There's like 1 spam message in my Gmail inbox every day. Some of it is so obvious that an LLM running on a Raspberry Pi can correctly classify it. For example car insurance ads.
(My email address is on my home page. It's also my username on over 100 sites that I signed up for over 20 odd years.)
And my theory is that the US only looked good because there were no competitors: Break up of the Soviet Union left the constituents without economies of scale. Similarly European markets were still desperately fragmented. China was growing, but from a low base.
So capital flooded to the US.
So we all have our own theories.
The real question remains "What's best for America right now ?"
Soviet Union was never the place where large scale immigration happened.
Actually the opposite. There were severe restrictions to emigration. They didn’t want people leaving the Soviet Union (or the satellite states) and going to the West. The Berlin Wall for example. Things weren’t so rosy behind the Iron Curtain.
And if you have unforgivable student loans because you believed the k-12 propaganda, then you can never "leave". You might be done paying them by the time you, uh, die.
The board members will be lobbied, wined and dined by billion or even trillion dollar companies. If politicians can be bought then so can non-profits.
Having said that, there may well be a room for a niche recaptcha-like service run by a non-profit. Perhaps one that uses a non-profit social graph or something.
It will certainly make some bot farms unprofitable: Remember that they are now paying for a screen, a battery, a 5G radio, software licenses, branding, distribution and customer support for which they have no use.
Also consider this: While bot farms may be able to buy millions of Android devices, they will certainly attract a lot of scrutiny as they approach the billion mark. So bot farms will never own more Android devices than humans.
Remember that they are now paying for a screen, a battery, a 5G radio, software licenses, branding, distribution and customer support for which they have no use.
If you have the $$$, which the big guys certainly do, they'll just buy the bare attestation bits and figure out how to use them directly.
If proof of work is the "payment" to prove that you're human, many AI startups will outbid poor people living third world countries. They will even outbid some Americans.
Yes, those AI startups can also buy cheap Android phones at scale, but it's a bit harder because they'll pay for stuff that their bots have no use for (a screen, a battery, a 5G radio, software, branding, distribution, customer support etc).
As I see it, living requires money. If we have people on this planet that are too poor to digitally prove that they're alive, then we need to figure out a way to distribute the Earth's wealth more equally in general, rather than to require hardware attestation, which seems to be worse on essentially every metric, including inequality.
i genuinely don’t think the idea of being too poor to prove you’re alive is on their radar. it’s just not in their priorities. this is why we need regulations. companies only care about bottom line and increasing profits not the wellbeing of humanity
> If proof of work is the "payment" to prove that you're human, many AI startups will outbid poor people living third world countries. They will even outbid some Americans.
The difference is that if you're human you can create an account and then carry on using it for decades, whereas if you're an aggressive scraper bot or spammer then you get banned and have to buy new accounts over and over.
An "account" which is somehow linked to enough of your browsing history to determine if you're a scraper or a spammer. Then the company(s) administrating these accounts will be able to collect a lot of info on the account holders over decades.
Google hardware attestation idea won't give them that much data: All Google will know is which phones visited which websites and only when the website asks the phone for hardware attestation. If the website gives the phone a cookie for bypassing subsequent attestations, then Google will know only of the first visit.
Attestation is a service, like every other service. Why should it necessarily be free? Especially now that we all know that "free" on the web means ads & tracking?
I think we should just accept that some things should cost a bit of money and move the discussion to "how much should it cost", rather than trying to sweep economics under the rug.
The De Beers cartel was able to avoid anti trust scrutiny because the best reserves are outside (Africa/Canada/Russia) of the most lucrative markets (US/Europe/Asia).
Corporations control only a small faction of housing supply.
You can pattern match on the prompt (input) then (a) stuff the context with helpful hints to the LLM e.g. "Remember that a car is too heavy for a person to carry" or (b) upgrade to "thinking".
If they aren't, they should be (for more effective fraud). Devoting a few of their 200,000 employees to make criticisms of LLMs look wrong seems like an effective use of marketing budget.
It looks like they do. https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt...
They patch it in the prompt and they eventually address it in the re-enforcement training. It seems the eventual goal is to patch all of these tiny "glitches" so as to hide the lack of cognition.
reply