“No Ads” Isn’t a Moral Stance | ✉️ #87
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Last week the AI people decided to do AI beef in the most American way possible: a Super Bowl ad. Anthropic bought a big shiny slot to say “ads are coming to AI but not to Claude.” Sam Altman replied with the CEO version of “lol that's bullshit”, and they both are wrong.
Anthropic is wrong. It's taking a dump on ad-supported models in a Super Bowl commercial — such a perfect little circle of hypocrisy that it could be a systems diagram. Millions can watch the game “for free” precisely because advertising pays for it, and you're standing inside a literal advertising cathedral to deliver a moral lecture about how ads are gross. Gross.
Altman is wrong. He responded like a politician. Lots of words, zero commitments. “Ads are good, actually” is not the point. The point is what happens when ads enter an assistant. You know, I hate ads. Not advertising in general. I just hate the modern experience, the YouTube-style hostage situation, where they make the experience worse on purpose, then sell you the antidote. “You're sick of ads? Buy Premium.” Yes, I'm fucking sick of ads. No, I don't want to be shaken down for basic dignity. Using my irritation and discomfort as a lever to extract a subscription is predatory. And the internet has normalized it so hard that we barely notice how fucked up it is. Altman says he's not going to use predatory practices. Fine. On a website, an ad is a banner. In a chatbot, an “ad” can look exactly like a recommendation. And if I can't tell the difference, if you can't draw a hard line there, you don't have a monetization strategy. You have a trust problem.
So when Anthropic frames “no ads” as moral superiority, and Altman frames “ads” as this noble access-expanding public service, I don't buy either story. I don't know what's the best solution here, I am sure there are people who get paid to figure it out, label them, keep them separate from answers, make them opt-in, whatever... Just don't pretend you're saving the world while you're selling me a subscription to stop suffering.
What We've Discovered
Advancing Our Chef Infrastructure: Safety Without Disruption. Slack is configuring all of their (EC2) infrastructure with Chef, and it’s almost refreshing to read about their latest advancements of their setup.
Shifting left at enterprise scale: how we manage Cloudflare with IaC. CloudFlare shares how they use terraform to manage hundreds of internal CloudFlare accounts at scale - and with ensuring security baselines.
How we deploy the largest GitLab instance 12 times daily: We wish this article had some lower level implementation details, but even without them it’s a great walk through of large scale deployments of a very big and complex system.
Don't fall into the anti-AI hype. Redis creator says in this article:Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five minutes test where you can just reinforce your own beliefs.
AWS Databases are now available on v0 by Vercel: Interesting move. Probably at this point it's easier to let other companies build customer-friendly application platforms and offer more complex AWS services via them.
The 88th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, February 27th. See you next time!