments in order to insulate themselves from accountability to the market.

And many of the bans and restrictions that firms try to avoid by switching jurisdictions are themselves the result of some other industry or special interest group managing to exert stronger influence over the local political institutions, and not due to any sort of "democratic" consensus. Look at the recent cluster of nearly identical age-verification laws passed by jurisdictions around the world, which there was near zero "democratic" impetus for, as an example of this.

The age verification thing was initially a UK project and people there broadly support it https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54405-eight-months-on-thre...

the others copied

> It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.

That also creates friction for new users, discoverability issues, and additional privacy concerns for people wanting to access your content.

> I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content.

Even the ones that do provide attribution and links back to the original source? Perplexity does a good job of that, for example.

> As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.

Well, yeah, if you're blocking the content from being accessed without a login, you're blocking it from being indexed by search engines.

I guess I'm a little confused as to what your ultimate goal is. If you're putting content up on the web for free, what are you gaining by blocking AI from indexing it, especially when you're blocking actual users, whether they discover it via AI or traditional search?

I understand the frustration at seeing AI tools digest your content and then repeat to users without connecting it back to your site. But that's something that other people have always been doing independently of AI -- people read articles, learn facts or understand new ideas from them, and then incorporate them into their general assumptions to be expressed in their own work without necessarily acknowledging, or even recalling, where the underlying information that informed their thinking came from. People have been writing articles and producing various forms of media content that are inspired by other people's unattributed work since time immemorial.

Yes, AI accelerates that process and makes it more visible to you, so I understand where the frustration is coming from. But consider that the expectation that everything that happens downstream of your work will always be attributable back to you may never have been a reasonable one in the first place.

It may seem that way in the short term. But in the long term, the tendency in technical development is for the infrastructure and capital requirements for new technology to start off very high, but then shrink over time, such that use cases that required massive amounts of upfront investment in the early stages become incrementally more viable at smaller and smaller scales.

People were saying the same things about computers in general in the 1960s as they are about GenAI now. That was an era when computer technology itself had developed to a point when it was economically impactful, but still only affordable to large institutions. People making predictions that increasing use of computers would lead to massive centralization of economic and cultural power didn't predict that merely twenty years later, computing power equivalent to contemporary mainframes would be available in a convenient desktop box available at a local shop to any individual or main-street business that cared to buy one.

The widespread availability of computing technology from the '80s to present actually had the opposite effect, and led to quite a bit of decentralization, as enterprising individuals and new startups started applying that technology to do at small scales what only large enterprises could do before. In fact, a lot of the reaction to AI in its current stage may actually be because it's disrupting the expectation of decentralization and autonomy over our technology that the personal computing revolution established in the first place.

Like most new technologies, GenAI in its initial stages has required massive infrastructure investments that have led to the early iterations being offered by centralized institutions, but that might not last. Open-source AI models are approaching the capabilities that the big players' frontier models had arrived at only a couple of years ago.

In 2026, we're already at the point where local inference is economically viable for commercial use cases -- at my own company, while we do use our Claude Enterprise account for a variety of use cases, it turned out to make much more sense in terms of both cost and risk exposure to instead process certain datasets (e.g. a large volume of phone recordings containing PII) with local models running on commodity GPUs. That proved to be entirely effective, and the one-time hardware investment (which created a bookable asset for the company) turned out to be less than the cost of running the same task on Claude (which would have been pure OpEx).

The biggest error of the "left" in most of these conversations is treating political institutions as something uniquely well-intentioned and competent, rather than understanding them as just another set of institutions in society, subject to the same incentive structures, biases, and errors as everything else.

A lot of skepticism of political interventions doesn't necessarily come from refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem, but rather from the recognition that the proposed solutions often just represent even worse instances of the same sort of problem. I think a lot of the people who've tended to support political intervention may have operated under the naive assumption that giving the federal government expansive power to intervene into our social and economic affairs could only bring net benefit; hopefully, the behavior of the current administration in the US should be something of a wake-up call.

Their business model is a straightforward "sell a good product at a reasonable price" approach, and they seem to be quite successful at it without needing to resort to gimmickry, subscription fees, or other even less savory ways of monetizing other people's activities.

But Ubiquiti doesn't really seem to be going for ecosystem lock-in: on the flipside, earlier this year, they released an update to UniFi Protect that enabled any RTSP-based video stream to be connected into it, rather than just their own cameras. That enabled us to migrate a site with 30+ Hikvision cameras over to UniFi infrastructure without having to purchase all new cameras from Ubiquiti.

Other companies might be disappointed that we didn't buy cameras from them, but maybe the people at Ubiquiti understand that we weren't going to do that in the first place, and not being able to use our existing cameras was a blocking factor for us to move the rest of the infrastructure over to UniFi.

Technically true, because bait-and-switch refers merely to advertising an attractive product offer in order to lure people into a pitch for a different product.

In this case, they actually sold a product, then decided to maliciously alter the product after it was sold to modify its behavior. That makes this a much more serious offense, equivalent to trespass, vandalism, or possibly even burglary.

It's equivalent to selling someone a house that includes a secret entrance that you retain access to, so you can surreptitiously enter the house to steal the new homeowners' property after they've moved in.

The "business" ended when the sale transaction concluded. The fact that you were the seller in that past transaction doesn't entitle you to vandalize goods that now belong to someone else.

This is just crime trying to disguise itself as legitimate business, as scams often do.

Actually not, though not in a way that makes the rest of your post incorrect.

Various laws and regulations state that the seller has responsibilities to the buyer after the initial transaction has completed, one of which Bambu might¹ be transgressing by removing features that people we lead to believe were part of the product, and could reasonably expect to remain part of the product, at the time of the sale.

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[1] This has not been tested in court, and I'm no lawyer, take my idea of what is the case with a requisite serving of condiment.