Live data from Hacker News

FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

thelibre.news

601–610 of 631 posts

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#601

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.

> The crawlers could just as well be search engine startups.

And yet they are not. So what does that tell you?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#602
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think uncontrolled price of cloud traffic - is a real fraud and way bigger problem then some AI companies that ignore robot.txt. One time we went over limit on Netlify or something, and they charged over thousand for a couple TB.

> I think uncontrolled price of cloud traffic - is a real fraud Yes, it is. > and way bigger problem then some AI companies that ignore robot.txt. No, it absolutely is not. I think you underestimate just how hard these AI companies hammer services - it is bringing down systems that have weathered significant past traffic spikes with no issues, and the traffic volumes are at the level where literally any other kind of…

>I think you underestimate just how hard these AI companies hammer services

Yeas, I completely don't understand this and don't understand comparing this with ddos attacks. There's no difference with what search engines are doing, and in some way it's worse? How? It's simply scraping data, what significant problems may it cause? Cache pollution? And thats'it? I mean even when we talking about ignoring robots.txt (which search engines are often doing too) and calling costly endpoints - what is the problem to add to those endpoints some captcha or rate limiters?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#603
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>do you think that would not affect incomes of those who are the current blue collar class? Obviously it is affect. Supply of goods are increased and their relative market value are increased - how can this not increase their incomes?

The law of supply and demand dictates that when the supply of a thing increases it's value decreases.

> it's value decreases

I mean yeas, values of consumed goods will decrease, so blue color workers will be able to consume more. That's exactly what is called increase of income.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#604
post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if everyone's broke >nobody's spending money on stuff like contractors, mechanics, and other hardcore blue collar trades. Why would this happen? Money is simply a medium of exchange of values that this contractors, mechanics and other hardcore blue collar trades are creating. How can they be broke, if Ai doesn't disturb their ability to create values and exchange it?

Customers that have funds available to purchase the services you offer and who are willing to actually spend that money are a hard requirement to maintain any business. If white collar and service industries are significantly disrupted by AI this necessarily reduces the number of potential customers. Thing is you don't have to lay off that many people to bankrupt half of the contractors in the country, a decent 3-5 y…

>who are willing to actually spend that money

Money mean nothing. It is simply medium of exchange. The question is, is there anything to exchange? And the answer is yeas, and position of white collar workers doesn't affect availability of things for exchange. There's no reason for recession, there is nothing that can hinder ability of blue collar workers to create goods and services, all that things that when combined is called "wealth".

Don't think in the meaningless category of "what set of digits will be printed in the piece of paper called paycheck?". Think in the terms, that are implied: "What goods and services blue collar workers can't afford to themselves?". And it will become clear that the set of unaffordable goods and services to blue collar workers will decrease because of the replacement white collar workers with AI, because it is not hinder their ability to create those goods and services.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#605
post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

My views on this issue are shaped by history. Starting with crop production and plowing and ending with book printing, conveyor belts and microelectronics - creating tools that increase productivity has always led to increased availability of goods, and the only reason that has lead to decreased availability - is things that has hindered ability to create and exchange goods.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#606
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that not cause your devs, or people doing contributions, or browsing commits via the web, to get blocked?

Yes, it does mean that anyone using the web-based interface to git gets blocked. We mirror to github for public access; our developers all use git itself, not the web interface, for interacting with the repo. How/what github et al. are doing to deal with this, I do not know.

In that situation, why bother to have a local web interface at all?

Edit: nevermind, I see you are using Gitea rather than cgit/etc. I guess Gitea can't disable the problematic commit/etc views.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#607
post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law of supply and demand dictates that when the supply of a thing increases it's value decreases.

> it's value decreases I mean yeas, values of consumed goods will decrease, so blue color workers will be able to consume more. That's exactly what is called increase of income.

My gut is telling me you're being intentionally obtuse but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. To reiterate in detail:

AI is poised to disrupt large swaths of the workforce. If large swaths of the workforce are disrupted this necessarily means a bunch of people will see their income negatively impacted (job got replaced by AI). Broke people by definition don't have money to spend on things, and will prioritize tier one of Maslow's Hierarchy out of necessity. Since shit like pergolas and oil changes are not directly on tier 1 they will be deprioritized. This in turn cuts business to blue collar service providers. Net result: everyone who isn't running an AI company or controlling some currently undefined minimum amount of capital is fucked.

If you're trying to suggest that any notional increases in productivity created by AI will in any way benefit working class individuals either individually or as a group you are off the edge of the map economically speaking. Historical precedents and observed executive tier depravity both suggest any increase in productivity will be used as an excuse to cut labor costs.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would absolutely love this as an alternative to the ad-based model

That is called micropayments and doesn't need to have anything to do with blockchain. All you need is a central clearing house service that can handle billions of 0.000001 transactions per day. Incidentaly, I doubt the bitcoin chain could handle that...

I was thinking this would involve farming the mining (the energy intensive part) out to clients. That basically just means they have to do sha hashes at some difficulty. The good thing is if you do 10 hashes at difficulty 5 you'd expect one to also pattern match difficulty 6, so I expect even low-difficulty hashing will eventually result in a block mine.

Of course it isn't very secure because if the client sees a mined block they might have the technical savvy keep it. But you'd be forcing big web scrapers to run a horribly inefficient mining operation and they'd hate it. Plus you can run a blacklist of hated clients and double the difficulty for them, which is very low-cost for false positives and very high-cost for real scrapers - that isn't a result of using Bitcoin but it'd be funny.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#609
post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers that have funds available to purchase the services you offer and who are willing to actually spend that money are a hard requirement to maintain any business. If white collar and service industries are significantly disrupted by AI this necessarily reduces the number of potential customers. Thing is you don't have to lay off that many people to bankrupt half of the contractors in the country, a decent 3-5 y…

>who are willing to actually spend that money Money mean nothing. It is simply medium of exchange. The question is, is there anything to exchange? And the answer is yeas, and position of white collar workers doesn't affect availability of things for exchange. There's no reason for recession, there is nothing that can hinder ability of blue collar workers to create goods and services, all that things that when combine…

> Money mean nothing.

You think so? Give me the contents of your checking, savings, and retirement accounts and then get back to me on that.

> position of white collar workers doesn't affect availability of things for exchange.

You appear to be confused about the concept of consumers, let me help. Consumers are the people who buy things. When there are fewer consumers in a market, demand for products and services declines. This means less sales. So no, you don't get to unemploy big chunks of the population and expect business to continue thriving.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we not just have a whitelist for allowed crawlers and ban the rest by default? Then places like DuckDuckGo and Google can provide a list of IP addresses that their crawlers will come from. Then simply just don't include major LLM providers like OpenAI

Or an open list of IPs that are identified as AI companies that is updated regularly and firewalls can be easily updated with? (Same idea as open source AV)

> Or an open list of IPs that are identified as AI companies that is updated regularly and firewalls can be easily updated with? (Same idea as open source AV)

I don't really know about this proposal; the majority of bots are going to be coming from residential IPs the minute you do this.[1]

[1] The AI SaaS will simply run a background worker on the client to do their search indexing.

Post reply on HN