young cosmopolitan tech workers are not particularly likely to have children.

I know that feel, bro. Wayback Machine is very spotty, unfortunately. websites that existed for years often have only a few pages archived.

the worst thing I saw was a website that was dead for over a decade but fully archived get hit with "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine" because of robots.txt set by whoever is squatting the domain now. I've managed, by some miracle, find an archive of its content on some random forum. bookmarked it. by the time I'd remembered about the bookmark, that random forum was dead and the link was not archived :(

>us all

you do realize that half your country had voted for the guy three times?

It’s not half. It’s half of who voted. Due to electoral college voting in most states matters Little and turnout is low.

bah, such a pity we didn't have those in wc3 times. bots sucked badly.

I could play online, but my dial-up costed $1 per hour for 250ms latency and near guarantee of at least one disconnect per hour.

impossible, unfortunately, because LLMs suck at creative writing. without handholding, they are incapable of producing anything but cliche-ridden purple prose for young adults. you can feed it the first half of a book with lots of sex, violence, and profanity, ask it to continue the story, and it will degrade into safe slop within two chapters.

both American and Chinese labs aim their models at coding and knowledge work, so they penalize adult themes in post-training.

so much sovl.

I loved window shopping for watches as a kid. idk if it was a Casio, but I did eventually convince my parents to get me one with a calculator. it was one of the coolest things you could have as a kid in the 90s, imo.

>But AI is absolutely loathed by the public.

by the public populating the echo chambers on reddit and bluesky, perhaps.

9.5 out of 10 normies use it daily now and have no negative opinions about it. the wholesome folx use it too, despite their incessant kvetching.

Most people I talk to use it because it's useful, but also hate what it means and what it is doing to the world.

There definitely has been a broad change in public perception of big tech and the future that it is taking us toward.

was that change organic, though? every single shitrag went berserk about AI once the so-called journalists had realized they were about to lose their jobs to it.

I think there is a massive selection criteria bias, AI has been a batshit insane productivity boost for me but I’ve been so busy with it that I’ve generally stopped posting online - I only do so now because I’m out of quota. I no longer see any point in arguing with people - I’ve got better things to do, like argue with AI. I used to scour the Earth looking for smart people to talk to and now I don’t even have to leave my apartment.

I use all sorts of things I hate all the time.

This is not the gotcha you think it is.

every fuckass website with 0.5 daily visitors has it now. russian minitrue had blocked cloudflare and the internet became completely unusable without a vpn. like you search for something and not a single link works.

Because websites with almost no visitors are hit the hardest. A hundreds bots per minute hitting your server (if you host any kind of source code) versus one real visitor every other day is a great scenario to protect against.

The Russian government being stupid and evil isn't really Cloudflare's problem to solve. Neither is the lack of abuse prevention from VPN providers necessitating the extra challenges for VPN IP blocks. And, now that botnets are the norm, residential IP addresses too.

Obviously, Cloudflare's tools aren't the solution. The web needs to be closed down behind paid or real-identity accounts for websites to ditch these protections. It's only going to get worse from here.

>Because websites with almost no visitors are hit the hardest. A hundreds bots per minute hitting your server (if you host any kind of source code) versus one real visitor every other day is a great scenario to protect against.

a $10 VPS hosting a static website can trivially serve a thousand pages per second.

I have a few fuckass websites hosted together on the cheapest VPS I could find, and the last time I got an automated alert about downtime was a decade ago.

there is simply no incentive for anyone to ddos a random website.

>The Russian government being stupid and evil isn't really Cloudflare's problem to solve.

didn't imply it was, it was just an observation that everyone uses Cloudflare now.

of course it's authentic. the folx with good politix live in a carefully curated reality where everyone agrees with them or gets silenced.

there's thread on the front page of reddit right now, the usual drivel with a literally who on twitter snarking about 50B spent on Iran war instead of free healthcare. those who'd committed the thoughtcrime of dividing 50b by 342m and suggested that 146 bucks per person doesn't buy much healthcare are downvoted into oblivion.

ai is simultaneously taking everyone's jobs and a bubble that's about to burst.

russia is simultaneously a bankrupt paper tiger on the brink of total collapse and the greatest threat to mankind on the brink of invading every wholesome democracy on earth.

etc etc.

> those who'd committed the thoughtcrime of dividing 50b by 342m and suggested that 146 bucks per person doesn't buy much healthcare are downvoted into oblivion.

I suspect the criticism isn't as absurdly narrow that ALL we have to do to get M4A is swap out the war funding. It's probably people pointing out that the govt wastes plenty of money on immoral and useless things, of which the Iran war is an example.