What really confuses me is ... people always say, it's because companies are gathering data for AI training. Then why would they need to scrape the same page thousands of times per day?
Edit: the article says millions of times per hour? (!?)
The article is also astonished by this, and speculates it might be some kind of underground AI labs but... millions of them? Or does it only take one with too much money and a badly configured scraping setup?
>There are ways to tell the difference — the bots usually do not fetch images or CSS, for example — but, by the time that determination is made, the address in question will not be used again. Blocking the address at that point is just a waste of time.
I don't get it. Don't we keep blacklists of this stuff? And if they hammer thousands of requests per site per second and never reuse an IP, they'd run out of addresses in a few weeks.
Then they'd switch to IPv6, and... well, are we using IPv6 for anything important?
Like we need it for IoT, but do you want random IoT devices talking to your web server? (IPv4 handled mobile phones just fine not that long ago, right?)
>mathematics is basically the only scientific discipline that rejected any notion of utility
I think this might depend on the department, but I was at a pure math department last year, and struggling with my Linear Algebra textbook (written by the professor, incidentally, who was not a great communicator).
I consulted the machines, and learned, to my great delight, that linear algebra is used in like 20 different fields in the real world. It's "perhaps the most applied branch of mathematics in existence".
I complained in the group chat, that our didactic materials, specifically tasked with providing motivation and concrete examples, did not contain a single application, of this most richly applied field.
I was promptly pilloried, and shunned.
(Apparently that particular department was the wrong one, to ask a question like that!)
> GitHub Code Quality is currently in public preview and will become generally available on July 20, 2026. During public preview, Code Quality scans will consume GitHub Actions minutes but you will not be billed for other usage. From July 20, 2026, usage will incur additional charges. See GitHub Code Quality billing.
>If you want to avoid charges, disable Code Quality before July 20, 2026. See Disabling GitHub Code Quality.
I don't see that tab, so either the docs are out of date, and it's called something else now, or it's not on all accounts/all repos. (Due to being in preview?) I don't know.
I've been finding that they can write surprisingly elegant code, you just have to ask them to. It seems to be kind of like the old generative AI art days where you still had to add "+quality -bad" to the prompt.
Failing that they default to the most common style they were trained on. Which, at this point, is mostly code they wrote...
It might just be me, but AI has made my code more human-maintainable. They've been complaining about obsolete comments, separation of concerns, testability, global mutable state...
(Also performance and security issues, addressing which doesn't make the code more readable, but does make the program itself more robust.)
That being said... I have found them weirdly unsuitable for some tasks though, e.g. asking frontier LLMs to assist me with game development, I found that they were not able to add simple features to a simple Pong clone (nor even port a working Pong implementation) without constantly breaking things. (Yes, Pong, from 1972!)
So, I want to say YMMV, but just the past 2 weeks, my own mileage has varied very much! They seem to be extremely domain specific.
This is an article about bloat, in the broadest possible sense. Psychological bloat.
Attention is the scarcest resource, and complexity eats away at attention.
There's lot of other threats to attention, the relevant one here is cognitive load. Your mind keeps track of things even if they're not in conscious awareness. Every item has a "handle" on you.
If you take inventory, you may find many are not worth the cost! Worth doing, every now and then.
Though beyond testing, I think there will be increasing focus on proofs of correctness. (Testing can only show the presence of bugs, not the absence. —Dijkstra)
At any rate, it's never been this cheap to produce the proof of correctness of a program, or on the other hand, to produce an exploit for an incorrect program.
I think we're a year or two away from the same argument being used by languages which enforce proof of correctness. The economics seem to be shifting in that direction.
Finding exploits is getting exponentially cheaper, and the cost of producing proofs is rapidly going down. For a lot of software correctness is rapidly becoming non-optional.
>typically they are achieved in a very short amount of time, so the author hasn’t acquired any discipline in creating the project. That means it’s unlikely the author is going to stick to the project in the mid and long term
Lindy effect! The longer something has been around, the longer it probably will be.
I forget the terminology but I read something recently about how people are paying too much attention to their kids and it's making their kids neurotic.
Like when kids were growing up a couple decades ago they could just do whatever they wanted and those folks turned out all right. And now we've got people obsessing over where their children are and literally tracking their location, and the results don't seem to be so great.
(I heard that this difference had actually been quantified but unfortunately I don't have a link.)
I remember something about how, some percentage of children are not even allowed to leave the yard. Whereas their parents were just roaming for miles, at a much younger age.
Although I suppose at the same time, we're also less present with each other. So I guess there's at least two dimensions to that.
I guess the first one would be, are you relaxed and do you trust them to take care of themselves, even at a young age.
And the second one would be... are you actually there, or is it just your body that's there.
My mom was always distracted so that's mostly how I remember her. We have all kinds of wonderful memories together but, what I think of her, the first thing that comes her mind is, her being in the same room as me but ignoring me.
I don't have kids but I've been thinking about how, I would probably need some kind of office separate from the house.
In fact that's probably a big part of why offices exist in the first place. If I had kids here then for much of the day, they would be trying to interact with me and I would be either getting distracted from work or shooing them away.
What I'm actually there I would want to be fully present with them. It goes without saying that I would follow the example of the people who invented the stuff, and not give them a brainrot device in the first place.
So basically they're well suited for like, an octopus or a crow?
I was thinking about those species earlier in the context of, what does intelligence mean outside of language.
The benchmark appears to be testing the same thing. Although I don't know how much transfer there would be between this data set and the kind of situations a crow or an octopus would encounter.
Edit: Huh, it's just a Game boy game? I just did a couple of the tasks. It looks like C64 era game to me. Navigating levels. A lot of overlap with animal intelligence then.
I said a few months ago, "man, Opus is great, but sometimes when talking with it I have the feeling like, this thing should be about 10 times bigger."
When Mythos was announced after that, I was pleasantly surprised to hear about it. But when it turned out to be only two times bigger, I was a little disappointed!
(I am even more disappointed with the safety filters, but that's kind of a separate discussion... "Fortunately" I find that I can usually edit my prompt by single character and get through...)
Really makes you think, what we're feeding them...