IMSAI8080

There was a popular pirate streaming stick sold on Amazon that ran a residential proxy by day and did ad fraud clicks by night.

It'll be the Chinese. The big Chinese cloud providers have data centres in Singapore for some reason. My Chinese mobile phone sends all it's telemetry back to Singapore, not mainland China.

My solution was similar. Anything coming from the ASN of a major cloud provider gets a CAPTCHA with a little nuance to allow Google and Bing to index. That seems to do a pretty good job. Also, anything coming out of China or Singapore also gets a CAPTCHA as my site is not popular in those regions and many Chinese bots seem to show up as a Chinese mobile provider. So far, the bots have never attempted to solve the CAPTCHA.

I recently moved off Hugo as well to a DIY Python static site generator for my own blog. The trouble I had was I found it frustrating to have to learn how to do something the Hugo way when I knew I could quickly code it in a language I was already familiar with.

I think it comes from a marketing exaggeration of what the card could do. None of the cards of the day could actually produce their own box art (in real time) but the art implies they could in a way they can get away with. It follows the tradition of box art on 8-bit games wildly exaggerating what the in-game graphics might look like and they'd sometimes post a tiny disclaimer in the corner.

Or related: there's no one to nag you about going to get that funny ache checked out. Men particularly are notoriously reluctant to go to a doctor for various reasons but a worried partner might persuade them.

Indeed. It'll be a gravy train for one of the usual big consulting companies. Billions of much needed cash will be wasted and nothing of any value will be achieved.

This ID system is touted as somehow stopping illegal boat crossings (the current political hot topic in the UK) because it will apparently somehow stop illegal work. This is obvious nonsense. Employers are already supposed to do ID checks and face heavy fines for employing illegal workers. Illegal employers obviously don't bother with such checks and pay cash in hand. They will continue not to bother doing any such checks, with or without ID cards.

A great deal of illegal work is actually caused by arm's-length employers such as food delivery apps and other similar platforms. These companies already do fairly robust ID checks. What happens though is people rent out their accounts (often for surprisingly small amounts of money) with the ID check already passed to illegals who actually do the work. The problem is nothing to do with ID checks, it's the fact that the employer never sees the employee in person and doesn't verify on a day-to-day basis who is actually completing the work.

Now you mention it, I can see there's a lot of demand for very cheap video ads on YouTube and such and I can see those kind of productions using AI slop and not really caring. I was just surprised by the calibre of client the poster above mentioned, such as HBO and Netflix and such. That sounded more like AI video making an impact in higher class professional work.

What component of the production process is the AI being used for? Is AI video now good enough for green screen backgrounds or something like that?

It's all about the story that's sold to the higher ups. The higher you go up the corporate ladder, the vaguer the understanding of the technology. The big boss hears from a Microsoft salesman that AI = you can fire 20% of your workforce, but never questions exactly how that works. They probably never got sold static analysis in that way. That was just some kind of tool that somehow helps with that mumbo jumbo that developers spend all day typing. There's no story there that inspires a manager. AI = cut costs is music to the ears of the board. So then pressure gets applied to those lower down.

Something similar was going on with cloud a few years ago. The story was if you get cloud you can get rid of those expensive infrastructure people and it will all be so much more reliable. So the big boss gets a cloud strategy and foists it on those lower down. There's also pressure to be an on-trend boss. If all the other boss' are getting into it, then you need to as well.

That's staggering that 50% are using LLMs. Have you tried making a statement in the job ad such as "in-person technical interview will be required for this position". Of course you may or may not choose to conduct the in-person interview in reality but the threat might cause the cheaters to self-select out.

Yeah it's probably an ancient web site. This was commonplace back in the day when Internet Explorer had 90%+ market share. Lazy web devs couldn't be bothered to support other browsers (or didn't know how) so just added a message demanding you use IE as opposed to fixing the problems with the site.

I think the sentiment was to keep your content (and audience) portable, not specifically that you don't rely on anyone else's services. If you post everything on Twitter and Twitter decides they don't like you, then that's the end of you. If you host on a personal domain and your rented web host decides to block you, there's plenty more options and you can take your audience with you and they will never know the difference.

My guess is the average technical book is probably in the hundreds of copies over a reasonable lifetime. Mine's sold 91 copies in 5 months. It's a book about how machine learning works. Unknown author, I have no social media and zero advertising budget. It's just Amazon organic listings. The economics are definitely not good but I didn't write it for money. I wrote it mainly for more existential reasons that I wanted to put my words out there and leave something behind in the world.

Already done for skipping the sponsorship sections in videos.