I've wondered for a while if simple interaction systems would be good enough to fend these things off without building up walls like logins. Things like Anubis do system checks, but I'm wondering if it would be even easier to do something like the oldschool Captchas where you just have a single interactive element that requires user input to redirect to another page. Like you hit a landing page and drag a slider or click and hold to go to the page proper, things that aren't as annoying as modern Captchas and are like a fun little interactive way to enter.
As I'm writing this I'm reminded of Flash based homepages. And it really makes it apparent that Flash would be perfect for impeding these LLM crawlers.
With content creation platforms there is absolutely no way one person or even ten people at the highest levels could kill them by leaving. In fact, as has been shown on Youtube and Twitch it usually makes the platform healthier because there's not one monolith to develop a strategy around bootlegging from. There have been several dozen gargantuan channels and several hundred giant channels on Youtube who have either left or just stopped uploading and Youtube still carries on. Youtube isn't carried by the Mr. Beasts and FailArmies who grab forty million views an upload, it's carried by thousands of smaller channels who get less than a million views per video. With places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur there are no giants, as everything is siloed so much that users in one community don't know much of what's outside that community, making it impossible for a handful of creators leaving to kill it.
I think "killing a platform" is less interesting than "birthing a competitor". And the Mixer experiment of 2021 suggests that the top dozen creators 5 years ago still wasn't enough to even foster a new platform. Market capture at this scale is truly sticky.
As another example. We're some 8 years into the "streaming wars", with a lot of top content leveraging their IP's. Netflix still seems to be long, and the only one profitable (though I wager it is not profitable on sustainable measures). Disney, HBO, paramount, and many more have struggled despite weilding much more well known programming. Being early is just so important in these situations.
I can confirm the earbuds thing. Not the mask thing. Modern jelly ended "earbuds" just feel awful. They irritate my sense of momentum, never stay in, and it constantly feels like I have altitude pressure buildup in my ear canal when I wear them. The old hard plastic first generation iPod style in-ear earphones however I have had no problem with. Gravity keeps those in place and so there isn't that constant pressure of expansion in your ears. Those or over-ear headphones are what should be recommended to people, and if neither of those options work then they're just using it as an excuse.
People get very annoyed and less productive when they have to relearn a large portion of their workflow. A carpenter uses the same tools the same way for fifty years, but someone working with software in any capacity has their tools replaced with new ones every few months and has to learn first how they differ and then how to get them to mostly do the same things as they old tools.
The enshittification has taken even the foods that were staples of the carb and sugar funnel. Many people aren't buying these foods not just because of GLP-1s, but because the quality of the food itself has gotten so bad. Doritos for example have almost no cheese dust on them, and the chips themselves are much thinner and now made with palm olive which makes them crumble rather than crunch. The satisfaction of both the flavour and the mechanics of eating Doritos is gone. Cheez-Its are more salt than cheese flavouring, and are overbaked until they're thin and crackly like flint flakes so as to maintain volume while using less dough. Faygo has reverted to using sucralose, which is mildly toxic and is a known carcinogen. Sucralose also tends to trigger sugar backlash, where the body mistakenly assumes it has taken in far less sugar and carbs than it actually did and then proceeds to rush and crash. Gushers come in packs of just four to seven now, and use far more xanthum gum as filler which makes them trend more towards chalky than gummy. Bagel Bites are now just bagels with cheese, as their is almost no sauce and hardly any toppings. Corn dogs are likely to be chicken or chicken and pork with soy fillers rather than beef or beef and pork. Little Debbie Swiss Rolls have a chocolate coating so thin that you're almost guaranteed to find holes on the top and sides where you can see the bare cake and have also switched to using palm oil.
I could go on and on. But the point is, these foods are no longer a source of contentment. I've spoken to a lot of people who stress eat who have told me that the terrible quality of their comfort foods has become a stressor in and of itself. They eat an entire box of Cheez-Its without noticing because the thinness of the cracker walls and the salt triggers them to eat more, they feel sick after eating frozen tacquitos because the tortillas have so many fillers, or they get anxiety that they've wasted their money because they get so little in a Payday bar. It's driving them away from these foods.
On the upside maybe it will drive them to cook for themselves like it has to you.
My local store the old standbys for sweets are getting less and less space. Half the cookie isle is store brand/off brand. The 'crunchy/granola' section has more candy selection than the traditional candy isle, and maybe half as much cookies as the traditional cookie isle. They really seem to be putting themselves out of business.
It seems strange now how often the power goes out. I remember back in the '90s I could leave my PlayStation running for two weeks because I didn't have a memory card to save my progress in Syphon Filter or NASCAR Thunder '98. Nowadays I have to set up autosave on everything and make checkpoint safeguards or scheduled backups because the power flickers off and back on at least once a week. This, with much more power efficient devices than that old PlayStation and Panasonic CRT.
This can vary greatly across locations, even within the same city and the same power distribution organization.
Different neighbors, being on different circuits, being on a line that's more likely to have storm damages, can make a lot of difference in quality of power delivery.
I've lived in places where the power practically never went out, never experienced undervolt situations, etc. I've then lived less than a mile away from the same place and experienced seemingly monthly issues of all the clocks being reset at random times when I come home. Living closer to things like hospitals, fire stations, emergency operations centers, etc. seem to give the best indication of power reliability, at least from my personal experiences.
It tends to happen in the area in general where I live. My house, neighbour's house, a house a mile away, all have the same trouble. I live within about six hundred yards of a volunteer fire department and about seven hundred yards from an elementary school, and even they've complained about how often the power goes out. The worst part is it's not like it's off for a few minutes and then it's back on. It's a momentary tenths of a second thing, like someone flicking a light switch down and up once to get people's attention.
I had a Soundblaster Live! Gold card back in the day, and I would route my record player or stereo through it so I could use a visualizer on my computer. You could hear the digital noise that was introduced on the highhats. And the source for the sound was a late '70s era Realistic system where everything was analogue. I never knew it was because of the soundcard. I'd always just chalked it up to either Windows XP or VLC doing something.
Unlikely to be this issue since this is about resampling of (e.g. from a CD's native) 44.1kHz PCM to 48kHz, and has nothing at all to do when recording since you'd most likely record at 48kHz and play at 48kHz (no HW resampling involved).
The pro-Trump group don't think about consequences is the thing. The anti-Trump group do, and that's a big reason why they're slow to respond. Performing a siege on the Capitol was a stupid, angry, and impulsive reaction with no thought of the consequences afterwards. That's the way the entire pro-Trump group tends to act. Meanwhile the anti-Trump group think about knock-on effects and long term consequences because they understand that nothing is an island and that everything is connected to everything else, even through degrees of separation. It makes them hesitant to do anything right away because they first have to consider what the ripples are going to affect outside of the area of their immediate focus. One group is reactive and the other is proactive, and being proactive is always going to be slower.
I don't think that's it. It has more to do with something to lose or not.
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose"
Liberals are generally more empathetic towards others and have good intentions when protesting. However if they have a comfortable life they will back down very quickly when faced with force. Just my opinion, could be wrong.
You're thinking about it with the wrong basis. They will not land in prison because they broke enough enforcement mechanisms to escape punishment. The administration will end, but the regime will not. Even if Trump died tomorrow, enough people have followed him through the holes he created that things will continue. You will of course have factions form and have those factions fight amongst eachother as they head off in their own directions, but the factions will exist in the first place. There is no way to stop them from forming and pursuing their goals without building new enforcement mechanisms, which they will obviously and vehemently impede the construction of. These people will likely die of age before they spend even a second getting a burning hot de-lousing shower and an orange one piece. This has happened every two decades in the U.S. since Reconstruction was sabotaged and prematurely ended.
A general strike at the level required to change things requires roping in unwilling participants as well. Probably on the scale of breaking infrastructure like payment systems or over the road shipping. If nobody can ignore current events because it's not just impacting but impeding and quickly degrading their quality of life they'll get angry. However just so long as people can go home and play their videogames, or listen to their podcasts, or read their books, they'll be able to focus enough of their attention away from events and keep their stress below the critical threshold just enough that they won't do anything. Calhoun's Rat Utopia Experiment comes to mind in that the rats suffered any number of indignities, maladies, and stressors just so long as they had ample access to endorphin and melatonin sources in strong enough bursts to stave off the constant floods of cortisol and norepinephrine.
Political theory is that ten to fifteen percent of a given population needs to actively rebel in order to enact change in a nation. The U.S. is fragmented enough by distance that you would need at least thirty percent of the national population to reach this state in order to get the ten percent in each of the six regions. Currently the number of people protesting is thought to be around four to six percent nationally, meaning it's less than one percent regionally. Part of that is because it's January, and most large scale protests happen in late spring or in the summer because schools are out and the weather doesn't suck. But part of it is simply because not enough people are motivated to act. Either pessimism or lack of direct harm is keeping them from caring.
So no matter what you're going to have to piss some people off. But it'd be better to piss off the people who will share your goals and ask forgiveness, because the other group was pissed from the beginning and have no forgiveness to ask for.
If you vote, the people you elect will ignore you. From your position as a private citizen there is nothing to hold your representatives responsible other than the possibility that their salaries and "campaign contributions" from lobbyists might stop. For many of these people they become incumbents because the voting population gives so little of a shit that they'll leave things as they are rather than spend the time and effort to research which candidate best aligns with their goals versus the incumbent. In actual use the only punishment mechanisms that exist have to be enacted by these representatives' direct peers rather than the people they represent, and as there are self levels of self interest that will dissuade them from doing so.
As for being labeled a domestic terrorist, the fools within this administration will use (and have used) any excuse to label someone as a domestic terrorist. In their view you are an enemy of the state regardless, because you are not the state. We are all in jeopardy no matter if we comply or not. If we will be labeled a threat because of any action we take, benign or malicious, then there is no practical fear of being labeled, only being captured and punished.
As I'm writing this I'm reminded of Flash based homepages. And it really makes it apparent that Flash would be perfect for impeding these LLM crawlers.
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