I could similarly ask what happened to journalists? Or the politician that cared about their stated principals.
The reality isn't even that they went away, necessarily. Or that it was all a lie. There were always exceptions and it always took some level of good faith between our different institutions to keep them working well. At some point, that good faith interaction got hijacked and it has quickly spread as a rot to all things.
Principals were always a liability. It is literally a key point in countless interactions. Is why "holding hostage" works. They are literally playing against a principal.
Similarly, lying has never been a virtue. But, joining people to your lie has always been a powerful way of gaining support.
I honestly don't know when or how things changed. My gut is, oddly, that the stakes all just changed. Used to be, you could literally retire to a homestead and you were living on your own. That just does not exist at all in the same way, anymore.
I think this is just a misunderstanding of how most technology has always worked?
Consider what is happening in most construction sites. The heavy work is absolutely from the technology on site. But without people there to oversee it and keep it working, it would fail.
And that is almost certainly true at any industrial site. Indeed, look up videos of high tech looms. A large portion of the technology added to them are so that the operators can locate the fault and fix it.
What? This depends entirely on where you are. And for far more people, I would expect they can far more easily walk to a grocery store than they can any sort of industrial thing.
You may be surprised. Many cities have urban sprawl and a desperate need for housing meaning subdivisions are being built in previously zoned industrial areas. That's certainly what's happened in my city.
I think the distinction __s is making is between layer toggles (layer is active between layer key presses, described as stateful) vs layer modifiers (layer is active while layer key is held).
And there are definitely reasons to minimize keyboard state. I've been playing around with programmable keyboards (running RMK in my case) with several thumb keys. My thumb was getting fatigued, so I tried using a layer toggle to avoid having to hold it while using the nav layer. I would hit it by accident and then get confused about why my keyboard isn't doing what I expect ("mode confusion"). That gets awkward, unproductive, and embarrassing real fast. You can display the mode via per-key LEDs and/or an OLED display, but those only help if you actually look down at the keyboard, which is not my habit. (I have thought about using a companion app to display an overlay on my computer's screen when in a non-default layer.)
fwiw, I think most of my thumb fatigue was from using my thumb on modifier keys beneath z/x/c and equivalent on the right, which required folding my thumb underneath my palm. Bad idea.
These keyboard designs have some really interesting ideas, but the ideas aren't all unambiguously good. Some of what are described as thumb keys really shouldn't be used with the thumb. I'm still on the fence about column stagger. I think a lot of the reason people avoid the number row on these keyboards is because the purely vertical reach on a column-staggered keyboard is more awkward than the diagonal movement you make on a row-staggered keyboard. And the idea that column stagger is better because it forces you to use e.g. the ring finger for "c" is based on an idea that it's bad to use the index finger for "c" even with a row-staggered keyboard, and I disagree with that. I also think they're undervaluing muscle memory (or maybe were made for people who never learned to type well on a row-staggered keyboard and are really committed to always using the column-staggered keyboard).
I'm typing on a SoflePLUS2 right now. It's based on the Sofle v2 design, which is described as having a 5-key thumb arc per side. But I try to limit thumb use to the innermost 2 or 3 keys per side after experiencing fatigue. I use the outermost 2 or 3 as opposite-hand modifiers (ctrl, opt, cmd) and try to pull my whole arm in to use them with the same-column finger, instead of treating them as a thumb key that requires folding my thumb underneath my palm as I keep my hand in the home position.
It seems like many in the ergo keyboard crowd are trying to never move their hands from the home position, and I think that might be a mistake. Use a variety of muscles, avoid unnatural positions. More broadly, my understanding is that the research behind using a tented/splayed split keyboard is solid (better shoulder through wrist positioning) but there's nothing really but anecdotal experience supporting the idea that vastly reduced key counts (and associated need for complex layer setups) or column-staggered layouts reduce pain and plenty of confounders (going from unibody to split simultaneously, maybe switching from QWERTY at the same time too, reducing speed, often learning decent form for the first time, often regression to the mean because people switch when they are having problems).
My previous keyboard was a split with traditional row stagger (Goldtouch) that Google's ergo team advised me to try forever ago. I switched recently because I wasn't liking the mushy feel of the keys, that the two "space bars" weren't distinguishable, that it doesn't have an integrated pointing device, and that after such long use I'd worn down the homing indicator on the f/j keys and was struggling to orient my hands correctly. But row-staggered layout was fine IMHO. Made it easier to learn, to switch between it and other keyboards when I had to, and to hit keys further from the home position.
Here's something from Kinesis, who have been designing split ergonomic keyboards for a long time: https://kinesis-ergo.com/wp-content/uploads/Advantage360-ZMK... search for "If your thumbs are sensitive" and "Guidelines for using your thumbs". And note that while they have keys under z/x/c they do not describe them as thumb keys.
Possibly, depending on how they're activated. If the layer is only activated while another key is pressed, that's not stateful (i.e. no different from yet another Fn key). I'd say that layer toggles and one-shot key modifiers are stateful control, yes.
Personally, I've found that I prefer layer shift keys over layer toggles. It takes more mental effort to track in which layer I'm working than to hold a key while pressing another. The only persistent layer toggles I use is to switch the entire keyset to a different layout (qwerty vs workman vs single-handed, or switch the right half to numpad).
Caps Lock is stateful control. The function of the keys changes depending on the internal state of the system. The "Fn" key on the keyboard in the article is also stateful (ish), and defaults to treating the F row as the special macros, rather than just F1-12.
An odd example, as fireflies are still pretty big in the places they have always been, aren't they? I know when I get to visit my childhood states, they are still there. Similar for cicadas and other bugs of my youth that I didn't realize were far more local than I expected.
It was just a recently notable example. Even as of 2-3 years ago I used to see them a decent amount. They're a highly visible marker of an insect population that is dropping like a rock.
They're also a beautiful creature that I could imagine wishing a child of mine could experience the same way I did, which better illustrates the tragedy of the damage we're doing to the planet.
I'm assuming you still live in the same place? My understanding the last time I took a dive on this is that the numbers are going down, but not in any way that is going to see them gone. You will need to go to where they are, though. And, alas, the PNW is not a place to find them.
I confess a sad assumption that bot traffic is far higher than we have admitted for a long time. Though, maybe we would see different stats specifically to social media sights to astroturf like counts? Certainly feels that we have known for a long time that bots were larger in ad viewing than ad companies wanted to admit.
I don't understand what difference bots make. For me, a website (the public part) is a storefront. People walk down the street and see what's inside — that's the purpose. If something should not be available immediately, that's the private part of the store.
I've been monitoring bot traffic on digital platforms for over 10 years. Sure, the crawler share is growing, some even with malicious intentions, and those I detect and block.
I disagree that this pain is worth the cost of making real people spend their life on verification.
For ad views, the concern is specifically that people pay for clicks and views. That that can be so heavily influenced by bot traffic greatly undermines their value.
Same general idea goes for any of the algorithmic driven platforms. The algorithms are ostensibly intended to surface organically discovered things by watching how people interact with things. That they are so susceptible to distortion through bot farms should be a lot more acknowledged than it is. People trust them far more than they should.
There is also a general cost of running things concern. It isn't like it is completely free to execute on bot traffic.
For ads, I believe this must be a problem for ad platform owners.
If the digital platform's storefront is their business, they could afford to spend some budget on bot detection. Bots still come from data center networks, sometimes render pages incompletely, request resources in bulk, and show enough patterns to be flagged internally.
If we look at a medium website, most random crawlers will come from Amazon, Microsoft, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, OVH, and a few other DC networks — these can be blocked easily without harming real users. The rest can be detected and cleaned up, even manually.
The math is simple: 20,000 visits a day at 15 seconds each = ~83 hours a day lost watching a Cloudflare logo, just because someone doesn't want to dig into the logs. I don't buy it.
Largely agreed, though I think you are likely underestimating how hard this is to detect. In particular, it is true that many bots can be hosted in data centers, but it is somewhat trivial to launder that traffic through other sources. Malware, in particular, is what I have in mind. Maybe I'm wrong and that has largely gone away?
There is also a bit of mixed incentives. Yes, it is the ad platform that is getting abused. But it is also the ad platform that is charging people based on abused practices.
And it isn't like this is completely made up. Just look at how facebook killed a lot of ton of people during the "pivot to video" programs. I don't know all of the details, as I was thankfully not in any of the involved industries, but my understanding is it is fairly well documented.
Edit: I changed an "isn't" to "is." I think I was trying to reword at one point, but left it in a way that is opposite what I meant.
When most of your server capacity is going to answering the scrapers it matters. It's not that the stuff is hidden, it's that storefront being flooded with 10x as many customers as the fire code allows. And some of them go around asking your employees mindless questions. (Small forum I help moderate: we were getting hammered with what was probably some sort of AI that was taking search queries and feeding them into the forum search. Search is now registered users only.)
> When most of your server capacity is going to answering the scrapers it matters
I've been dealing with the web since the previous century and still haven't managed to build a website that could be hurt by scrapers visiting it.
If you went through the logs, you'd probably see that these bots are on a single IP or subnet, which can be easily detected and blocked instead of closing off search to non-registered users.
For efficiently-hosted sites with little media it's not too bad. E.g. hosting a static site just doesn't cost much, even if you're hammered occasionally.
That's extremely far from all sites though. It's probably safe to say it's a severe minority, particularly when you ignore personal / non-profit-bringing sites. Tons of small and large sites run stuff like poorly-written wordpress or ruby on rails or thousands of microservices doing god knows what. A major increase in request volume on those can easily mean significant increases in hosting charges (e.g. small-% on big, many multiples on small) or significant effort in optimizing (which is expensive too).
The website I mentioned has over 15k webpages and ~200 GB of media, and yet we monitor bots manually and only block them if they're pulling 5k requests in a row. Malicious URLs, multiply 404 are blocked by default. HEAD request rejected.
Even on a very bad day, the server's page load time doesn't go over 1s.
However, it seems like I'm indeed looking at the problem through the wrong prism, as what I've seen from the comments suggests that the initial issue is performance, and the bots are what uncover it.
I think a good chunk of it is bot-induced performance problems, yea. Whether that's compute or transfer. And advertisement costs.
Optimization is very very much not a solved problem though, just look at basically all software ever written - it's written for an optimization priority and to a price point (whether commercial $$ or via personal time), and that target's value to its users has shifted rather dramatically.
This is really interesting. I indeed looked at this problem from the wrong perspective.
I'm working on an open-source tool that could be useful for bot detection, but I'm still not confident that anyone would deploy it on-prem and make the setup/maintenance instead of just routing traffic through the cloud.
I think you'd definitely find some interest, e.g. anyone that intentionally avoids "the cloud" will want something local. Honestly I assume there are some of these already, monitoring apache/nginx/etc logs. Anubis is arguably similar and has been exploding lately, for example, though I'm not sure if it auto-updates its rules at all: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
As to if it'd get enough interest: yea no idea at all. I wish you luck tho! Clearly there's a need for this kind of thing.
Our team develops a risk-based analytics system that we also use for bot detection. From our perspective, bots shouldn't be blindly blocked, but rather properly monitored and blocked only when necessary. Here is a live demo (1) to give you a general idea.
Well the fun things is that no one knows how much traffic of what kind they are getting when they use Cloudflare.
You get the numbers that Cloudflare tells you, but who knows if you can trust their stats after their CEO is apparently cherry-picking data to shape their product narrative?
That same CEO too that just went on a wild tone-def layoff justification, classifying human employees into roles of either a builder, seller, or measurer and saying he wants to get rid of everyone that "measures" the business...
I wouldn't trust a single thing coming out of his mouth.
If it helps, I have found the attitude that writing is mostly for the writer to be healthy in continuing the practice. And it largely tracks with how I feel I have had better understanding of things I have documented than those I have not.
I had a good laugh when Haiku's thinking summarization referred to mayor Mamdani as a, quote, "known anti-Zionist." :-) Probably a good thing to remember is that the value added in RLHF is not partly biased, or biased, but itself bias.
(Context: I asked it to write fake Reddit comments, because I was curious about how realistic they could be. The colorful phrase occurred during its reasoning about the requested subjects.)
In English, the word "known" is generally placed in sentences like, "known sympathizer," more often than in "known Democrat." Compare, "suspected," contrast the more neutral, "is an."
When a researcher discovers that smoking is damaging to the lungs, do they need to provide a solution that allows people to smoke without damaging their lungs? Would their inability to provide a solution take anything away from the research?
Acute would imply that we should flat out stop. Chronic would imply looking for plans to work on it. Acute and chronic would imply that we should both stop and take action to address damages.
If you’re referring to a solution to large datasets without not being auditable, she actually did provide a solution. Something to do with data sheets for these training data sets similar to those provided for hardware components. At least, if my memory serves me.
I was more irked by the diversity of teams developing these concern. Which, feels like a benign enough concern, but not one where you can just stop progress.
Worse, I think it is a ridiculously safe bet that the US was home to the most diverse teams you could get for this sort of work. Asking the good faith participants to stop participating would have decreased the stated goal.
If the criticism can't distill up from "bad things could happen", it just isn't useful to keep paying people to come up with that kind of critique.
And it isn't like we stopped paying attention to these concerns, is it? Nor were they completely blind siding us at the time. The question was largely of what to do about them.
The question also whether large-scale utilization of LLMs (and also the prerequisite increased training processes) should proceed before these issues were addressed. Clearly, we collectively answered "yes" without any actual reasoning (and arguably, without any collective decision making either).
This feels incoherent. I'm game to agree that there were and are poor decisions being made. But are you proposing that we could have stopped all progress until these vague concerns were addressed?
For some of the concerns, like language understanding, I can't bring myself to think that many of the experts out there were doing any better than these models can do today. Quite the contrary.
And do you think that that would not have been counter to the concern over diversity of teams working on it?
Or concerns over bias going away by having the US attempt to abstain? Good luck with that. It sucks, but China and Russia should stand as stark examples that it turns out you can take strong control over the internet.
It’s pretty common in the security world to have a red team and a blue team. There is overlap in the skillset for both, but there are good reasons to have separate people develop each team, and we wouldn’t expect people to have a talent for both.
Ideally, we like it if the red team can suggest solutions, but that’s not always their job or expertise and I’ve rarely if ever heard someone express the sentiment you are within that context by suggesting a really good red team person isn’t useful if they can’t fix the holes they find.
The reality isn't even that they went away, necessarily. Or that it was all a lie. There were always exceptions and it always took some level of good faith between our different institutions to keep them working well. At some point, that good faith interaction got hijacked and it has quickly spread as a rot to all things.
reply