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Thales Bad Bot Report categorizes the traffic between "good" and "bad" bots.

I would add that AI dramatically blurs the line between legitimate and malicious, and the intent generally speaking.

In regards to social bots, there's a 2024 study of over 1 million accounts on X and over 60% were found likely to be bots. Curiously, when Musk took over Twitter, the "Blue Checkmark" became something that can be bought for several bucks a month (with crypto, even), without any sort of verification.

I mean, just for a reference point, 2013. 2013 was the first year they did the report.

According to the Thales Bad Bot Report, in 2025 >53% of traffic came from bots. 2024 was 50 - 50, and in 2013, it was measured at 43%.

AI-driven* bot activity has increased more than tenfold however in the past 12 months so I'm confident this will grow to a very solid majority.

Zero. I have also taken all my blogs offline. Building a human-only community at https://island0.com where no AI-generated content is tolerated.

I think a lot of these execs have equity in Anthropic... and the dumb ones that don't are just "keeping up with the Joneses" so to speak.

Screw Cloudflare. I went through a bizarre 3+ months hiring process where I would have a disconnected, vague 30 minute interview with someone every couple weeks. Then, suddenly rejected for no real reason given.

How would one build an online community free of LLM agents commenters and links to "slop" content?

Strict invitation trees? Small signup fees? No SEO incentives?

No, it's not at all. Bizarre analogy.

I pulled all the websites I had - some existed for a decade plus and made me hundreds of thousands of dollars. All that is left is bots that theft the value of my work. Until something changes, goodbye.

Can we reach out directly to Reid Hoffman? Or is he too wrapped up doing damage control from being all over the Epstein Files?

Your business is getting the money. Your business is not to fly around the world trying to engineer-mog the client. The OP has a bad ego.

"They don't even use version control..." Yeah? Get the money. The client are "carpetbaggers", yeah okay... get the money.

It's implied that they hired you because they need the help. But they also may have hired you because they need the help and you seem like a sucker they can stiff.

Seems like the logical conclusion, no matter what.

I don't think it's a scam at all. Will it be around in a week? Probably not. But it's not a scam.

The opposite is true in my case - though 1 organization that had a small budget for things like AWS certs. I remember almost everyone who would get those certificates would never really learn anything from it either. They would just take the exams.

The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?

I'm sorry but you work at Oracle. Terrible people. Very rude people. You should expect it.

All (not some) of the most successful devs I've known in the sense of building something that found market fit and making money off it were terrible engineers. They were fairly productive at building features. That's it. And they were productive - until they weren't. Their work ultimately led to outages, lost data, and sensitive data being leaked (to what extent, I don't even know).

The ones who got acquired - never really had to stand up to any due diligence scrutiny on the technical side. Other sides of the businesses did for sure, but not that side.

Many of you here work for "real" tech companies with the budget and proper skin in the game to actually have real engineers and sane practices. But many of you do not, and I am sure many have seen what I have seen and can attest to this. If someone like the person I mentioned above asks you to join them to help fix their problems, make sure the compensation is tremendous. Slop clean-up is a real profession, but beware.

I'm cool with blogging about your mess-ups, sort of. Is "I'm incompetent" a good content strategy though? Yeah, you're going to get a lot of traffic to that post, but what are you signaling? Your product is a thousand bucks a year. I would not go near it.

I'm cool with blogging about your fuck-ups, but honestly, not really. Is "I'm incompetent" a good content strategy? Your product is a thousand bucks a year. I'm not going near it. But that's just me?

While I agree, how much training does anyone get as an interviewer? I spent 10+ years doing interviews at all sorts of orgs (including Fortune 500s, government, etc.) without a single hour of interviewer training.

Now that I think about it, none of those organizations ever trained me at anything at all. Huh.

RE: My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.

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"Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"

People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...

"Information wants to be free". Government stooges help information with what it wants.

Most people live in a fake world, especially when they are playing the part of tourists.

The original post laments having to interact with these people (in Cambridge, MA - oh no, Harvard and MIT sweatshirts, maybe as a "local" you should walk off the beaten path a bit).

Looking up webcams and Wiki pages as a substitute for going places is a bad conclusion - it's even more of a fake world. The author thinks we can somehow "really beautiful how rich of a cultural understanding can be cultivated without ever setting foot in the country". Really beautiful? Come on, that's ridiculous. I get that this is Hacker News but that's a terminally online viewpoint that's warped as can be.

Divide and conquer...

Meh. Everywhere has foreign investment. The economic elite of the UK owns the US as well.

"The Iraq War, launched in 2003 – resulting in over 100,000 deaths"

Isn't this an extreme low-ball estimate?

Free, and open source models. Now and forever.

Yes, I have found almost any developer job where you code much of the time to be incredibly lonely. Especially when teams are distributed, which seems to be the norm these days.

Ha, maybe rethink the I AM NOTHING BUT A HUGE CLOUD CONSUMER thing on some fundamental levels? Like food?

"...a 2016 internal memo written by Facebook executive Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, leaked in 2018, which stated that the company's growth was paramount and that negative consequences, such as harm from bullying or terrorism, were acceptable collateral damage".

Don't submit stuff from this guy, he is an atrocious human being.