maurycyz

The raw materials are cheap: It's mostly just quartz, which is the most abundant mineral on earth.

The problem is actually making chips. The machines use to make modern integrated circuits are some of the most precise equipment in the world, manufacturing structures just tens of atoms across.

Getting more factories online might take close to a decade, and that's if anyone wants to pay: The current demand showed up basically overnight as some of the companies (running of investor money with no way to make profit) started a bidding war. Betting billions of dollars on them still being around in 5-10 years is just not a wise decision.

Most people want to avoid looking like AI, ut what if you want to blend in with the robot uprising.

I present ⸻ the U+2E3B dash.

Very predictable: If Facebook (or any other social media site) showed you what you wanted to see --- stuff from your friends --- you would be satisfied and leave.

... but Facebook makes money off ads. They don't want you leaving. They want you to stay online all day.

Instead, they show you brainrot: content interesting enough to keep you on the site, but shallow enough that you are always thirsty for more. However, making this content is still a lot of work, and isn't what most people want to do: It takes a lot of brainrot to keep you trapped 24/7.

Slop requires no effort, costs next to nothing, and fills the "brainrot" niche perfectly. Facebook doesn't care that people are posting bot content, because it's the perfect thing to make them money.

This. A physical safe provides something that you can't do digitally: It's hard, but not impossible to get in without credentials.

On the internet, it's either: Public for anyone in the whole world, or impossible to recover if anything goes wrong.

I doubt that's going to be much of a problem: As long as the average power is within rated limits. It takes time for coils to heat up and cool down: The worst thing you can do for speakers is to play loud music on a hot day. (Music also has a high dynamic-range which maximizes mechanical loads)

Inductive kick won't be an issue either: amplifiers are designed as voltage sources, not current sources. They present a low impedance path for back-EMF to take without causing any problems.

That would work, but I'd really prefer not to force users to run JavaScript, break RSS readers and slow down page loads (round trips are expensive). Adding a link maze to a random corner of the site doesn't impact users at all.

> Do they do any harm

Not to me, but I've known people who have had their sites DDoSed out of existence by the scrapers. On the internet, it's often the smallest sites with the smallest budgets that have the best content, and those are hit the worst.

> They do provide source for material if users asks for it

Not for material they trained on. Those sources are just google results for the question you asked. By nature, they cannot cite the information gathered by their crawlers.

> You still need to pay for the traffic

It's so little traffic my hosting provider doesn't bother billing me for it.

> and serving static content (like text on that website) is way less CPU/disk expensive than generating anything.

Sure, but it's the principle of the thing: I don't like when billion dollar companies steal my work, and then use it to make the internet a worse place by filling it with AI slop/spam. If I can make their lives harder and their product worse for virtually no cost, I will.

The problem is that believable content doesn't compress well. You aren't going to get anywhere close to that 1:1000 compression ratio unless it's just a single word/character repeated thousands of times.

It's a choice between sending them some big files that will be filtered out long before they can do any real damage or sending them nonsense text that might actually make it's way into their training data.

It's often one IP (v4!) per one request. It's insane how many resources are being burned on this stupidity.

Part of the reason I did this is to get good numbers on how bad the problem is: A link maze is a great way to make otherwise very stealthy bots expose themselves.

> The client can still send a flood of correctly-formed requests

This is possible with any server. It's a known exploit and very difficult to fully mitigate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack Whatever you do, they can always overwhelm your network connection.

And yes, there is inherent risk with exposing any service to the internet. That goes for any program, written in any language (remember Log4Shell?) doing any task.

Sorry about that, stupid mistake on my side. I've fix the version on the server, an you can just edit the line to "pthread_detach(thread);" The snprintf() is only part of a status page, so you can remove it if you want.

As for the threads, that could be an issue if directly exposed to the internet: All it would take for an attacker to open a whole a whole bunch of connections and never send anything to OOM the process. However, this isn't possible if it's behind a reverse proxy, because the proxy has to receive all the information the needs server before routing the request. That should also filter out any malformed requests, which while I'm fairly sure the parser has sane error handling, it doesn't hurt to be safe.

My bad. It's fixed now. (and yes, the gcc suggested fix is the right one.)

The law does not mandate cookie banners. Cookie popups are malicious compliance by advertising and analytics companies to continue spying.

The real solution is to tighten what counts as consent.

Except it's not tracking. Remembering user preferences is the original goal of cookies, and doesn't come with any legal requirements.

The law is (paraphrasing) "You must use cookies or similar to be evil without permission". Advertising companies decided that instead of not being evil, they'd annoy users into giving permission.

By setting billions of VC money on fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

No, really. They just have entire datacenters filled with high end GPUs.