> I also don't have any concrete examples jumping to mind
I do (and I may get publicly shamed and shunned for admitting I do such a thing): figuring out how to fix parenthesis matching errors in Clojure code that it's generated.
One coding agent I've used is so bad at this that it falls back to rewriting entire functions and will not recognise that it is probably never going to fix the problem. It just keeps burning rainforest trying one stupid approach after another.
Yes, I realise that this is not a philosophical question, even though it is philosophically repugnant (and objectively so). I am being facetious and trying to work through the PTSD I acquired from the above exercise.
Given that Gemini seems to have frequent availability issues, I wonder if this is a strategy to offload low-hanging fruit (from a human-effort pov) to the user. If it is, I think that's still kinda impressive.
> Today, we’re excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives.
> No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense.
... I would. Out of curiosity and amusement I would most definitely do that. Not every time, and not many times, but I would definitely do that one or a few times.
Guess I'm getting added to (yet another) Cloudflare naughty list.
> It is important to us that we don’t generate inaccurate content that contributes to the spread of misinformation on the Internet, so the content we generate is real and related to scientific facts, just not relevant or proprietary to the site being crawled.
In that case wouldn't it be faster and easier to restyle the CSS of wikipedia pages?
Bandwidth isn't free, not at the volume these crawlers scrape at; serving them random data (for example by leading them down an endless tarpit of links that no human would end up visiting) would still incur bandwidth fees.
Also it's not identifiable AI bot traffic that's detected (they mask themselves as regular browsers and hop between domestic IP addresses when blocked), it's just really obviously AI scraper traffic in aggregate: other mass crawlers have no benefit from bringing down their host sites, except for AI.
A search engine has nothing if it brings down the site they're scraping (and has everything to gain from identifying itself as a search engine to try and get favorable request speeds - the only thing they'd need to check is if the site in question isn't serving different data, but that's much cheaper), same with an archive scraper and those two are pretty much the main examples I can think of for most scraping traffic.
In short if you get several million requests and expect to only get 100 you won't know which are the real requests and which are the AI ones - but it is obvious that the vast majority are AI.
I think finding a meaningful way recognise a significant contributor in a way that doesn’t really impact anyone is something to be encouraged. I imagine that most people would use the hex code anyway and only devs/designers would see the name in their tooling.
I can’t see how to apply logic to naming a colour. It’s fundamentally a perceptual and, dare I say it, emotional process.
I also think your comment is uncharitable and tone deaf.
If this thread continues for a few more levels, I think you’ll end up justifying hiring your own private police force.
Ownership requires that a state exists to enforce your rights. There are tradeoffs with this arrangement, one of which is that the state gets to set boundaries/limits on how you can use the thing you own. Ideally, acting with the best interests of the population. This sometimes includes ensuring areas are off limits to transient inhabitants so that a society can develop.
People who get existential crisis out of this can find relief in the fact that the Universe can expand faster than the decay. So, it is possible that decay never reaches your region of Space.
> The effects could range from complete cessation of existing fundamental forces, elementary particles and structures comprising them, to subtle change in some cosmological parameters, mostly depending on the potential difference between true and false vacuum. Some false vacuum decay scenarios are compatible with survival of structures like galaxies and stars or even biological life while others involve the full destruction of baryonic matter or even immediate gravitational collapse of the universe
What an interesting wiki article. It’s incredible this is proposed as a sliding scale effect, where the tunable parameters on that scale are the fundamental physical constants of the universe itself.
Yes please lets focus on probability. And cost-benefit analysis. We'd be a lot closer to solving all sorts of problems, including the asteroid one and any climate-related ones, if people had thought about probabilities when dealing with nuclear power in the 80s and 90s.
Humans don't seem to be very good at symbolic reasoning though.
That's an interesting perspective, given that the legislation is aimed at opening up the big players' platforms/products to more competition by forcing them to eliminate restrictions.
I don’t think legislation can force them to just open up, it has to be something like “if you offer an X in the EU, it must be open”, and they can always decide not to offer the X in the long EU. In other words, a country (or group of countries) can set the rules of play, but they can’t make play mandatory. And this is probably partial; eg they don’t have to offer news linking while still offering other features.
- A set of boundaries that sovereign states are required to respect (Congress shall make no law), or...
- A set of competing interests that have to be balanced in order to maximize the desired freedom for the maximum number of people (your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins).
The US codified the former in its constitution, because the formation of the current US government was a struggle between the people who found the prior Articles of Confederation to be unworkable[0] and the people who didn't want to build British Empire 2: Electric Boogaloo. The compromise was that we'd codify very obvious things the government was not allowed to do based on what horribly unpopular things the British did to the colonies. This is why we have a strong constitutional prohibition against being forced to quarter soldiers in one's home, even though you rarely see it get used in court. This as applied to freedom of speech is the 1st Amendment, which covers basically every way that the right of freedom of speech had been curtailed in Britain up to that point[1].
However, because we have this very strong prohibition on the government restricting speech, people have misinterpreted it to mean that only the government can restrict speech. That is, if Comcast refuses to let you watch Netflix unless they get paid more for the traffic, that's Comcast's protected speech, and any government regulation to unblock Netflix is censorship. Or, alternatively, if someone decides to publish your personal information in response to a video you don't like, the resulting mob justice against you isn't censorship because it's not the right person holding the gun, and taking down your personal information would be censoring the person who published it.
This is, of course, absurd. But the US has exported and normalized this thinking beyond the narrow realm of constitutional law scholars. Right-wingers were able to successfully appropriate 'free speech' to mean 'turn every website into 4chan', and in response, liberals made the mistake of adopting the Comcast Argument I listed above. This is how we got arguments like "Twitter and Facebook can't censor because it's a private platform", even though it's a monopoly. Now that Musk owns Twitter and boosts the far-right in exchange for them protecting Musk's fragile ego, I fully expect this calculus to flip and you'll see right-wingers go back to the Comcast Argument while liberals call for regulation.
The EU's tech regulations would be condemned by the same logic. i.e. the EU should not be allowed to regulate big tech, because only sovereigns can censor, and censorship is so bad that we should not even censor the people engaged in censorship[2]. The boundaries argument ends up with a nominal right to free speech that is defacto privatized censorship, which is a problem the balancing argument does not have.
[0] for reasons largely similar to the problems the EU faces being an international union rather than a federal state
[1] I would also argue that it is a de-facto ban on "culture war issues", given that religion and wars over minor church schisms were the European culture war of the 1700s.
Yawn. It's classic FSF attitude, and it's a perfect microcosm of GPLv3's goals of preventing things like locked-down hardware in the scope of a software license. In this case, the commenter I replied to thinks it wrong that users of OSM's data product, which has copyleft clauses in the scope of the data only, should be able to sell a closed-source application using that data. Which is of course not the will of the data product creators (the only people that have a real say in this), and is just annoying rms cult dogma cut and paste. For the record, Magic Earth is far and away the best OSM-based non-big-tech mapping product. It absolutely blows away GPLv3 products like OSMAnd. So yeah, it's annoying hearing people clamoring for its source to be opened, or soft-shaming the authors for trying to earn a real living with their great product that's perfectly inline with the data provider's license.
I do (and I may get publicly shamed and shunned for admitting I do such a thing): figuring out how to fix parenthesis matching errors in Clojure code that it's generated.
One coding agent I've used is so bad at this that it falls back to rewriting entire functions and will not recognise that it is probably never going to fix the problem. It just keeps burning rainforest trying one stupid approach after another.
Yes, I realise that this is not a philosophical question, even though it is philosophically repugnant (and objectively so). I am being facetious and trying to work through the PTSD I acquired from the above exercise.
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