blakesterz

It's 11 THOUSAND searches ON JUST THAT ONE TOPIC in one day when they are used to seeing less than 11 THOUSAND searches in one day TOTAL. None of these systems were built for this type of traffic. The total traffic from these crawlers is many times more than just 11,000. It's more like 11,000 searches on 100,000 topics.

What I still don't understand is who is doing it? I assume it's not the big companies like OpenAI or Google or Anthropic, right? So there are a bunch of small things out there doing the scraping and then they sell it to the big places? Or are these just smaller AI models doing the scraping and using it for themselves? Is there an underground ecosystem where people buy and sell this stuff? I understand why it's valuable to the AI companies I'm curious about how all this work, the economics of it all.

The "WAS" in that title just made me feel really old. I remember learning about this in college and it being a thing that I would need to work with and understand how it works why it's different than ethernet. And now it's just a big "WAS".

First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.

I'm mostly a MacOS user now, but my Linux box is Ubuntu because that's just what I've been using. It's what I know, it's stable and just does what I want.

Reuters has a non-paywalled (short) report with a bit of detail:

https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-cites-force-majeure-...

That's funny, I guess I always just assumed that a truck was a self contained thing were all the work happened, all that other stuff never even occurred to me!

  "The basics: a food truck commissary gives you a licensed commercial space to fill your fresh water tank, dump gray water, handle grease disposal, wash dishes, deep clean your truck, and store food when you’re not operating."

This site has numbers and sources: https://www.tesladeaths.com/

  "There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. "

I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good.

And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who really care?

  "Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion. "

Wow, that is some incredible growth in a really short time.

  "When I spoke with Cranor, she was floored by just how often I went to McDonald’s: “This guy eats a lot of McDonald's.” My boss, who was also stunned by my processed-food choices, says I now have to stop eating there. Despite my love of crispy Diet Cokes and greasy french fries, I agree." 

I wonder how many of us would stop going not just to McDonald’s, but all the other places if we knew just how much they ALL have in our files. They're not tracking us to be helpful, they're tracking us to increase their profits.

  "Accessibility failures are near-universal."

Why does it seem like Accessibility is always an after thought? It is usually so easy to do while a site is built. We just don't think about it until someone complains?

Looks interesting but I would want some public information about how it works and who is doing it, etc... The complete lack of any available details must be stopping many potential users.

Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...

The css is ".prose-invert" and there's a ".prose" that looks better, I wonder if something threw a switch to make it "invert" when it should be ".prose" because you're right, this is unreadable as-is. Interesting read though.

There's a video of the entire session here:

https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k14/k14ej1ucqu?kalturaStartTim...

(if that link doesn't work, it starts about 12 minutes into the start)

I just started using Claude Code for my work as a sysadmin. For my work, it's great. I don't need to wrestle with MySQL joins, claude gets even the most complex ones right WAY faster than I would. Same with new Terraform stuff. Things that would have taken me a day are cut to less than an hour.

So for my work, it's made me much better at my job. Much faster and more accurate.

Are there any defenses I can put in front of my websites that are good for stopping these things? The amount of traffic I see from residential proxies is just killing me. In particular defense against residential proxies.

That link it throwing me:

  "Scan this QR code with your mobile device to verify you are human. reCAPTCHA protects your privacy and does not share your details with this website or app."

Is that a new recaptcha thing? I've never seen that before.

Planet Money just did an episode on this. The answer is, at least according to this, yes, pretty accurate. At least in the past https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5815308

I'm glad they had the "Brands That Still Make Their Own Stuff" list, that was my first thought. What other brands are still decent?

John McPhee had a great New Yorker article (which I think was also in the collection Irons in the Fire), where he wrote about how U.S. geologists used sand found in the Japanese "Fu-Go" bombs that made it to the NW US to figure out their launch sites from specific beaches near Tokyo.

It starts on the 9th page here

https://gwern.net/doc/technology/1996-mcphee.pdf

You're right, those tags are GREAT! Worth clicking through and having a look.

  "Most of the private credit loans were floating rate and tied to the federal funds rate, which has persisted at a high level over the past three years. Fitch pointed to this as a catalyst for last year's defaults."

I wanted to dismiss that and say ... but it's not really historically high. I suppose it really is not IF you look WAY back. It actually has persisted at a relatively high level if you look back to 2009, which is more than a short time now.

I guess it is fair to say the federal funds rate has persisted at a high level over the past three years now isn't it?

https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-c...

Also interesting to note, "Fitch recorded NO defaults in the software sector last year. The rating agency noted it categorizes software issuers into their main target market sectors when applicable."

Reminds me of when kids were doing the same on MySpace

https://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20070917/SUB/709170352...

https://mixergy.com/interviews/andrew-fashion/

  Meta aims to introduce facial recognition to its smart glasses while its biggest critics are distracted, according to a report from The New York Times. In an internal document reviewed by The Times, Meta says it will launch the feature “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

https://www.theverge.com/tech/878725/meta-facial-recognition...

I'll just add another vote for OrbStack. I found it way faster on M1 and M5 and never found any compatibility issues.

That's handy! I just started using oh-my-zsh and I feel like I know about 4% of useful things it can do so far.

Alex Stamos talked about this a bit on TWiT late last year:

  "It's getting hard to not be conspiracy minded here. They closed  CSRB, destroyed CISA. CISA has no confirmed director.  This just adds to kind of a complete surrender at least on the cyber side. We are spectacularly poorly prepared right now for a cyber attack."

https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1056?autost...

It also reminded me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax

One of those things that seem POSSIBLE, but then again...