I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages.
Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.
It is difficult to say this is what consumers want, when right now consumers are getting the best of both worlds: The ease of AI agents without the long-term negative consequences of destroying the publishers who created all the high quality training data in the first place.
I think in the long term the highest quality content creators are going to find ways to keep their information out of AI training data, and put it behind walled gardens.
While yes, I am attempting to collect ad revenue from users, and yes, I don't want somebody competing with me and cutting me out the loop, a large part of it is controlling my content. I'm not arguing whether the AI chatbot has the legal right to access the page, I'm not a legal scholar. What I'm saying is that the leading search engines also have the equal rights to access whatever content they want, and yet they all give webmasters the following tools:
- Ability to prevent their crawlers from accessing URLs via robots.txt
- Ability to prevent a page from being indexed on the internet (noindex tag)
- Ability to remove existing pages that you don't want indexed (webmaster tools)
- Ability to remove an entire domain from the search engine (webmaster tools)
It is really impolite for the AI chatbots to go around and flout all these existing conventions because they know that webmasters would restrict their access because it's much less beneficial than it is for existing search engines.
In the long run, all this is going to lead to is more anti-bot countermeasures, more content behind logins (which can have legally binding anti-AI access restrictions) and less new original content. The victim will be all humans who aren't using a chatbot to slightly benefit the ones who are.
And again, I'm not suggesting that AI chatbots should not be allowed to load webpages, just that webmasters should be able to opt out of it.
The AI isn't "reading the web" though, they are reading the top hits on the search results, and are free-riding on the access that Google/Bing gets in order to provide actual user traffic to their sites. Many webmasters specifically opt their pages out of being in the search results (via robots.txt and/or "noindex" directives) when they believe the cost/benefit of the bot traffic isn't worth the user traffic they may get from being in the search results.
One of my websites that gets a decent amount of traffic has pretty close to a 1-1 ratio of Googlebot accesses compared to real user traffic referred from Google. As a webmaster I'm happy with this and continue to allow Google to access the site.
If ChatGPT is giving my website a ratio of 100 bot accesses (or more) compared to 1 actual user sent to my site, I very much should have to right to decline their access.
A datacenter could consume a lot of water with evaporative cooling. I don't know how prevalent it is, but given how cheap and efficient evaporative cooling is, I'd guess datacenters use it a lot where possible (probably in combination with other cooling methods).
Coincidentally I just had a professionally done garage door spring replacement today, and I asked the repairman this question, and here is what he said:
1. The springs lift the door from the bottom, and from each side, which puts less load on the door itself as compared to if the entire weight were being lifted from the top middle every time.
2. The motors can be smaller, quieter and use less power
3. In case of power failure, the door is much more functional and safer the less apparently weight it has.
Also the springs themselves are very unlikely to be dangerous (as long as you don't try to replace them yourself), because he said they almost always break when the door is at the closed state, because that is when they are under the most tension. Therefore on the whole, the springs in practice offer no practical safety risk, while greatly increasing the safety of the door in it's normal operation while also reducing wear and tear on the door. They also allow people to have heavier types of doors if they want them.
He has been constantly changing his positions and using the proceeds to invest in other companies. The benefit isn't one time, it is compounding over time, because he gets to keep investing the 20% of extra money he would have had to pay in capital gains, over and over again, as he shifts his money between investments. It would pay off anyways even if he did have to pay 20% when he eventually withdraws, but the fact that he gets it all tax-free makes it pay off massively.
He also doesn't have to keep all of his wealth in this Roth IRA, just a percentage. And it clearly is a scalable strategy because lots of people are doing it.
Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.