I wonder if someone educated in this could provide the neurological benefits of reading, outside of communication. They are numerous, are they not? Memory, neuroplasticity, focus, stress relief—I'm sure there are many other benefits too.
Asking customers to pay anything prior to purchase is a non-starter... Imagine a brick-and-mortar shoe store asking customers to pay an entry fee to shop before customers enter the door?
That's just going to be a really different from the shopping experience customer's are used to today, and I don't think customers would go for it. I know for at company asking customers to pay for the shopping experience would be a non-starter... If bot traffic became untenable we would probably do something like required account creation + sms verification, and even that would be a huge change in expectations for our customers.
As I understand it as models driving agent behavior of headless browsers are getting more and more sophisticated it's getting harder to reliably predict.
The same way LLM's without watermarking cannot be reliably classified as "not-human" neural-network driven scraping tools are getting harder to detect.
Cloudflare, and DataDome position themselves as companies that can detect automated traffic using things like IP reputation, behavioral signals, timing... But these things can be faked through proxy-networks, human behavior signals can be imitated with generative AI the same way text can be, web bots can utilize neural networks to generate trajectories and timings similar to those of humans.
If you can have an AI use a browser the same way a human can how can you distinguish the two?
This doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly difficult to tell bot from human. Baking microtransactions attached to APIs into an internet standard does not solve the core issue... And if we can't tell bot from human, why would bots choose to pay rather than just use the public endpoints we serve to our customers?
For example, take a large online retailer... They have to show their products to customers (for free) for people to be able to shop, but increasingly they see spikes in traffic that match what would be expected from targeted bot attacks or scraping... But this traffic is getting more and more difficult to distinguish from legitimate traffic to the website. They could easily add this x402 middleware to their services, or they could offer API access to their product catalog for a price and enforce usage limits... But if they cannot reliably detect human users from bot/agent users, they have no way of pushing the bot/agent users to paid access... And why would the people running these bots pay when they're already getting what they need for free? Now Cloudflare cannot even reliably block bot traffic, and there are AI based browsing/scraping tools available now for bypassing Cloudflare.
I don't hate AI. What I hate is while billionaires are promising us a utopian future where work is optional, the price of food, housing, and healthcare in the USA is through the roof. Many people my age (millennials) cannot afford to buy a house for themselves like prior generations were able to. The supposed riches being produced by AI are not being realized for the majority of Americans.
100% agree. There's no substance to the argument, just the same cultish rhetoric from the aristocracy trying to fleece us into thinking that, while they simultaneously push mass layoffs and aim to drive down the price of labor, they are actually doing this to benefit us in the long run. "Just wait," they say. Once the AI future comes to fruition, you will eat "peaches and cream" and "bask in the sun all day." "You will dance in this utopian paradise." How could anyone possibly take this seriously, and are we expected not to see, plainly, the self-interested agenda being dressed up in the language of collective uplift?
Jedberg... Wow an internet legend replied to me! ><
> I'm much more worried about people who give full write access to their agents! But at least this solves that problem.
Yeah it goes without saying that write access would be crazy... But, it seems like people don't really care about the fact that they are just giving their private data to companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
> Branch anonymization
Branches default to a full copy of your production data.
<-- This doesn't seem a safe default to me...
Perhaps a data policy should be required to be in place before a branch can be cloned... The default configuration giving the LLM full prod data access by default, is a bad standard to set, I think.
AI Datacenters are not how all or probably even most HNers get paid...
> Most data centers colo multiple types of compute, not just those dedicated to inference or model training. Additonally, strangling the economics of the infrastructure layer makes entire ecosystems move abroad.
Sure but we are talking about whether the enormous investment into AI infrastructure is prudent or not. Also I reckon most people on here made a living just fine before everything moved to remote data centers, and many if not most HNers workloads could run on individual machines... But that's another conversation.
I think language grammars are the an interesting way to define a ruleset too. Forget REST API's or MCP Servers for a second... Define a domain specific language, and let the language model generate a valid instruction within the confines of that grammar.
Than pass the program, your server or application can parse the instructions and work from the generated AST to do all sorts of interesting things, within the confines of your language features.
It's verifiable, since you are providing within the defined grammar, and with the parser provided.
It is implicitly sandboxed by the powers you give (or rather exclude) to your runtime via an interpreter/compiler
I've tried this before for a grammar I defined for searching documents, and found it to be quite good at creating valid often complex search instructions.