This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.
Whilst looking for an easily cut'n'pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don't get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else's summary, "just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets".
I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like
The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes
and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?
Bruh, when I said “you misunderstand why scrapers use a common user agent” I didn’t require further proof.
Requests following an obvious bulk scraper pattern with user agents that almost certainly aren’t regular humans are trivially easy to handle using decades old techniques, which is why scrapers will not start using curl user agents.
I’m not saying it won’t block some scrapers
See, the thing is with blocking ai scraping, you can actually see it work by looking at the logs. I’m guessing you don’t run any sites that get much traffic or you’d be able to see this too. Its efficacy is obvious.
Sure scrapers could start keeping extra state or brute forcing hashes, but at the scale they’re working at that becomes painfully expensive and the effort required to raise the challenge difficulty is minimal if it becomes apparent that scrapers are getting through. Which will be very obvious if it happens.
once it’s in a training set, all additional protection is just wasted energy.
Presumably you haven’t had much experience with ai scrapers. They’re not a “one run and done” type thing, especially for sites with frequently changing content, like this one.
I don’t want to seem rude, but you appear to be speaking from a position of considerable ignorance, dismissing the work of people who actually have skin in the game and have demonstrated effective techniques for dealing with a problem. Maybe a little more research on the issue would help.
Are you talking about anubis? Because you’re very clearly wrong.
And now I think about it, regardless of which approach you were talking about, that’s some impressive arrogance to assume that everyone involved other than you was a complete idiot.
Eta:
Ahh, looking at your post history, I see you misunderstand why scrapers use a common user agent, and are confused about what a general increase in cost-per-page means to people who do bulk scraping.
Getting in early on targeting the vibe coder demographic.
Because it is nice to have something entertaining for a change:
https://bsky.app/profile/willsmith.fun/post/3lmi2bjrao22t
Wow, that latest chat with Adam Patrick Murray about the Nintendo Switch 2 was quite the ride! The bit on the console's dock secrets and the MicroSD Express storage had me glued. It's amazing to see how these tech advancements are sculpting new landscapes.
Speaking of tech wizardry, have you thought about having Christian Perry on the show? As the CEO of Undetectable AI, he's taken the whole generative AI world by storm, much like the Switch 2 is taking over gaming news! With over 15 million users and standing as a top AI writing tool, Christian's insights into AI's hidden workings promise to intrigue your audience, especially when it comes to how his tools seamlessly pass for human writing without tripping any detectors like GPTzero
Undetectable AI, everyone. Astounding.
Dijkstra did it first, but it is very ai-booster to steal work without credit or understanding, I guess.
The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
Shopify going all in on AI, apparently, and the CEO is having a proper born-again moment. Don’t have a source more concrete than this yet:
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114298302252798365
(and transcript: https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648)
It’s a lot like this:
Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.
You must be new here. Hi!
Please cast your eyes over the archives, paying close attention to the threads where people are enthusing over AI search!
Actually that’s tricky because the people here might generally be described as unenthusiastic about AI, because the technology is fundamentally a fountain of bullshit and bias finely crafted to fool people into thinking it is a valuable and accurate tool.
The popups aren’t the issue, you know.
Gumroad’s asshole CEO, Sahil Lavingia, NFT fanboy who occasionally used his customer database to track down and get into fights with people on twitter, has now gone professional fash and joined DOGE in order to hollow out the department of veterans affairs and replace the staff with chatbots.
https://tedium.co/2025/04/06/gumroad-open-source-doge-drama/
Naturally, it’s been done before, without ai, and (inevitably, I guess) using rust.
https://github.com/Shadlock0133/cargo-vibe https://github.com/vmfunc/cargo-buttplug
Corbyn is unusual because he was an actual lefty politician, and there aren’t many of those, especially not after subsequent labour party purges. The weirder one is Rifkind, who was a politician alongside Thatcher, but sometimes disagreed with her soft and centrist views. Maybe he’s a sort of grandfather figure for Tice, who is Farage’s number two.
Weird mix of wingnuts. Probably all united by their transphobia, though.