Apparently it depends on the model. Testing on OpenRouter with Search enabled, gpt-5 strictly refuses to provide any links, but Deepseek R1 provides several Archive.org links, one of which is for a torrent file.

Thanks Deepseek, I guess I'll be watching The Fellowship of The King for free tonight. ;)

You changed the word "purpose" to "obligation"

I think there is a big difference b/w the two.

I would consider a correction in both of these statements, that the only purpose isn't to make money but rather to make valuation (but same thing most of the times)

They'd rather lose on profits or even burn the profits if that would mean that somehow their valuation could grow faster.

But sooner or later the profits will catch up to the evaluation (I hope) and only profitable companies should have their valuations based on top of that in an efficient economy.

Public traded corporations get money from people indirectly via retirement funds or directly via investing in them directly. The whole idea becomes that the profit to a person retiring is not the profits of the company but rather the valuation of the company. Of course, they aren't a legal obligation to profit itself but I would consider them to be almost under legal obligation to valuation otherwise they would be removed out of being publicly traded or in things like S&P 500 etc.

As an example, in my limited knowledge, take Costco, some rich guy would say for them to raise the price of its hotdog etc. from 1.50$ to 3-4$ for insanely more profits. Yet, they have their own philosophy etc. and that philosophy is partially the reason of their valuation as well.

When the rumour that costco is raising the prices of their hot dogs, someone might expect stock prices to increase considering more "profit" in future but rather the stock prices dropped.. by a huge margin if I remember correctly.

most companies are investing into AI simply because its driving their valuations up like crazy.

I don't think its an understatement to say that companies are willing to do anything for their valuations.

Facebook would try to detect if girls are insecure about their body and try to show advertisements to them. This is in my opinion, predatory nature showed by the corporation. For what purpose? for the valuation.

Speak for yourself. I've worked in several "Kafka-esque" software organizations.

It's much more egregious on the Android play store. Many apps like banking, transportation and online shopping apps are geolocked for installation, sometimes even without the developers' request or knowledge. What if I'm flying over there in two days, or just want to help someone who's already there? And even when I'm there, I have to prove my presence by supplying the local credit card details! Nothing else is enough - not GPS, not cell tower IDs, not the IP ranges or whatever else.

This is just outrageous because I can't even get a device that I paid for, to work for me. This is just sheer arrogance at this point - a wanton abuse of their co-monopoly privileges. However, I'm not under any delusions that they're here to improve my digital experience. These corporations profit by restricting their "users'" experience on an otherwise fully open internet.

Sometimes I consider actually enabling personalized search just to get to the things that I'm actually looking for.

That's perfectly fine. If I'm going to use a search engine, I'm not willing to sift through hundreds of potentially relevant results. I hope I find what I'm searching for in the first page, or at best in the first 3 pages or so.

What's not cool about Google is that now it hits you with AI slop with dubious quality right at the top, followed by a page of sponsored results, followed by some potentially useful results, followed by an entire ocean of spam traps and clone sites and really shady results with exotic never-seen-before TLDs that leaves you wondering whether clicking on a link will get in a hostile database. That's what's not cool about Google: is that you can't use it to search the web anymore.

That's a 230-page pdf. Do you have a more specific citation?

Bing felt about as good as Ecosia, until Ecosia started to mix in the Google results. At that point Ecosia became they better search engine. Bing vs. DDG, I'd say about the same. I stopped trying to use Bing once they rolled out all the Copilot nonsense. Now the UI is unusable and cluttered.