Most of my domains are at PairDomains (no nonsense UI, but also limited TLDs). Have become a recent convert to Porkbun after Godaddy blew a renewal (on a TLD Pair doesn’t support).
No. I don’t know that “the public” worried about anything with respect to the Internet. There was a lot of hand wringing by various thought leaders about porn, adult content, porn, more porn, inappropriate communications, porn, and finding someone to blame for various social ills that the Internet amplified but didn’t really cause. I think a lot of us were incredibly naive about the feedback loop of using engagement driven advertising to compensate the creation and distribution of content (which is more a Web 2.0 thing than a dot com era thing).
If this cycle is anything like the dot com cycle, there will be billions of dollars in capital invested in AI “stuff”. Data centers, various LLMs, derivatives of LLMs, shells of derivatives of LLMs, and other tangential things that claim to be AI. Eventually some anal retentive shareholder activist will ask some pretty basic questions about return on investment, the wisdom of investing so much in capital that depreciates rapidly, the actual value of all of this.
Truth be told, a lot of the predictions from the peak dot com era came true, it just took another decade of technology development and the widespread deployment of broadband. The hype cycle inevitably outpaces the market reality by several years, even if elements of it are true.
And a lot of the “efficiencies” of moving commerce online simply got appropriated by new middlemen. Amazon, Google, Apple each take their transactional vigs. Hard to argue that the current advertising supported media market is efficient when the most successful sites have to meter access to content with subscriptions (and chum ads that burn your CPU).
UBI? Not going to happen in an allegedly capitalist society like the US. We're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires who resent paying anything to support someone else's lifestyle. Far more likely to eliminate entire categories of jobs and careers.
It’s curious to me that the investor class will pour billions of dollars into “AI” over the coming years seeking to replace labor costs instead of investing in improving the efficiency of the existing labor pool. In some ways this is like the outsourcing/offshoring rager the investor class had over the past thirty years (that was the thing people should have worried about in the 1990s but did not). In the goal to shave pennies per share of costs and juice market returns we wiped out entire job categories and industries in the US. Sure, we got cheaper devices and other manufactured goods, but ignored the social costs.
So, what will happen next? It’s a big muddle. If you’ve spent billions investing in various LLM processing systems, can you reasonably expect to generate revenues and profits from the very people who are now unemployed or underemployed due to the very LLMs/AIs/algorithms you’ve invested in?
No, IIRC the Port Authority owned the land but leased development out to a developer, Larry Silverstein. Coincidentally Silverstein leased the rest of the WTC complex from the PANYNJ in July? 2001.
yes, and somewhere there will be at least one very dry definition of what NYC considers a "building", but then again it might be contextual and turn out to be a deap dive into the mind twisting depths of
beuorcratic moat's and silos, only for the very brave and commited
There was still an antitrust case in process against IBM in 1981 when the PC was launched, it would only be dropped by the US in 1982. I started in 1990 and the fear of another antitrust case pervaded everything through the ten years I was there, even after the earlier consent decree expired.
Do the AI training bots provide free access to the distillation of the content they drain from my site repeatedly? Don't they want a free and open web?
I don’t feel a particular need to subsidize multi–billion even trillion dollar corporations with my content, bandwidth, and server costs since their genius vibe coded bots apparently don’t know how to use modified-GETs or caching, let alone parse and respect robots.txt.
Is the problem they exist or the problem they are badly accessing your site? Because there are two conflating issues here. If humans or robots are causing you issues, as both can do, that's bad. But that has nothing to do with AI in particular.
Problem one is they do not honor the conventions of the web and abuse the sites.
Problem two is they are taking content for free, distilling it into a product, and limiting access to that product.
Problem one is not specific to AI and not even about AI.
Problem two is not anything new. Taking freely available content and distilling it into a product is something valuable and potentially worth paying for. People used to buy encyclopedias too. There are countless examples.
It was a similar problem with cryptocurrencies. Out comes some kind of tech thingy, and a million get-rich-quick scammers pop out of the woodwork and start scamming left, right and center. Suddenly everyone's in on the hustle, everyone's cryptomining, or taking over computers and using them for cryptomining, they're setting the world on fire with electricity consumption through the roof just to fight against other people (who they wouldn't need to fight against if they'd just cooperate).
A vision. A gold rush. A massive increase in shitty human behaviour motivated by greed.
And now here we are again with AI. Massive interest. Trillions of dollars being sloshed around, everyone hustling to develop something so they'll get picked and flooded with cash. An enormous pile of deeply unethical and disrespectful behaviour by people who are doing what they're doing because that's where the money is. The AI bubble.
HN people working in these AI companies have commented to say they do this, and the timing correlates with the rise of AI companies/funding.
I haven't tried to find it in my own logs, but others have said blocking an identifiable AI bot soon led to the same pattern of requests continuing through a botnet.
And that problem was largely solved by robots.txt. AI scrapers are ignoring robots.txt and beating the hell out of sites. Small sites that have decades worth of quality information are suffering the most. Many of the scrapers are taking extreme measures to avoid being blocked, like using large numbers of distinct IP addresses (perhaps using botnets).
I think the reasoning would be much simpler: more and more services and personnel working in those services are becoming mandatory reporters through legislation and regulation.
Yes, that's very likely.
While it seems that big-tech does not like regulations too much, i imagine that a regulation requiring them too listen-in on anything around their devices might actually one they'd not oppose, to say the least.
Personally, it became too much of a hassle to maintain. Comment spammers would whale on your comment systems, so you either shut them off or offloaded to some third party. If you ran Google ads it always seemed to take more effort to stay in Google's good graces than you’d actually earn. The one month I earned $200 Google suspended my ads account over seemingly trivial issues (that had been on the site for…years). If you wrote anything slightly controversial you got to be the target of people who really, truly, believe the worst thing in the world is to have an opinion different from theirs and your job should be forfeit as a result. Or maybe your life.
In the latter years (even pre–LLM bot feeding frenzy) the number of bots inhaling content over, and over, and over again overwhelmed the perfectly normal bandwidth limits.
At least with social media it's someone else's dime paying for the hosting and security apparatus. You still get the brigading and pile–ons and death threats.
It’s 1997. The executives in the boardroom have heard about this AI thing and have tasked the managerial class to make sure they have an AI plan to execute for FY2025 and FY2026. Shareholder Rights Activists are demanding that companies have an AI strategy. There has yet to be a Netscape moment though the ever larger capital raises by OpenAI and others may be the Netscape moment. Money is pouring in even though there’s little measurable benefit yet.
There will be a couple of tells when the bubble is popping: the Shareholder Rights Activists will flip to demanding companies execute the executives who implemented the wasteful AI strategies that they demanded, and “AI” companies will take over all of the ad slots for the SuperB*wl.
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