Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

thelibre.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 631 posts

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#581

Post by dalke »

fuzztester wrote: post #553
dalke wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see ChatGPT's bots pull down all of my Python wheels every couple of weeks. Wheels that haven't changed in years, with a "Last-Modified" and "ETag" that haven't changed. The only thing that makes sense to me is it's cheaper them to re-pull and re-analyze the data than to develop a cache.

Or, could it be, just possibly be (gasp), that some of the devs at these "hotshot" AI companies are just ignorant or lazy or pressured enough, so as to not do such normal checks? Wouldn't be surprised if so.

You think they do cache the data but don't use it?

For what it's worth, mj12bot.com is even worse. They pull down every wheel every two or three days, even though something like chemfp-3.4-cp35-cp35m-manylinux1_x86_64.whl hasn't changed in years - it's for Python 3.5, after all.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#582

Post by xyzal »

kod wrote: post #411
xyzal wrote: post #159

In case anyone is interested in a tiny bit of sabotage, I am under the impression I managed to 'drown' true information on my microblog by generating contradicting posts with LLaMa (tens of them for each real post) and invisibly linking them, so a human would not click through. You know, flood the zone with s***, Bannon-style ...

Besides flooding them with junk, what about outright sabotage in the form of serving zip bombs or other ways to waste computational resources?

I think we need to aim for the bots to get _negative_ utility value from visiting our traps, not just zero value.

Did you try to GET a canary page forbidden in robots.txt? Very well, have a bucket load of articles on the benefits of drinking bleach.

Is your user-agent too suspicious? No problem, feel free to scrape my insecure code (google "emergent misalignment" for more info).

A request rate too inhuman? Here, take those generated articles about positive effect of catching measles on performance in bed.

And so on, and so forth ...

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#583

Post by xyzal »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #399
xyzal wrote: post #159

In case anyone is interested in a tiny bit of sabotage, I am under the impression I managed to 'drown' true information on my microblog by generating contradicting posts with LLaMa (tens of them for each real post) and invisibly linking them, so a human would not click through. You know, flood the zone with s***, Bannon-style ...

This is an approach I've seen used and I'm not sure what success it has had. But logically it seems sound: explicitly reference paths that no human would actually see - traffic hitting those paths are bots. They can't help themselves.

Regarding pollution of the LLM weights, at least the Russian propaganda machine seems to prove it works, see https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250310-russian-disin...

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#585

Post by glodime »

Ray20 wrote: post #560
moooo99 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there will be job market and the people will compete in it maybe there will be. I'm sure there also is a market for Walkman somewhere, its just exceedingly small. The proclaimed goal is to displace workers on a grand scale. This is basically the vision of any AI company and literally the only way you could even remotely justify their valuations given the heavy losses they incur right now. > Job market is formed by…

>The proclaimed goal is to displace workers on a grand scale. It doesn't matter. What you need to understand - is that in the source of the job market is needs, ability to meet those needs and ability to exchanges those ability on one another. And nothing of those are hindered by AI. >Many industrial nations are largely service based economies with a lot of white collar jobs in particular. Again: in the end of the da…

> In the end of the day you need a cooked dinner, a built house and everything else. So someone must build a house and exchange it for a cooked dinners.

You should read some history.This veiw is so naive and overconfident.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#586

Post by FeepingCreature »

soco wrote: post #58
FeepingCreature wrote: post #41

To be clear, this is not an attack in the deliberate sense, and has nothing to do with AI except in that AI companies want to crawl the internet. This is more "FOSS sites damaged by extreme incompetence and unaccountability." The crawlers could just as well be search engine startups.

Correct, they could - but they are not. This is about the unaccountability, and if I was charitable (which I'm not) I'd add also incompetence, of the techbros leading the AI giants. Are we still expecting anything like "ethics"? I hope the few engineers reading HN will still have some, but the higher you go the foreign the concept gets.

Sure, I just think focusing it on AI companies misses the reason this happens. It's not an "AI company problem", it's a "tech company problem". It just happens that AI companies are the tech companies that externalize their incompetence with crawlers at this point in time.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#587

Post by FeepingCreature »

Vegenoid wrote: post #351
FeepingCreature wrote: post #41

To be clear, this is not an attack in the deliberate sense, and has nothing to do with AI except in that AI companies want to crawl the internet. This is more "FOSS sites damaged by extreme incompetence and unaccountability." The crawlers could just as well be search engine startups.

> "FOSS sites damaged by extreme incompetence and unaccountability." Given this info, the natural next question is “who is doing the harm?” The answer is “AI companies”. Most people would now view the situation as having a lot to do with AI companies.

As a matter of fact, yes. As a matter of cause, no. Being an AI company doesn't make these companies especially incompetent; rather, this is the normal tech company level of incompetence, and being an AI company causes it to externalize via crawling.

Bing used to do the same thing. (It might still do it, I just haven't heard about it in a while.)

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#590

Post by neutronicus »

lithocarpus wrote: post #570
neutronicus wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the bright side, armies of robot slaves give us an off-ramp from the unsustainable pyramid scheme of population growth. Be fruitful, and multiply, so that you may enjoy a comfortable middle age and senescence exploiting the shit out of numerous naive 25-year-olds! If it's robots, we can ramp down the population of both humans and robots until the planet can once again easily provide abundance.

Sure, the problem though is it won't be "we" deciding what the robots do, it will most likely be a few powerful people of dubious character and motivations since those are the sort of people who pursue power and end up powerful. That's why even though technology could theoretically be used to save us from many of our problems, it isn't primarily used that way.

True.

But presumably petty tyrants with armies of slave robots are less interested than consensus in a long-term vision for humanity that involves feeding and housing a population of 10 billion.

So after whatever horrific holocaust follows the AI wars the way is clear for a hundred thousand humans to live in the lap of luxury with minimal impact on the planet. Even if there are a few intervening millennia of like 200 humans living in the lap of luxury and 99,800 living in sex slavery.

Post reply on HN