This is exactly the kind of challenge I would want to judge AI systems based on. It required ten bleeding-edge-research mathematicians to publish a problem they've solved but hold back the answer. I appreciate the huge amount of social capital and coordination that must have taken.
Of course it isn't made the front page. If something is promising they hunt it down, and when conquered they post about it. Lot of times the new category has much better results, than the default HN view.
Unfortunately that's ending with mandatory-BYOK from the model vendors. They're starting to require that you BYOK to force you through their arbitrary+capricious onboarding process.
I think the big cloud companies (AWS) figured out that they could scrape compute-intensive pages in order to drive up their customers' spend. Getting hammered? Upgrade to more-expensive instances. Not using cloud yet? We'll force you to.
The other possibility is cloudflare punishing anybody who isn't using it.
Probably a combination of these two things. Whoever's behind this has ungodly supplies of cheap bandwidth -- more than any AI company does. It's a cloud company.
> Whoever's behind this has ungodly supplies of cheap bandwidth -- more than any AI company does. It's a cloud company.
Most of the major cloud companies are themselves also AI companies, so I don't think the “cloud companies are artificially driving up compute spend” hypothesis is mutually exclusive with the “AI companies are doing a very bad job at scraping” hypothesis.
We used to have a balance of power between the huge megaplatforms: they were the gatekeepers, but the worst punishment they could impose was forcing you to make a new account. Because they couldn't reliably tell us apart.
This got nuked by the combination of two things:
1. Really good facial recognition
2. Everybody owning a bootloader-locked device with a front-facing camera (so you can't splice in FaceFusion to defeat #1).
This is what made permabans possible. And it has upset the delicate balance that made things tolerable previously.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1stproof
This is exactly the kind of challenge I would want to judge AI systems based on. It required ten bleeding-edge-research mathematicians to publish a problem they've solved but hold back the answer. I appreciate the huge amount of social capital and coordination that must have taken.
I'm really glad they did it.
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