The antidote to all the yelling about “it’s just slop” or “it’s spicy plagiarism” or “it’s a lie factory” is to actually use it.
From: @rands
https://mastodon.social/@rands/114657268949190564
| GitHub | https://github.com/jamiemccarthy |
| Pronouns | He/him |
Jamie McCarthy
@jamiemccarthy
- 228 Followers
- 495 Following
- 500 Posts
Ruby on Rails engineer, vegan, enjoy D&D and relational databases. Formerly: Slashdot, ThinkGeek, The Holocaust History Project, Vox Media. Engineering account is over at @jamiemccarthy
Apple: *has a lovely campus in a city*
Mastodon: first of all how dare you
From: @jplebreton
https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/114532945118141391
Missile and drone attacks going both ways across the border. No line of direct communication between these two nuclear-armed nations! And I cannot find sources of news about this war on Mastodon. My app prefers to show me tech news and US politics instead
Some of these screenshots of what the AI says when you prompt it “X Y Z meaning,” where X Y Z is a random phrase that’s not an English idiom, are super interesting and revealing.
No one is asking the AI “what does this idiom mean,” so it’s answering as if it’s a phrase from a book or a song or something overheard.
And most of the time it’s doing a fantastic fucking job. Some of the screenshots are almost breathtaking in the AI’s ability to understand human meaning. Try actually reading them.
Apple will continue to go to bat for its users, even if captured regulators charge them millions
From: @9to5Mac
https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/114257031084689155
9to5Mac (@9to5Mac@mastodon.online)
Attached: 1 image Apple bizarrely fined $162M for App Tracking Transparency after advertisers complained https://9to5mac.com/2025/03/31/apple-bizarrely-fined-162m-for-app-tracking-transparency-after-advertisers-complained/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
Here’s an actual number instead of an anecdote, from a reliable source that actually works on this problem at scale.
Cloudflare says “AI Crawlers” are “just under 1%” of web traffic.
Another site that hosts data for over 10,000 projects was sad they had to give “the VM” more RAM. Someone else had to keep their site alive by increasing their pod count from 3 to 6.
I stubbed my toe this morning but I didn’t blog about it. It sucks but it’s part of that bipedal lifestyle I enjoy. Cost of doing business baby
Another site, which hosts static content that other people write, and makes it available for free download, was very angry that one bot downloaded so much of their free data it cost them $5000 in bandwidth in just one month.
That is their business model! Their pricing starts at $150 a month! Every CDN will extrapolate your monthly cost and you can set alert thresholds. Was it not someone’s job to monitor their expenses?
Candles $3,600, my family is dying
I think if you’re going to complain that “AI” bot traffic is swamping your website, you need to share numbers.
I saw a collection of anecdotes that included one from a guy who used a lot of swear words describing how angry he was at reading his web access logs. A full 70% of his traffic was AI bots!
Which turned out to be 2 requests per second.
@CmdrTaco I dreamed last night that I wrote a Slashdot post that wasn’t right or wasn’t smart, and you had to edit it to correct me.
I thought about re-editing it to respond to you, but I didn’t want to disrespect the readers, or you, by making it seem like airing a disagreement.
In case you were wondering if imposter syndrome is real — 20 years later — it’s still real 🤣