Problem is, everything gets poisoned by AI these days, and it gets worse when there's some sort of reward attached. Karma points in the case of Reddit and HN, in Wikipedia you got a ton of commercial actors and propaganda/distortion campaigns.
And that's why everyone on the receiving end of the AI slop deluge is so paranoid.
The thing why Cloudflare got invented isn't AI scrapers. These are just the latest development... the original reason why Cloudflare got created and why it experienced such a meteoric growth is DDoS and botnets.
Yes. We need regulation in the AI space. But it will be useless as long as bad actors aren't held accountable - and a lot of the bad actors aren't in our jurisdictions. You got hacked devices all over the world in giant botnets, controlled by Russia, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean actors. You got Chinese AI scraper bots as China is heavily investing into training their own models. You got Indian, Filipino and Myanmar-based scammers.
And frankly I have no idea how to get all of that under control. As much as I'd like to see sanctions against both domestic and foreign enablers of abuse (which includes residential ISPs) - it's going to be one giant ass whack-a-mole game.
> I don't really see that many ads to be honest. I'm not on social media (except HN), I use Adblock, plus I just don't consume a lot of the media that the general population does.
If you are in any urban area, your eyes will be blasted with "PURCHASE ME! PURCHASE ME!" visuals all the time, you cannot escape it. Just take a trip via Munich Main Station to transit from the regional trains to the subway [1]. It's not enough that the entire passenger transit area is lined with shopfronts with all sorts of lights, screens and other attempts to get your attention, it's not enough that there are huge flatscreens with video everywhere, no... even the concrete pillars are covered with ads nowadays.
> Every GrapheneOS server has a local DNS resolver (Unbound) that's configured not to resolve queries itself, but to forward them to Cloudflare's servers over an encrypted connection. This means Cloudflare sees the DNS query patterns of every GrapheneOS server — what domains they look up, when, and how often.
Well, the general idea is to protect the privacy of GrapheneOS users. Sure, a government-backed entity can wiretap the GrapheneOS servers and force Cloudflare to deliver DNS logs to then correlate with requests... but that is a class of attack that I really don't see anyone doing anytime soon.
> Young people are always more eager to adapt new tech while older people yell at clouds.
That's not just because young people have time like GP explained, but it is also because young people haven't been through the endless rounds of getting beaten up at work over daring to suggest that the "old ways" of one's superiors might be outdated, inefficient or just plain wrong.
> But how would that also reduce the nonphysical SAAS stuff?
The resulting economic crash will affect everyone, we're (IMHO) looking towards a dotcom-bust level wipeout. And many SaaS and other companies run asset-lean (i.e. they have no server hardware because that's all cloud, no real estate because it's all either wework or conventionally rented), margin-lean (the VC business model requires that, as the basic recipe is to achieve market domination by burning cash) and cash-lean (often enough, it's less than a quarter of expenses on the bank accounts).
All that "lean-ness" looks great on an investor's quarterly release sheet: no massive amounts of wealth tied up in assets and no cash sitting around on bank accounts that could be released towards investors as dividends or, if it comes from third parties, costs the company interest... but it prevents resiliency against crises.
> We might have just shot our most valuable non-AI tech products in the foot.
Counterpoint: the fiber buildout during the dotcom boost. That crashed the economy pretty hard when the bubble burst, but we are still benefitting from all the dark fiber that was arranged for and built out back in that era. A lot of today's ISPs were able to grab up that fiber after the bust for cents on the dollar.
Assume that OpenAI and Anthropic go bust, which at least one of them likely will, and possibly a fair few of the datacenters that are under construction will also collapse. Someone will be able to snatch these physical assets again for cents on the dollar and run open-weight models on them or train new ones.
The problem isn't (and no, this is not an AI tell, everything I write here got typed on a 2022 M2 MBA by hand) the assets, they will be put up for productive usage, just as with any other large bankruptcy or bubble in history. The problem is the "IOU" that is being passed from one hand to the next like a hot potato. Assuming a recovery of, maybe, 20% after the collapse, at 1.6 trillion dollars of assets under management by some kind of private investment/debt we're looking at about 1.3 trillion dollars in valuation that is going to be wiped out.
And given that a lot of the investment market is actually backed by pension funds... this is going to be a bloodbath. Not only will there be a lot of people laid off in addition to the layoffs we already saw "due to AI", but when the pension funds and thus their payouts collapse? We'll see retirees flooding the employment markets who just try to make a living, rendering the situation for everyone else even worse. Flipping burgers used to be a gig for students, these days students compete with people of all ages desperate to survive - and thus desperate to undercut others in wages.
Another problem will be the capacity buildout in the semiconductor industry. It's already heading toward an oligopoly after numerous boom-bust cycles: you only have two and a half GPU chip vendors (NV, AMD, Intel), two vendors of general-purpose CPU vendors (Intel and AMD - I exclude Apple because they do not sell their CPUs to any third party and ARM because 99% of non-Apple ARM chips do not go towards servers, desktops and laptops), three RAM manufacturers (Samsung, SKhynix, Micron) and two and a half physical chip manufacturers (TSMC, Samsung, Intel). When the AI bubble bursts, it will be one of a hell of an effort to prevent at least one actor from going bankrupt.
You're expecting that there's going to be a supply collapse only, but there's a real risk the collapse hits both supply and demand.
A lot of the current AI business is FOMO and vanity metrics. Nobody really wants to acknowledge the support tickets where the first three responses are the customer cursing because they didn't appreciate being handed off to a chatbot, or the reworks, or the compliance/policy/privacy concerns, or the internal friction and brand damage it's causing.
Right now, a lot of that is being dazzled away by how "cheap" the alternative is, since it's built on an unsustainable cost base. It's like someone opened a "restaurant" where the food was actually supplied by making a bazillion new DoorDash accounts to claim promotional credits and having them drop the food at the "kitchen". During the initial phase, the customers will forgive that the burger was cold because it was $1.79.
Once the funny money runs out and services start shuttering or pricing for actual profitability, people are going to ask about actual quality and return on investment. There will be a demand rollback.
Even if you can do it cheaper with an open-model running on fire-sale hardware, we probably don't need 500 "chatbot listens and transcribes your meeting" services that weren't that much better than dictation software running locally on a Pentium III. We probably don't need AI-powered support experiences that manage to be worse than actually keyword-searching your company's Confluence. We probably don't need to be spinning up coding agents to spend 15 minutes discombobulating and bibblewabbling and re-reading 82 billion tokens of context before making a two-line change that an actual developer with learned experience in the code would make in 15 seconds.
> You're expecting that there's going to be a supply collapse only, but there's a real risk the collapse hits both supply and demand.
That was what I alluded to in the last paragraph. Semiconductor industry and everything associated with it will get screwed hard.
But in case you mean a demand collapse from the entire economy because even more people get laid off... yes, agreed. Dotcom bubble bust, here we come, full steam ahead.
> We probably don't need AI-powered support experiences that manage to be worse than actually keyword-searching your company's Confluence.
I'd pay good money for an AI that could actually ingest Confluence. In literally every organization that does not have a dedicated team to manage it on all aspects, it inevitably devolves into a tire fire. Unfortunately there's no easy way (yet?) to "after-train" a model - what I'd envision here is a nightly batch job that adds another layer to the AI model from all the information in the Confluence so searches don't incur a giant cost for the AI agent to process everything.
> We probably don't need to be spinning up coding agents to spend 15 minutes discombobulating and bibblewabbling and re-reading 82 billion tokens of context before making a two-line change that an actual developer with learned experience in the code would make in 15 seconds.
Oh we do. The stonk markets don't like it when companies employ people. People need office space, they need associated services (say, IT, fruit baskets and other amenities), they need wages, and in everywhere but the US you can't just go and fire them on a whim. The less people an organization has, the better the company looks on an investor relations press release. That is why the large AI organizations are investing untold billions of dollars... the race to be the first one that can fully replace a class of human employment. Say an SWE makes 130k/y on average - fire 100 of the 150 you have, that's 13 million dollars. That can buy you a looooot of tokens or hardware.
I think it's reasonable to assume that Google artificially nerfed its search engine before they pushed so massively for AI.
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