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What happened to TheNumbers.com

stephenfollows.com

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Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#131

Post by CamperBob2 »

podgietaru wrote: post #116
CamperBob2 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I stole all veggies from your garden but spent time/money/effort making a meal, I should at minimum share it with you for free, no? Yes, and that's exactly my point. We are in violent agreement. It's shared with me, with you, with OP, and with everybody else. We can get a delicious meal for free or we can pay somebody else to serve us a slightly-tastier version. Here, disregarding copyright law has fulfilled the v…

I wouldn’t be happy if those companies used my vegetables to open a Michelin star restaurant, even if I got a free McDouble out of the deal. Plant based I guess I don’t know metaphors are hard.

But the McDouble isn't an adequate comparison. Yes, the companies who opened Michelin-rated restaurants with the food they stole from your garden are giving you McDonalds'-level food for free and charging for the rest. Meanwhile, some other companies who raided your garden are giving you the plant-based equivalent of Ruth's Chris or Fogo de Chão for free.

The other thing is, after they stole all that stuff from your garden, it was somehow still there. Your neighbors on Hacker News say that some bandits raided your garden, but you can plainly see that no one has picked any fruit or uprooted any plants, and your security cameras reveal nothing more rapacious than a rabbit or two. You begin to suspect that your neighbors are gaslighting you.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#133

Post by ryukoposting »

podgietaru wrote: post #27

"One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products." I know this isn't really the point of the article, but I've been thinking about this a lot. I wonder if we're going to see more resources go this way. I used to publish little doo-dads as opensource software. Not because it was something that was legitimately ground breaking or anyth…

> Because the fact that it gets scraped and added to a pile of training data to later be monetized really rubs me the wrong way.

I suspect the next AGPL (if not normal GPL) will explicitly prohibit training of closed models against the source material. Ideally it will prohibit training of open weight models too. Either share the entire process, or go piss up a rope.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#134

Post by squidproquo »

abetusk wrote: post #8

I think people are missing one of the points of the article. It's not just that agents are hammering the site, it's that there might be lurking vulnerabilities that allow malicious usage, which is why it went down, then came back up with a fraction of the data and a reduced design. The article says (speculates?) that malicious users are trying to get privileged access for an edge in prediction market betting. From th…

If it's the case that prediction market traders were trying to front-run the market outcomes, the prediction markets should put the fix on their end by locking down trading before a market closes with some time buffer to prevent this.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#136

Post by yuye »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #29
podgietaru wrote: post #27

"One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products." I know this isn't really the point of the article, but I've been thinking about this a lot. I wonder if we're going to see more resources go this way. I used to publish little doo-dads as opensource software. Not because it was something that was legitimately ground breaking or anyth…

This attitude makes zero sense to me. You benefit from the "training data" just like everyone else does. If you don't, that's a problem with you, not a problem with AI models. AI solves exactly the meta-problem you describe: "I had a problem and needed to write a one-off doo-dad utility program to solve it." Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads. As for monetizing the trai…

>Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads.

This is such a disgusting statement that goes against the very core of what open-source stands for. If even only one person got some use out of what they made, it is not pointless by definition.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#137

Post by yuye »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #108
dminik wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a sad worldview. Life without any challenges. Every problem immediately solved without learning anything.

What's sad is somebody giving you a godlike tool and watching you mope around muttering about "life without any challenges."

It's only considered "godlike" by those satisfied with mediocrity

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#138

Post by sillysaurusx »

primitivesuave wrote: post #25

A couple years ago, I was running a website which allowed the public to view all the US government handouts to small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also tracked all the fraudulent loans being prosecuted by the DOJ, and allowed anyone to run structured queries over the public dataset. There was a "donate" button which took in ~$2k in donations over the lifetime of the site, and you could download the enti…

For what it’s worth, a Hetzner dedicated server has unlimited ingress and egress. It seems like it’s the only provider that does. Egress fees suck.

You can get a beefy one for about $40/mo on their server auction site.

Just... don’t miss payments. Ever. Or they’ll delete your server within a week or so.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#139

Post by yuye »

john_strinlai wrote: post #80
ajkjk wrote: post #71

It feels like there is fundamentally missing infrastructure here that is needed to make these problems go away. Basically bots need to be (somehow) paying for the traffic they create, or prevented from creating it, or told to go away and then fined if they violate the request. No idea how to do these or even at what level in the stack they should happen, but they need to happen eventually somehow.

we've been working on basically the same problem in the email space for a few decades (legit email vs. mass spam). its a very hard (i think impossible) problem.

The same goes for telephony.

I reject all phone calls by default, unless I'm expecting a call.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#140

Post by userbinator »

primitivesuave wrote: post #25

A couple years ago, I was running a website which allowed the public to view all the US government handouts to small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also tracked all the fraudulent loans being prosecuted by the DOJ, and allowed anyone to run structured queries over the public dataset. There was a "donate" button which took in ~$2k in donations over the lifetime of the site, and you could download the enti…

the AI scrapers decided it would be more efficient to download terabytes upon terabytes of raw HTML by paginating through every possible facet on the search endpoint.

No, they decided that would be a great way to convince you of the narrative and persuade you to pay for "security" services that further the incumbent browser monopoly.

They're not "AI scrapers", they're DDoS'ers manufacturing consent.

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