I actually read a really interesting article from a relatively small blog explaining that they're receiving a massive amount of scraper traffic from residential proxies.
The article was called "The one we're commenting on"
Residential Proxies are the most emblematic technology of our era- a group of people looked at something that used to be considered a crime (botnets) and realized that if they just did it openly, no one would ever punish them.
Many research labs in scientific fields other than CS need a lot of compute power and have an insufficient budget.
In the PS3 era, the PS3 had the highest compute power (FLOPS) to cost ratio of any commercially-available computer, due to a combination of its parallel architecture and the fact that Sony's business model was to sell the console at a loss and make up the money by taking shares of game revenue (and by charging $6 a month to allow the console to connect to the Internet)
But it turned out that it was possible to jailbreak the PS3 to run software other than certified PS3 games (this was officially allowed at first, but Sony quickly pulled the plug). And as a result, the best bang for your buck for "highly parallel we just need FLOPS" supercomputer workloads was to build a rack of PlayStation 3s.
The "Anyone can use this to do anything they want in total anonymity and privacy" to "oh no bad people are using this to do bad stuff" pipeline is eternal.
LinkedIn brain honestly really disturbs me. I didn't believe in souls until I needed a word to describe what people with LinkedIn brain lacked.
Fortunately, then LLMs came along and now if I see a worryingly-soulless LinkedIn-brained post, I can lie to myself and say it was made by a discount LLM.
You can also just copy the files you want to move in the archive view and paste them where you want them.
Or you can click and drag the files from the archive to where you want to move them.
Funnily enough, it's really only Linux users and people who used computers in the early 00s that don't think to move files in archives the same way they would move files that aren't in archives.
They keep popular but unprofitable products that would otherwise be turned down alive.
There are Victorian-horror-esque costs to that, but it's still better that those projects be alive but enshittified than completely dead (If you disagree, you can just cancel your subscription, after all)
As I said downthread, that is exactly the opposite of why I got into this field, and I fully admit that I'm upset that people with your attitude were the ones vindicated by technological progress.
(And I admit I'm salty that the "I don't give a shit about why the calculator doesn't work in France, I'm just here because they pay me to fix it" people were the ones vindicated by technological progress)
This is legitimately the reason I'm looking to leave programming.
I got into programming because the problems of programming were interesting to me. But if the problems go from "figure out why this calculator is off by one in France" to "Get this LLM to stop spamming cutsey emojis", then maybe it's time for a career change.
Both had a 3-year deadline. If you failed to do either before their deadline, then your "lifetime" Minecraft account is completely dead with no possibility of recovery.
> It also seemed really accurate. I never remember it beeping at me when I was actually paying attention.
This is the exact opposite of my experience! The one time I tried BlueCruise, it went into "panic mode" every time I turned my head to check my blindspots.
The idea of "Wait, we can just make sporadic random customs inspections" is way older than this law. I suspect it was invented by the first ever customs inspector. (At a minimum, Plutarch at one point described it happening at a checkpoint between Roman provinces)
The most obvious (to me) example is the San Francisco anti-homelessness program. The city government of San Francisco understood that
1. Homelessness is a massive problem, far larger here than most cities
2. For political reasons, the obvious solution of "Double the number of homes in the city to take people off the streets at the margin" is off the table.
As a result, they started giving massive contracts to a wide variety of NGOs that promised a wide variety of novel solutions to the homelessness tragedy.
As it turned out, the effect of basically all of those experiments was either nothing or counterproductive. But the NGOs ended up being so numerous that they have political power of their own, and are now at the same level as "teachers" as a major expense and powerful constituency for the city.
If you're one of those people who needs an opposite-political-valence example, a good one is the TSA. Totally worthless at stopping terrorists, but totally skilled at keeping itself funded.
The article was called "The one we're commenting on"