Lawyers do a lot more than accepting liability. In my field they spend a lot of time on contract negotiation, and on interpreting what federal and state regulations actually require us to do.
I guess most people think that their source of news is the best one. Because thats why they read them.
Unimportant info is filtered, that realy important that somehow affect me get quite quickly. Most conversation about news are irrelevant thus I have more time to do other things.
News are mostly distraction and emotion flow anyway, I'm not sure why consumption is considering as informing. There are plenty other subjects that I consider much more informative.
Ah - near the bottom where he is disclosing his own bias. Got it.
So do you disagree that AI companies are in very large amounts of debt? And do you also disagree that debt will have real consequences (and one of those consequences might be either the lights going out or a buyout or merger)?
Not at all. And to be honest, I don't hear the original author asserting that all AI will go away.
But if you have a ChatGPT plan and OpenAI is bought by another company (because they are insolvent) ... do you honestly think you will be able to continue using your service without a significant price increase?
I suppose that would be up to the new owner? How would I know what happens to their services? You shouldn't conflate AI-the-technology with OpenAI-the-company. I'm super bullish about the tech, couldn't care less about a specific company. I mean, I hate Oracle like any other sane person, but that doesn't mean I hate databases.
I'm very confident that AI will continue to be available no matter what happens, at reasonable prices. We don't have to guess - we know what the open source models take to run, the hardware, the electricity, everything. They are served at a profit today - no-one is subsidizing them. Anyone can run GLM5.2 or (soon) K3 etc - you have capex and opex, you can serve X tokens per second, you sell them at Y price, it's just maths.
AI is a technology, not a company or group of companies.
I had the same reaction. It is the same kind of argument people use to claim that computer science is useless because, “What would you do if the electricity went out?”
Zitron has been predicting an imminent bubble pop since 2023 (although in less and less falsifiable terms), as OpenAI and Anthropic revenues have steadily grown 3-10x per year, but people keep listening. Zitron has done a lot to misinform the public but at some point you have to conclude it's demand-driven, and people won't re-evaluate his credibility because he tells them what they want to hear.
Right, I didn't mention anything about profit or debt.
The question is whether this is a bubble that's going away - whether "AI will just be turned off". A revenue trajectory indicating a vast increase in actual consumer/enterprise usage every year indicates otherwise. This is true regardless of whether or not forward-looking investment becomes too much at some point. If CSPs or AI labs have bought more compute than they can sell at current prices, maybe they'll go bust, but at that point supply and demand mean compute and therefore AI inference becomes much cheaper, which is unlikely to make it go away.
I've been seeing a lot of this in online discourse where people are like "the bubble's gonna pop and then this will all be over!"
it's a combination of wishlful thinking and straightup delusion to think that AI will just poof and disappear (maybe the specific LLM approach eventually, but not the general idea of AI/the industry/product as a whole)
We're seeing, right now, that the people pushing for it are doing it in ways just as you do. Maybe you'll have to accept being considered a second class slop human, who knows? Or do the threats only flow one way?
Grey market residential proxy service providers are one of the most common methods of implementing bot spam, social media manipulation and plenty of straight-out fraud.
There's all kinds of things that malicious actors want to do where they value coming from an ordinary (comcast, charter, centurylink, shaw cable, whatever) residential IP.
Sure, I do as well, I have my own VPN into my home office that lets me run traffic outbound through its default gateway while I'm somewhere else. But letting random third parties I don't know run traffic through my house is another thing entirely.
Do you really need residential ip for this? for my news scraping i have choose static datacenter proxy first, rotating only as fallback, direct as last. flaresolverr covered cloudflare js challenge, but it wedge on memory time to time, so i add healthcheck for it. on my own site aws waf meet datacenter ua with captcha, so i understand other side too. residential never was necessary for me, but maybe my targets are just easier, what do you scrape?
If you don't want to share your internet with others, that is your choice, but please don't make seem like you are only sharing the internet with criminals. That is a harmful belief to spread.
Only if the app provides 1. prominently-displayed, informed consent, 2. an option to opt-out without losing app functionality, or 3. joining the botnet provides some kind of actual benefit to the user, besides just money to the developer.
Add to that list respecting the TOS of the user's ISP so that the user does not get banned, and providing some sort of remuneration if illicit activity through the proxy causes problems for the primary user, and then _maybe_ you could call this all not shady as fuck.
If only ISPs would actually crack down on (usually unwitting) users whose systems are participating in a malicious botnet or otherwise have their networks compromised. They could offer temporary disconnection + anti-malware support to get the user cleaned up, if they actually gave a shit.
No residential last mile broadband ISP at the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of customers is presently willing to spend the salary/benefits/fully loaded employee cost on the massive teams of (somewhat technically clued in, not low wage) people it would take to effectively implement this.
Apparently at least one of the apps mentioned does that. From the article
>A Pac-Man smart TV app from Bright Data offers users the choice between viewing ads in the game or agreeing to allow their TV to serve as a residential proxy node.
I wonder how informed the end user actually is, and if it's disclosed to them what kind of content might pass through their network as a result of agreeing.
I don't know how "join your users to a botnet" became some kind of legitimized monetization scheme. Ads are bad enough. What's next? "Participate in a DDOS in order to use our app?"
I'm surprised Comcast or some other ISP doesn't step in with a claim of tortious interference. Reselling or granting access to the ISPs services like this is almost always against the ISPs terms of service.
The consumer is in no place to consent to this exchange.
Oh yes they can. If I'm a consumer, I pay for my connection that is sold to me and held in my name. I have no right to "resell" or "sublet" part of that. It is usually spelled out in the Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy.
At the very least, consumer connections explicitly disallow "Commercial Use". That means that you can't use them to run a business. You can't use them to turn a profit. You can't use them to generate revenue. That means no running servers, and that means no "reselling 2% of your bandwidth" for a few pennies because some Euro-Trash-Stranger wants to borrow it!
You wanna run a business? Then get a business license, pay your business taxes, and sign up for a business Internet connection. That’s what they’re made for. Then run your servers to your heart’s content.
Okay, I can understand that there are instances where people want to run a website or some kind of server, recreationally, or out-of-pocket, or cooperatively, outside of a business/corporate context.
But I'd say it's fundamentally a market segmentation. ISPs don't want consumers running servers on consumer connections. Think about it. This allows ISPs to plan deployments better. Consumers should be, well, consuming downloads and content rather than distributing it upstream. Therefore, for example, my DOCSIS connection is 10x downstream vs. upstream. And an ISP's consumer-level backbone can be planned much more effectively when consumers are consuming downloads.
If you wanna run a server then go colocate it, or run it as a legit business. You've got to accept some market segmentation here.
I purchased a new HP printer recently, and it's firmly a SOHO printer. Perhaps more powerful than I really needed. And guess what? I found out that it's not really supported by Chromebook or Android drivers. So... I've got to bounce all my print jobs through Linux! Ah well!
Internet service should be as close to a dumb pipe as possible. It can be biased in one direction (though 10:1 is too much and future DOCSIS versions are remedying that) but even a slower upload can and should be able to do basic hosting.
so much of the early aughts small business and startups were people selling stuff and doing things out of ppls home. and not like the "startup industry" startups, actual startups
but aside from that, hosting a website or email server or newsgroup or game server with friends isnt necessarily hosting a business, not everything is a transactional relationship
We have this invention called money so that individuals don't need to wrangle complex swap trades and instead sell the things (usually their time) that they are OK with selling with informed consent and buy the things they want without having to give up things they don't want to or don't understand. If selling your internet connection was a reasonable thing to do there would be dedicated apps/boxes for that instead of this being packaged into random apps.
We may cast a human connection to slavery, but from the owners' perspective, the whole point is automating away the things they don't want to do. Fundamentally there's no difference.
It's not that silly of a blogpost. See: "permanent underclass", a term popular among people that believe that an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is imminent and desirable.
Let's face it, only thing lawyers are there for right now is to take liability. And even that may not be needed 5 years from now.
Middlemen that can be automated will be automated.
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