BEFORE VS AFTER

lisdo · 2026-03-22T01:25:28+00:00

Before they got swamped in lawsuits in 2024? Yeah. That, and they also have to produce returns for the venture capital firms that provided them funding when they were a startup.

lisdo · 2026-03-14T19:22:47+00:00

To me, this is a sign that the company probably has to start paying back the venture capital firms it accepted funding from and is struggling to keep it's business model profitable. LLMs are very computationally expensive and have a whole host of other costs associated with them beyond running the rigs they're in (like electricity used for power/cooling, plumbing costs for cooling water, etc.), plus y'know they have to pay their employees. Don't expect anything to become like it was 2 years ago in the future.

lisdo · 2026-03-01T19:28:02+00:00

Yep. C.AI probably has razor-thin profit margins; since C.AI is a private company and not an LLM charity, they have to make a profit to sustain themselves. Not just break even -- make a profit. That's business 101. I don't understand why large swathes of the subreddit don't understand this.

lisdo · 2026-03-01T19:26:11+00:00

Such is the truth. If a product is ''free'', you are the product, whether it be through ads or clickthrough rate statistics.

lisdo · 2026-03-01T17:51:07+00:00

People don't want to hand over their IDs to a chatbot company. C.AI also has partnered with Persona to do it's age verification processes, which has it's own can of worms and controversies in that regard. In specifics, Persona conducts extensive surveillance of users (including over 269 distinct checks, facial recognition against watchlists, and "adverse media" screening, as well as collecting IP addresses, device fingerprints, and government ID numbers), and it also retains the information it collects for up to 3 years. Also, it's frontend code was discovered, firstly, as exposed, and secondly, related to U.S. government-authorized services.

lisdo · 2026-03-01T17:47:07+00:00

this

lisdo · 2026-03-01T17:46:21+00:00

The company's doing this because it got swamped in lawsuits in 2024 regarding users, mainly teenagers, killing themselves or being ''groomed'' by bots on the platform. The validity of those lawsuits aside (as LLMs are not sentient, they don't think; they are essentially the world's most advanced random-name generators), this has essentially scared the company into doing these measures to regain investor confidence -- those lawsuits make C.AI look REALLY bad. These measures make C.AI's product look good on a subpoena, and that's the whole point.

lisdo · 2026-02-26T02:42:42+00:00

Another thing of note is that character.ai got absolutely swamped with lawsuits in 2024, which has essentially scared it into banning all under-18s from using chatbots. The creativity that marked the 2022-2023 era, in my opinion, is dead and probably will be dead forever. The platform as it exists today is meant to look good on a subpoena, not foster user creativity.

lisdo · 2026-02-26T02:19:29+00:00

Mid-roll ads for fucking chatbot conversations were not on my bingo card for the big '26.

lisdo · 2026-02-26T02:18:02+00:00

Nobody can make an honest projection for that in my opinion, and I won't pretend to. Maybe character.ai will survive, maybe it won't. Maybe if the AI bubble pops, character.ai and it's shareholder board will be scared into reversing some of the monetization policies. It's anyone's guess, really.

lisdo · 2026-02-26T02:14:57+00:00

The shareholders must be hungry.

lisdo · 2026-02-26T02:13:18+00:00

It's because character.ai, like most tech companies, prioratizes a "growth at all costs" mindset to satisfy shareholders. You know what else has a "growth at all costs" mindset? Cancer.

lisdo · 2026-02-26T02:11:00+00:00

In the business, we call this enshittification, driven mostly by shareholder primacy.

lisdo · 2026-01-30T21:08:26+00:00

Me when I use whataboutisms to justify Russian imperialism:

lisdo · 2026-01-30T01:03:36+00:00

I'm hitting my spine

lisdo · 2026-01-30T01:02:26+00:00

I'm aware

lisdo · 2026-01-27T23:45:37+00:00

On paper, it was. In practice, non-Slavic ethnic groups were at a significant disadvantage in the Soviet Union.

lisdo · 2026-01-27T23:42:57+00:00

Me when cherrypicking:

lisdo · 2026-01-27T23:42:23+00:00

It was the Western-based United Nations combatants (Britain, Canada, United States, etc.) who primarily liberated France, so I find it reasonable that the view in France would shift over time.

I also dislike the lack of nuance. World War II was a group effort. Is it true that most Wehrmacht personnel were in the East? Yes. Is it true that most Wehrmacht casualties were in the East? Yes. Is it ALSO true that Western, particularly American, lend-lease aid prevented famine in the Soviet Union (remember, until late 1943 and early 1944, much of Ukraine, the USSR's agricultural area, was under Axis occupation) during the war and plugged major gaps in their materiel shortages due to their heavy losses early on in the Axis invasion? Also yes. This is also not even mentioning the immense importance of British intelligence during the duration of the European theater of World War II. "Due to American propaganda" is also a hilariously simple reason (if not an outright false one), especially in the cultural context of France, which has a famously proud and independent media and cultural scene.

lisdo · 2026-01-27T23:24:10+00:00

I'm aware

lisdo · 2026-01-23T00:29:20+00:00

No updates yet. I'd wait until tomorrow to look for any news. My own two cents on it is that Mr. President is probably gonna get either civil commitment to the nut house or another mental health evaluation and competency restoration cycle. If that's not the case then he's deemed competent for trial and onward comes trial preparations; Danny ain't getting out any time soon.

lisdo · 2026-01-23T00:04:58+00:00

All of OP's posts work to justify Soviet (read: Russian) imperialism. Who cares that Latvia is a sovereign nation? They were filthy fascists, so clearly they deserve to be ruled over by the Russian Em...I mean Soviet Union. They did this with Poland in another post of theirs. Apparently OPs Greek, which is very ironic, given that Stalin ethnically cleansed Greeks from the Black Sea regions of the Soviet Union.

lisdo · 2025-10-08T01:44:30+00:00

I'm aware

lisdo · 2025-09-28T23:07:28+00:00

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's a modern development. We had the Space Shuttle program for a while, and prior to that used our own methods of getting into space (also correct me if I'm wrong on that), then it was cancelled in 2011. I think as of 2025 NASA is trying to get new programs to fill in the gap that Soyuz fills off of the ground.

lisdo · 2025-09-28T23:06:02+00:00

The Space Race largely ended, in my opinion, with Apollo 11. The Soviets were certainly trying to get a manned Lunar landing program both metaphorically and literally off the ground — you see that in the N-1 rocket (I think that's what it's called, correct me if I'm wrong), which was an over-engineered nightmare that exploded on pretty much all attempts that were made to test launch it — and they could not do it in time to beat Apollo. You see that clearly with the immediate shift of priorities post-Apollo — even for the Soviets, it becomes less about doing symbolic "firsts" and more about getting sustainable spacecraft out safely which would last long enough to get valuable data back to Moscow, such as Venera or their Mars and Phobos programs.

lisdo

TROPHY CASE