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What happened to TheNumbers.com

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Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#201

Post by hack1312 »

amiga386 wrote: post #178
TeMPOraL wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is, people were scraping and monetizing other people's websites long before the current LLM fad. The difference is the magnitude of the problem. > In other words: it sucks when people are using your work in a manner that you find offensive That to me still reeks of Dog in the Manger mentality. If you publish something for the world to use, you should neither care nor even track, much less discriminate by…

This is absolutely fine, until some shitheel decides they're going to continually scrape your website, thousands of requests per second, and knock it offline constantly, so they don't have to cache even a single thing, or write better scrapers. They'll just suck up your bandwidth for it. After all, it's you that's paying, not them. Search engines were absolutely fine. They were respectful of the sources they scraped.…

Your rhetoric is harsh but you’re not wrong.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#202

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #190
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this is what you agreed to (implicitly or explicitly) when uploading stuff to the internet. In fact, open source embraces this (hence the 'open'). But people are free to not publish things or post things online with a more restrictive license. Not that a license stops things from being indexed.

> But people are free to not publish things or post things online with a more restrictive license. Not that a license stops things from being indexed. Right. In fact, people are also free to publish things with licenses that condition access on compensating the author/publisher, and they have both social and legal backing to enforce it. This is called "proprietary", and it's not a wrong choice - in fact outside of so…

[deleted]

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#203

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #138
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.

[deleted]

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#204

Post by MikeTheGreat »

Genuine question: do prediction markets open up a new revenue stream for TheNumbers.com?

Specifically: they suspect that the motivation for trying to hack their site (for at least some people) is that they wanted early access to numbers that folks were betting on in prediction markets. Since they've got those numbers they can just bet on them, then benefit from their perfect knowledge.

On the one hand this does seem incredibly unethical (it's clearly insider trading). On the other hand the CEO of PolyMarket has said that insider trading is part of the point of PolyMarket: https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?si=ztyTtgjeHSJbNjSZ&t=1566

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#205

Post by TeMPOraL »

amiga386 wrote: post #196
TeMPOraL wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major AI companies aren't indiscriminately scrapping any more than search engines were (which themselves caused some problems in the past too, until that got sorted out). Your gripe is with SEO people and content marketers. I'd be more sympathetic if it was really about this, though. However, the majority of the complaints seems to come from people personally offended by the possibility of their content, which they c…

The problem is the rat race for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A similar thing happened when crypto was in ascendence. Web pages were getting crypto-miners injected into them. Celebrities were shilling NFTs. Everyone and their dog was on the make. The thought of riches broke the minds of millions. The same is happening with AI. Whether it's the "major AI companies" or millions of self-interested also-rans…

You may be right about the scale of also-ran operations, even though I disagree with the core comparison. Unlike crypto coins, which require superlinearly growing energy waste just to sustain their basic guarantees, and were created to solve "problems" that aren't problems and don't need solving (hint: trust is a feature, not a bug), AI actually works. It delivers real value for cheap. The growth isn't artificial, it's a product that doesn't even need much marketing[0] - it exploded organically since ChatGPT, since it's obviously that immediately useful for approximately everyone in some aspects of their work or life.

One nit though:

> And it's not like the "major AI companies" hands are clean. Who bought up all the RAM and compute power? Who's building datacenters in the third-world parts of the USA and powering 24/7 them with diesel generators, or sucking up most of the power generator, and of course using up all the drinking water to cool their machines?

They paid for it, much like everyone else.

> Everything in humanity and nature is there for the AI bros to use and dispose of, provided they come out on top. This is the attitude that needs to be taken down.

Here you're arguing against the basic market economy. They aren't using and disposing of anything they couldn't buy for that purpose like literally everyone else. There's no theft or trickery going on here. There's a boom, because AI is that useful, but it's still all normal resource allocation.

--

[0] - Of course the competing players invest tons in marketing to gain an edge against the other players.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#206

Post by CamperBob2 »

foco_tubi wrote: post #147
CamperBob2 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The plant metaphor breaks down when you pause, take a breath, put the McDouble down and realize that intellectual property is a completely different ownership concept than physical property.

Exactly. Plants, like flames, reproduce themselves.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#207

Post by amiga386 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #205
amiga386 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the rat race for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A similar thing happened when crypto was in ascendence. Web pages were getting crypto-miners injected into them. Celebrities were shilling NFTs. Everyone and their dog was on the make. The thought of riches broke the minds of millions. The same is happening with AI. Whether it's the "major AI companies" or millions of self-interested also-rans…

You may be right about the scale of also-ran operations, even though I disagree with the core comparison. Unlike crypto coins, which require superlinearly growing energy waste just to sustain their basic guarantees, and were created to solve "problems" that aren't problems and don't need solving (hint: trust is a feature , not a bug), AI actually works . It delivers real value for cheap. The growth isn't artificial,…

> They paid for it, much like everyone else.

That's really not how it works. Did you miss the part where the RAM vendors, had they known their rivals were also selling all their RAM to OpenAI, would not have sold what they sold? OpenAI, who did know this, and what it would mean for every other industry and device on the planet that needs RAM, chose to go ahead with it. Because all they care about are themselves, fuck everyone else I got mine

Markets are imperfect because of information asymmetry, aka the Cheating Bastard Problem.

After announcing the deal and the truth coming out, they could also have said "hey, we see now this crimps all other industry but ours. We'll make this right, we'll reduce our RAM order if our vendors would prefer that." But they didn't, because fuck everyone else I got mine

As the AI companies are so flush with cash, they could afford to offer a Common Crawl, so everyone who wants web resources for their models or whatever can get very fresh cached copies from a common crawler, which obeys robots.txt and crawls in a fair way so as not to overwhelm the source webservers. But fuck everyone else I got mine, so here come a million dodgy scrapers to bring down everyone's site.

And in terms of natural resources, one does not simply "pay" and get whatever they want. Any government worthy of the name puts its own residents needs above the lucrative offers made to them by amoral outsiders who couldn't care less if the residents lived or died.

If you're a consumer of products and you know the product was made by taking away vital resources from people elsewhere, then you're complicit in that action by continuing to buy the product.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#208

Post by ssl-3 »

freediddy wrote: post #199
ssl-3 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few people showed up to read stuff on the old web, and yet: It existed.

The "old web" hasn't existed in 30 years now. I was a part of the old web and if people in the early 90s knew that someone was profiting off their work it would have killed it immediately.

I was a part of the old web, too.

Everything that I published in this way was placed online with the distinct expectation that everyone (and everything) would do whatever they wanted with it.

Re: What happened to TheNumbers.com

#209

Post by foco_tubi »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #206
foco_tubi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plant metaphor breaks down when you pause, take a breath, put the McDouble down and realize that intellectual property is a completely different ownership concept than physical property.

Exactly. Plants, like flames, reproduce themselves.

Technically most flowering plants need an intermediary for pollination
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