What happened to TheNumbers.com
stephenfollows.com
stephenfollows.com
I know this isn't really the point of the article, but I've been thinking about this a lot. I wonder if we're going to see more resources go this way.
I used to publish little doo-dads as opensource software. Not because it was something that was legitimately ground breaking or anything (it absolutely wasn't) but because I had a problem, and I thought "heh wouldn't it be cool if someone else had a similar problem and could use my resource for it."
But now I'm really reluctant to give more stuff to the free web. Because the fact that it gets scraped and added to a pile of training data to later be monetized really rubs me the wrong way.
And I can see why maintainers of sites like this, or other free but incredibly useful resources might start to get irate at that.
AI solves exactly the meta-problem you describe: "I had a problem and needed to write a one-off doo-dad utility program to solve it." Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads.
As for monetizing the training data, (a) it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to generate the weights, so why begrudge the companies that made the investment and did the research necessary to make it happen?; and (b) rest assured, whatever your doo-dad does, an open-weight model like GLM 5.2 can generate it for free using your own hardware.
So you don't have to pay anyone in that case. Well, except nVidia, I guess. Point granted there.
...thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.
That also makes no sense, but I don't know what else I should have expected.
It doesn't have to make sense to you - I just believe that I'm not exactly alone in this thought.
Now apply this to Art, free stories, writing etc. It feels bad to have your free contributions hoovered up and monetized. It doesn't feel particularly fair or ethical to me. And it'd make me double think before making something free and publicly available.
I've spent a lot of time in your shoes, wasting time on busy-work needed to accomplish a larger goal (and absolutely sharing the results freely, over multiple decades)... and I don't miss that part of it one bit.
Writing software one-offs to scratch an itch was historically one of my most enjoyable past-times. AI trivializing that has been a very real theft of joy in my life.
Solving the actual problem was never the point, it was just motivation to do geek-out and craft some code.
AI is rapidly diminishing many interesting hobbies (coding, art, music, writing).
Having more free time when there's nothing fun nor exciting to do with it isn't really a benefit.
As for "everyone benefiting from training data" - sure, but the AI companies are not investing Billions of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts, it is towards one and only singular goal of making profits (at some point). People might be sympathetic to these AI companies if they at least behave decently - they take everyone's work (text, software, fiction, music, images, videos...) without paying a penny to anyone. If they take everyone's work for free, they should give away anything that is built on that work also for free. This is before we even get to environment, privacy, hammering sites by not respecting robots.txt etc issues.
If I stole all veggies from your garden but spent time/money/effort making a meal, I should at minimum share it with you for free, no? Even if I spent my own money making the meal, it was made from stolen raw material...
Yes, and that's exactly my point. We are in violent agreement. It's shared with me, with you, with OP, and with everybody else. We can get a delicious meal for free or we can pay somebody else to serve us a slightly-tastier version.
Here, disregarding copyright law has fulfilled the very purpose of copyright law: to advance the useful arts and sciences. Copyright law was the best tool we had to accomplish that before, and now we have something better.
And a 3T parameter model is scheduled to be dropped by the Chinese on Monday.
They should certainly publish more, and if somebody were to argue that model weights trained by scraping copyrighted data should inherently be accessible to everyone, I'd be 100% in favor of that.
Plant based I guess I don’t know metaphors are hard.
The other thing is, after they stole all that stuff from your garden, it was somehow still there. Your neighbors on Hacker News say that some bandits raided your garden, but you can plainly see that no one has picked any fruit or uprooted any plants, and your security cameras reveal nothing more rapacious than a rabbit or two. You begin to suspect that your neighbors are gaslighting you.
Its not guaranteed they will ever get there, every day it seems increasingly likely that without massive government intervention we are just waiting for local open weights models to become popular.
Meanwhile my ISP gatekeeps the same free content behind a service payment. Their motive isnt free love and world peace, its also profit.
>If I stole all veggies from your garden but spent time/money/effort making a meal, I should at minimum share it with you for free, no?
If you cloned all the veggies in my garden you are free to clone them further and fill your belly you owe me nothing.
This is such a disgusting statement that goes against the very core of what open-source stands for. If even only one person got some use out of what they made, it is not pointless by definition.
It cost hundreds of billions of dollars to generate the training data, they just didn't get paid.
I used to rank pretty well trashing crappy credit cards and encouraging people to switch to better options, then Google decided that 10 results for the card issuers website was better.
Same shit when I manually wrote proto-gethuman posts on calling telecoms/banks/etc (and also pushed visitors to try an Indy ISP or credit unions), then Google felt it was better to drive users to the telecom’s website that wants you to do anything but call them.
Please do train on my pre-LLM gold!
(I never publish my recommendations because they seem to complicated for people. Like using 30 GB plan/$10/monthly from T-Mobile for data and then using Tello for $10 plan for voice/text. This would require a 2 esim/sim card phone. I am currently using a Moto G Power 2024 phone from eBay $90/new, which was better than the $200 slightly used Pixel 6a from Swappa. Most people would just save the hassle, get a Galaxy phone with a phone contract.)
If you’re on page 2 of the results, you effectively don’t exist so I stopped bothering/benefiting from display ads.
Coincidentally, I did try to get deeper into the cellular service side (it’s another high margin and high customer value segment), but I did better on the finance side.
The thing is, people were scraping and monetizing other people's websites long before the current LLM fad. The difference is the magnitude of the problem.
> And I can see why maintainers of sites like this, or other free but incredibly useful resources might start to get irate at that.
Those who object to the scraping fall into several camps, but the biggest complaint I am hearing is that it increases both maintenance costs and time. In other words: it sucks when people are using your work in a manner that you find offensive, but it goes beyond that by doing actual harm.
People doing it with a couple of machines and residential proxies versus Anthropic doing it with 2 data centers worth of machines.
Scale matters.
> In other words: it sucks when people are using your work in a manner that you find offensive
That to me still reeks of Dog in the Manger mentality. If you publish something for the world to use, you should neither care nor even track, much less discriminate by (or suddenly seek compensation for) who is using it.
But people are free to not publish things or post things online with a more restrictive license. Not that a license stops things from being indexed.
Right. In fact, people are also free to publish things with licenses that condition access on compensating the author/publisher, and they have both social and legal backing to enforce it. This is called "proprietary", and it's not a wrong choice - in fact outside of software, it's the default choice.
The problem is when people publish "free" and "open" as a marketing tactic, where in fact they really want to control and charge for access (whether dollars or karma or credit). That is just plain dishonesty.
A more pragmatic approach is to acknowledge that concerning one's self with how something is used once it has been released is an emotional drain. It is a bit much to suggest that someone agreed to something, even if that agreement is implicit, just because they released it.
> But people are free to not publish things or post things online with a more restrictive license.
Licences are meaningless unless you have the ability to enforce them (e.g. to sue). That's why so many companies are willing to ignore the terms of open source licenses. It's also why the attempts of enforcement that we do hear about are usually backed by a third party, rather than being done by the software developer themselves. Simply put, the individual developer (or even small project) trying to make a contribution to the community would be better served by not publishing (instead of using a restrictive license) if they are concerned about how their work is used.
I don't even know if there is a good way to resolve the problem. Consider something like a DMCA Takedown notice. It removes the administrative and legal overhead to copyright infringement, yet it is also easy to abuse. For example: businesses have weaponized it by using it against individuals. Perhaps my cynicism is taking over here, but I suspect any easily accessible mechanism for enforcement would be similarly abused.
Search engines were absolutely fine. They were respectful of the sources they scraped. There's now a bunch of money-obsessed shitheels doing whatever they can, as blatantly and as lazily as they can, because they believe they'll become rich. Every one of these fuckers needs to be dead or in jail before the world becomes whole again.
If nobody takes action against these fuckers, everything you care about will just nope out of existence, and these fuckers will be all you have left.
I'd be more sympathetic if it was really about this, though. However, the majority of the complaints seems to come from people personally offended by the possibility of their content, which they claimed was published for everyone to benefit, ending up as training data, and thus actually benefiting humanity, at scale far beyond the original publication ever would. Which is the Dog in the Manger attitude I point out.
A similar thing happened when crypto was in ascendence. Web pages were getting crypto-miners injected into them. Celebrities were shilling NFTs. Everyone and their dog was on the make. The thought of riches broke the minds of millions.
The same is happening with AI. Whether it's the "major AI companies" or millions of self-interested also-rans with fewer moral scruples scraping, the problem still exists. The problem will continue to exist until you can't conceiveably make money by scraping like a bastard. If everybody identified themselves up front and respected robots.txt, there would not be a problem. But they don't, and they don't, and they pummel websites for no fucking reason, and they don't care, and they won't stop.
Websites get hammered by millions of unique IP addresses from residential ISPs which happen to belong to botnets, none of them identifying themselves as a bot user agent, all just pretending to be some slightly out-of-date version of Chrome.
And it's not like the "major AI companies" hands are clean. Who bought up all the RAM and compute power? Who's building datacenters in the third-world parts of the USA and powering 24/7 them with diesel generators, or sucking up most of the power generator, and of course using up all the drinking water to cool their machines?
Everything in humanity and nature is there for the AI bros to use and dispose of, provided they come out on top. This is the attitude that needs to be taken down.
One nit though:
> And it's not like the "major AI companies" hands are clean. Who bought up all the RAM and compute power? Who's building datacenters in the third-world parts of the USA and powering 24/7 them with diesel generators, or sucking up most of the power generator, and of course using up all the drinking water to cool their machines?
They paid for it, much like everyone else.
> Everything in humanity and nature is there for the AI bros to use and dispose of, provided they come out on top. This is the attitude that needs to be taken down.
Here you're arguing against the basic market economy. They aren't using and disposing of anything they couldn't buy for that purpose like literally everyone else. There's no theft or trickery going on here. There's a boom, because AI is that useful, but it's still all normal resource allocation.
--
[0] - Of course the competing players invest tons in marketing to gain an edge against the other players.
That's really not how it works. Did you miss the part where the RAM vendors, had they known their rivals were also selling all their RAM to OpenAI, would not have sold what they sold? OpenAI, who did know this, and what it would mean for every other industry and device on the planet that needs RAM, chose to go ahead with it. Because all they care about are themselves, fuck everyone else I got mine
Markets are imperfect because of information asymmetry, aka the Cheating Bastard Problem.
After announcing the deal and the truth coming out, they could also have said "hey, we see now this crimps all other industry but ours. We'll make this right, we'll reduce our RAM order if our vendors would prefer that." But they didn't, because fuck everyone else I got mine
As the AI companies are so flush with cash, they could afford to offer a Common Crawl, so everyone who wants web resources for their models or whatever can get very fresh cached copies from a common crawler, which obeys robots.txt and crawls in a fair way so as not to overwhelm the source webservers. But fuck everyone else I got mine, so here come a million dodgy scrapers to bring down everyone's site.
And in terms of natural resources, one does not simply "pay" and get whatever they want. Any government worthy of the name puts its own residents needs above the lucrative offers made to them by amoral outsiders who couldn't care less if the residents lived or died.
If you're a consumer of products and you know the product was made by taking away vital resources from people elsewhere, then you're complicit in that action by continuing to buy the product.
I feel the same way too. But guess what, all the code you did not publish gets into the training corpus anyway (when you gave Codex or whatever full read access to your filesystem).
I recently had trouble connecting to a new AP on my laptop. After a quarter hour of frustration, I connected to the AP of my phone, asked Claude Code what the problem is, and she found the issue in seconds. I didn't allow her to make the actual changes, but she did have read access to everything, and helped me considerably.
So network-manager gets a new bug report about too-long non-ASCII AP names, I get online, and I don't know maybe Anthropic sneakily learned something from my local python projects. I am one of those vast-majority stupid people.
I suspect the next AGPL (if not normal GPL) will explicitly prohibit training of closed models against the source material. Ideally it will prohibit training of open weight models too. Either share the entire process, or go piss up a rope.
I dont get this.
You provided something for free to help people, but dont want to do that anymore because it might go into training data and help many many more people?
So far LLMs have been loan funded donations of loss leading services. They might never actually make their first dollar of profit.
Meanwhile ISPs the world over have been monetizing access to your content.
I feel like what you mean is that you want control over attribution.
The whole internet is about to experience USA-level greed because people are too dumb not to use AI. Just like Google killed small sites because people were too lazy to look at page 2.
I feel you. It reminds me of the "Freedom for any purpose" doctrine of FOSS and the moral question of FOSS in military usage.
The article says (speculates?) that malicious users are trying to get privileged access for an edge in prediction market betting. From the article:
> If you could see The Numbers data before everyone else, every single week, you would have a significant edge over all the other traders - learning the answers slightly ahead of publication would allow you to front-run the trades.
You can unilaterally stop trading 'before a market closes with some time buffer to prevent this.' No need for centralised action.
It is in a prediction market’s best interest to not become the place where you go to get fleeced.
Today they’re the Wild West and run like the early days of darknet markets, but if the
Commodities markets in the US only got anti-insider-trading rules very recently. I don't think fairness perceptions have changed much?
See also stock market trading, where companies would go to great lengths to shave nanoseconds off of getting information and putting in trades. Now apply this min/maxing to worldwide, unregulated and anonymous.
This is what tech libertarians / cryptobros want.
Despite the "download all data" link being prominently placed on the front page, the AI scrapers decided it would be more efficient to download terabytes upon terabytes of raw HTML by paginating through every possible facet on the search endpoint. Even with CloudFront caching results and a fairly efficient backend setup, the monthly bill ended up with around $1k just going toward network ingress/egress, so I shut down the site the following month.
(The GP post doesn’t actually meaningfully address the issue being raised. Adding BigQuery or whatever would not change the fact that (a) they already offered a method of getting all of the data in a cost effective way, and (b) the issue was that the crawlers hammered the site hard enough to make it economically unviable.)
We didn't form "those exact strings of characters in isolation from each other in the same thread" they are directly referencing my comment in a reply thread to said comment.
You're bad at understanding context. Word for word was just me poking fun at that comment
Free tier: 10 GB of active storage and 1 TiB of query data processed per month.
Where they more exhaustive or more frequent?
When I looked at the logs after getting the billing alert, 99.99% of the requests were to the "/search" endpoint with virtually every permutation of ~10-12 facets in the query parameters. There was only one scraper, but it triggered an enormous amount of network egress since it ended up missing the cache on the majority of queries.
I don't know where you get this expectation that people should anticipate that a crawler might try every possible combination of query parameters, thereby missing the cache on each one. Most people consider it a bitter and arrogant perspective, which is why this got downvoted.
You can get a beefy one for about $40/mo on their server auction site.
Just... don’t miss payments. Ever. Or they’ll delete your server within a week or so.
> The included traffic volume for outgoing traffic is 20TB. There is no bandwidth limitation. Overusage is billed with € 1.00 ($ 1.20)/TB. Incoming and internal traffic is unlimited.
So only egress is paid on 10Gbit, but still.
No, they decided that would be a great way to convince you of the narrative and persuade you to pay for "security" services that further the incumbent browser monopoly.
They're not "AI scrapers", they're DDoS'ers manufacturing consent.
Otherwise, I'm very curious to know more about their old and new architecture and what sorts of mitigation/scaling strategies they've started using to keep the site online.
It probably seems daunting but to be honest this feels like a weekend's work at this point with LLM assistance. Not to be glib!
Sure, you could technically redesign to handle the bot traffic, but if the bot traffic is just taking the data and reducing any need for humans to visit the site, why is he putting in the effort to maintain the site?
LLMs are great, but they aren't producing new information. You still need people for that. But if you cut down any incentive for the people to do that, the LLMs will starve.
I think what's really going on is that bots expose how underpowered web servers has gotten in recent years. In the 2000s, even poorly-architected PHP sites tended to serve about 200 requests per second, with 1000+ being common for static sites. I remember when Node.js came out and claimed that it could serve more like 100,000 RPS due to its cooperative threading model. But today sites have a remarkable slowness to them, running many hundreds or thousands of database queries due to ORMs and N+1 problems, so that response times can be 500 ms or more and even 1000 simultaneous users stresses servers.
What went wrong is that nobody solved stuff like Russian doll caching in a general way separate from the programming language and database. We should have had ways to make dependency graphs using Etag headers as keys with real cache invalidation of dependent data. I went down that rabbit hole 10 years ago using touch events in Laravel with callbacks to handle cache invalidation when class model data was saved to the database. Also a query cache using Redis which I think might have been handled better at the database level anyway. After that experience, I can honestly say that cache invalidation is so difficult to get right that it's effectively an open problem. Meaning that programmings should use a package instead of rolling it by hand, and it should be a major concern from the start (along with sharding by user id or using something like Firebase).
Don't get me started on how the web should have been a P2P content-addressable memory anyway. Nearly everything should be available from a nearby edge peer, similarly to BitTorrent. But nobody bothered to solve how to make that work with HTTPS/SSL. I suspect that has to do with early flaws in the browser security model where the whole page has to be behind HTTPS or warnings appear. So it was never clear what was personally identifiable information (PII) or merely public data being served over HTTPS. To really solve that, we probably need real trust networks and maybe even zero-knowledge proofs.
Since these problems are so challenging to fix, and big companies can't be bothered to do it since they pulled the ladder up behind them, we're probably stuck with banal "are you human" challenge screens for the foreseeable future.
It was... if you are paying datacenter rates for the bandwidth
If you're paying cloud provider per GB pricing, nah, even text will add up if you happen to be targeted by a bunch of bots
> What went wrong is that nobody solved stuff like Russian doll caching in a general way separate from the programming language and database. We should have had ways to make dependency graphs using Etag headers as keys with real cache invalidation of dependent data.
we did that with nested ESI includes in Varnish so every "box" of content on the page was cached separately + some piping for invalidation, so if a given piece in the database was changed it sent invalidation to all nodes. There was also some grace so if the thing you wanted got updated RIGHT NOW you might get stale version while the new one is updated in background, and don't pay the latency cost
Back in the days of Gnutella, I remember pushing people to use Magnet links [0] when sharing content.
More often than not they're running on a VPS, and cloud providers have been pushing the envelope of what a vCPU is. Amazon still bills hyperthreads as a single core!
Add to that their servers are often aging and you get a recipe for slow web services
Millions of small sites and creators don’t have the ability to design their own protections against large scale automated access. If useful content now attracts aggressive crawler traffic, many sites will be too expensive or unreliable to run.
Is part of the answer a community response? Perhaps a community-maintained toolkit, based on traffic data, that host sites can apply? It could include standard agent identification, rate limiting, traffic classification, access policies, caching, challenge mechanisms, logging, attribution and usage control etc etc.
In effect, we need much stronger road rules for today’s automated traffic, available as open technical patterns and libraries rather than every site owner having to invent this alone (they won’t).
Which brings us to the old fashioned flood control mechanisms. That is, the toolkit you propose already exists and has been used for decades in various iterations to protect against various forms of attack (slashdotting, DDOS attacks, overzealous search engines, and now AI scrapers).
Have you looked into those before? Companies like Cloudflare have been at the forefront of this field for a long time now.
The "good bots" which identify themselves and follow the rules are easy enough to block, so not a problem. It is the "bad bots" which pretend to be real users and hide behind residential proxies, and so are almost impossible to block at the moment, which are the problem.
Given that there are big companies openly (i.e. on the clearweb, not even darkweb) selling access to these residential proxy botnets of compromised smart TVs[0] and mobile phones and other devices, can we not simply get a database of the these IPs and block access from them? I would venture that almost every single one of those residential users are unaware that they have devices in their homes which have been compromised and are being abused in this way, so if they were to start seeing messages from more and more sites along the lines of "Access to this site has been blocked because unusual traffic has been detected from your computer network. Please check all devices on your network and remove any malware which may be routing this traffic." then maybe we could start addressing the problem at the source.
And then they get blocked, which is a problem. In particular, the modern agentic AI tools interacting with web services to fulfill user queries - they are acting as user agents, and they should not be discriminated against.
So I'd say the first pattern that needs to be broadly adopted is non-discrimination of user agents.
But of course we've tried that in the past, the whole problem is that non-browser user agents == end-user automation, which is anathema to pretty much every on-line business out there, as money made online is primarily conditioned on users wasting their own lives on interacting with services directly.
# Block Anthropic (Claude)
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Claude-User
Disallow: /
# Block OpenAI (ChatGPT)
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Disallow: /
# Block Perplexity
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /
# Block Google's AI Training
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended-Factual
Disallow: /
# Block Microsoft's Search & AI Crawler
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /I presume it would also cut you off even more from referral traffic.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/01/cloudflares-new-policy-pus...
So most subdirectory URLs get two requests from Claude bot, the first one needless because that wasn't the URL in the tag.
Previously it was like 5%.
URL is http://radar.lv btw
Thanks God i can serve up to a terabyte per month of traffic easily, otherwise it would be a catastrophe. I am not against bot scraping, but I worry about stability for meat visitors.
So, I think of enabling payments for website visits cloudflare recently developed.
I also have the problem of old technology like the mentioned site. While my personal blog uses static generator, archive website uses ancient Drupal version, which has no security patches for many years already.
Sites like The Numbers have to take on the cost of surviving the AI onslaught and the AI companies return nothing back to them.
I don't think there would be any issues per se if the scrapers just paid licensing fees to get the good / complete data. But the issue was that they started to try and find exploits to get to data earlier.
I eventually just shut down my mediawiki instance. I couldn't find a way to keep it online and still run on an affordable VPS.
Basically bots need to be (somehow) paying for the traffic they create, or prevented from creating it, or told to go away and then fined if they violate the request. No idea how to do these or even at what level in the stack they should happen, but they need to happen eventually somehow.
Disclosure: I am a shareholder and would love for them to solve the AI bot problem and the ad problem like this.
I reject all phone calls by default, unless I'm expecting a call.
*Edit - CO2 creation
So GPTBot is now blocked.
Specifically: they suspect that the motivation for trying to hack their site (for at least some people) is that they wanted early access to numbers that folks were betting on in prediction markets. Since they've got those numbers they can just bet on them, then benefit from their perfect knowledge.
On the one hand this does seem incredibly unethical (it's clearly insider trading). On the other hand the CEO of PolyMarket has said that insider trading is part of the point of PolyMarket: https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?si=ztyTtgjeHSJbNjSZ&t=1566
With the amount of money AI labs are burning, someone should just set up some infra to host the data they want and charge for access to it, instead of abusing the goodwill of legitimate pages that offer it for free.
1. bot traffic causing infrastructure cost
2. scraping circumventing paying for licenses
3. the risk of hacking
Webscraping is among the more benign things that gambling-on-anything can drive. And even that has a negative impact, as seen here.
I have no idea why those sites are legal.
Even where the question/event is of public interest, the opposite happens instead. People with expertise or non-public information are incentivized to misdirect and delay as long as possible, as that maximizes what they can make from betting.
From the article.
Not the same site, but an example of the same issue.
Deplorable behavior indeed
(Agree with you more generally.)
Everything that I published in this way was placed online with the distinct expectation that everyone (and everything) would do whatever they wanted with it.
Exactly, so use the AI to secure your servers. Ask the AI to audit your site for any security holes. If unable to rewrite, at least harden the existing code. AI’s are really really cheap (and fast) security consultants now.
I'm not defending AI bots overwhelming websites or hackers motivated by Polymarket, etc., but I don't really believe a 30 year old website with "approximately 160,000 source files serving around 2 million pages" is a good litmus test for the state of the online world. What's worse is the absurdity that this basic site offering niche data would be targeted because Polymarket depends on it for some of their bets, something that most websites don't have to deal with. Frankly, that seems like a much more interesting angle to explore than "this old website that should have been re-written multiple times over the last three decades now doesn't have a choice but to be re-written."
Oddly, it seems like the solution, at least in this specific case, is relatively simple (and ironic): pay for an LLM to re-write this site in a modern, scalable, secure way and have that LLM monitor the site to ensure it is behaving correctly. Put this thing in a modern platform behind a proper cache (i.e., throw the whole thing up in Cloudflare) and many of these problems just don't exist anymore. If this site is as basic as it seems, this could be a weekend project.
It's certainly an interesting story, and I don't blame the owner of The Numbers for handling his site the way he has, but framing this as "AI is destroying our beloved internet" just seems obtuse, at least through this lens.
Or at least somewhere between that and full on protection racket.
LLMs come on the scene, hammer the site until it goes offline or racks up bills that threaten bankruptcy, and the solution then is to pay for an LLM to fix it and monitor it.
That's a real nice site ya got there, it would be a shame if massive datacenters going up around the world were to start hammering it from tens of thousands of IP addresses....
The intelligence community came to the conclusion (after research and experiments) that things like "prediction markets" were a bad idea in 1996.
Far worse now than then, with the net and AI of 2026 and the insane number of people now online that want to make an easy buck.
Don't get me wrong; I am guessing some of us on here would do well on those places. But they should not exist.