socialcommenter

I do what I can by serving webapps from my Linux server, or using command line, but I haven't had much success with a Linux RDP or VNC server that can compete with MS RDP for performance. If I could do that I'd switch fully. Does anyone have recommendations?

Those 150 billion will be taxable at the same (hypothetically 30%) tax rate, reducing the expected return by 45bn * 5% chance. The expected return is still negative; all this bet does is shift tax liabilities in time, which admittedly would matter to some people who subscribe to short-termism.

Precisely, completely agree.

If this method actually removed a significant percentage of scam ads, rather than just heading off scrutiny, then a) doing proper verification wouldn't cost them $2b a year like they claim it would, and b) their quarterly revenues would be taking a meaningful (single digits %) hit and the share price would suffer.

I'm not sure it stops there, either - I wonder if others feel the same. If every platform is doing this, then are they destroying the trust of online media (the internet?) in general? Facebook isn't exactly alone in its reputation of monetising people's attention and serving them dangerous content.

I'm eagerly waiting for the day when the elderly people in my family swear off the internet entirely.

From reading the TIL, it doesn't appear as if Simon used LLM for a large portion of what he did; only the initial suggestion to check the archive, and the web tool to make his process reproducible. Also, if you read the script from his chat with Claude code, the prompt really does the heavy lifting.

Sure, the LLM fills in all the boilerplate and makes an easy-to-use, reproducible tool with loads of documentation, and credit for that. But is it not more accurate to say that Simon is absurdly efficient, LLM or sans LLM? :)

No easy answers, but a glimpse of hope anyway. Thank you for weighing in!

Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit?

I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.

I won't ask about or speak to the overall message of your first link, I'm interested to digest it further for my own benefit. This is striking to me though:

    Throughout this post I’ll assume the average ChatGPT query uses 0.3 Wh of energy, about the same as a Google search used in 2009.

Obviously that's roughly one kilowatt for one second. I distinctly recall Google proudly proclaiming at the bottom of the page that its search took only x milliseconds. Was I using tens-hundreds of kW every time I searched something? Or did most of the energy usage come during indexing/scraping? Or is there another explanation?

Let's be careful here. It's generally a good idea to congratulate people for changing their opinion based on evolving information, rather than lambast them.

(Not a tech worker, don't have a horse in this race)

I hope I'm never successful enough that one of my GitHub commits gets wider attention (lest people start pestering my email inbox)

A photograph is an expression of the photographer, who chooses the subject, its framing, filters, etc. Ditto a painting.

LLM output is inherently an expression of the work of other people (irrespective of what training data, weights, prompts it is fed). Essentially by using one you're co-authoring with other (heretofore uncredited) collaborators.

That's fair - though are we in an isolated bout of "every now and then" or has AI created a new normal of abuse (e.g. of robots.txt)? Hopefully we're at a local maximum and some of the scrapers perpetrating harmful behaviours will soon pull their heads in.

Without wanting to upset anyone - what makes you interested in sharing tips for team scraper?

(Overgeneralising a bit) site owners are mostly cting for public benefit whereas scrapers act for their own benefit/for private interests.

I imagine most people would land on team site-owner, if they were asked. I certainly would.

P.S. is the best way to scrape fairly just to respect robots.txt?

In fact it's apparently $5.2 trillion by 2030 [0] (out of $6.7T total data center spend; meaning all of "traditional IT needs" are less than a quarter of the total). That's the total if you add up all of the firms chasing this opportunity.

I do wonder, if you (and the commenter you replied to) think this is a good thing, will you be OK with a data center springing up in your neighbourhood, driving up water or power prices, emitting CO2? Then if SOTA LLMs become efficient enough to run on a smartphone will you be OK with a data center bailout coming from your tax dollars?

[0]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...

Mature sunflowers reliably point due east, needles on a compass point north. They implement different things using different mechanisms, yet are really the same.