It is hard not to be moderately worried, since the administration has already made concrete attacks on citizenship pathways, immigrants and legal residents. Most notably, it's targeted birthright citizenship via executive order, tried to push through the power to unilaterally revoke green cards, and arbitrarily cancelling the ability of universities to host foreign students.
More importantly, successful legal challenges to these efforts are being vacated or reversed by the Supreme Court. That means the administration's attempts aren't being fully checked by balances.
You should take the rhetoric fairly seriously. There is no good-faith explanation for this pattern of attacking people who have gone through the process faithfully, and no credible ongoing efforts to prevent those happening.
> You must be paying your software engineers around $100,000 yearly.
> Now that vibecoding is out there, when was the last time you committed to pay $100,000 to Lovable or Replit or Claude?
I think the author is attacking a bit of a strawman. Yes, people won't pay human prices for AI services.
But the opportunity is in democratization - becoming the dominant platform - and bundling - taking over more and more of the lifecycle.
Your customers individually spend less, but you get more customers, and each customer spends a little extra for better results.
To respond to the analogy: not everyone had $100,000 to build their SaaS before. Now everyone who has a $100 budget can buy Lovable, Replit and Claude subbscriptions. You only need 1,000 customers to match what you made before.
How much demand for software is there, though? I don't buy the argument that the cake will grow faster than jobs are devalued. On the bright side, prices might collapse accordingly and we'll end up in some post scarcity world. No money in software, but also no cost, maybe.
The idea behind the headers is to allow bots to bypass automatic bot filtering, not blockade all regular traffic. In other words:
- we block bots (the website owner can configure how aggressively we block)
- unless they say they're from an AI crawler we've vetted, as attested by the signature headers
- in which case we let them pay
- and then they get to access the content
(Disclosure: I wrote the web bot auth implementation Cloudflare uses for pay per crawl)
Thanks for replying! Do you have some provision for false positives as well, like sending a captcha in the body of the 402 response? (So in case the client was a human and not a bot, they could still try to solve the captcha)
The blog post covers this. The announcement also drops relying on spoofable user agents for crawler identification and requires crawlers to voluntarily identify themselves via RFC 9421 cryptographic message signatures to get access: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/#payme...
There are likely incentives for AI companies to try to simulate human users as much as possible, but the value proposition here is that CF is so good at identifying and stopping those that signing a request becomes the path of least resistance.
This blog post plays too loose and fast with its terms to be useful as a model of anything:
- It's tautological. A tribe is defined as a connected graph of members with a shared mean opinion, and then God is defined as that shared mean opinion. You can't do that - you can't assume what you're setting out to prove. Nor can you just call something a term (like 'God') and then assume it actually has other properties we associate with the term - you have to demonstrate that. In other words, all this blog post does is propose a definition and fail to show how that definition remotely captures that interesting properties we care about. I can call birdsong "trees" all I want, I doubt I'll be getting calls from the department of forestry anytime soon.
- It assumes a bad foundation. N in the author's formulation is clearly infinite (I challenge anyone to describe a procedure to enumerate all possible opinions), but the author assumes its finite. What they really want to mean is that you can assign a numeric score to a person that describes inclination towards agreement with a particular proposition, which is still workable.
I don't think this is the right conclusion. It's more: people with no expertise and hidden agendas should be forced to behave in line with the best available evidence unless there are no other recourses for them. People with expertise, using the standards of high-quality data gathering and analysis, should be exploring alternative hypotheses. Galileo, Kepler, Newton et. al. all fell in the latter camp. COVID denial and flat earthism is an example of the former.
This really just boils down to saying: there is a rigorous evidence-based standard for updating our best available knowledge, and people who don't know how to adhere to that standard should be disqualified from recommending deviation (they are of course welcome to believe and do unto themselves as they wish, they just shouldn't be allowed from promoting it unless they have solid evidence for their claims).
The Greeks knew the Earth was round because they could look at ships appearing over the horizon and observe that the tops of their sails would appear first. Eratosthenes was further able to calculate the radius of the Earth to a decent first approximation simply by using the shadows cast by two sticks at reference locations. If they could do it, you can do it too[0].
The idea that you "cannot verify" is a very pedantic comment, and using flat Earth as a basis only makes it more comical. Of course you can't know anything "with absolute truth", but nobody cares about that. The relative distribution of evidence strongly disconfirms some hypotheses, there is already a culture of strong distrust and independent verification in the hard sciences (see the LK-99 saga), and you can rely on the long-term output of that process in the same way you can rely on your GPS to just work without needing to independently launch your own satellites. Needing to be your own scientist now is like needing to be your own farmer: completely unnecessary for most people.
[0] Yes, flat earthers claim these results are spurious because of optical illusions caused by hot air or the like. But the relative distribution of the evidence for _that_ hypothesis is pretty darn slim, which only furthers my point.
>Needing to be your own scientist now is like needing to be your own farmer: completely unnecessary for most people.
I wish I could tell that you were right. But you are wrong. This tell me more about how much you have spent time on a even a simple subject like food if you lived in USA. How can I even have a more nuanced conversation on a complicated subject?
I would push back on the interpretation that syntactic sugar, by virtue of making programs shorter, is more expressive. APL folds entire compositions into single character sequences, but one would probably not argue that it is more expressive than Brainfuck.
Rather, it seems expressiveness as used in common parlance is closer to ease of comprehension. We like programs that are easy to "think of", that are "natural" to write in that they are succinct and "natural" to read in that they mimic what you are conceptually trying to accomplish. This has very little to do with programming language design and more the experience of the language user - aesthetics, really.
It is hard not to be moderately worried, since the administration has already made concrete attacks on citizenship pathways, immigrants and legal residents. Most notably, it's targeted birthright citizenship via executive order, tried to push through the power to unilaterally revoke green cards, and arbitrarily cancelling the ability of universities to host foreign students.
More importantly, successful legal challenges to these efforts are being vacated or reversed by the Supreme Court. That means the administration's attempts aren't being fully checked by balances.
You should take the rhetoric fairly seriously. There is no good-faith explanation for this pattern of attacking people who have gone through the process faithfully, and no credible ongoing efforts to prevent those happening.