Burnout's other blog about stuff

Gatekeeper of the Internet

I guess I am becoming a full-time AI hater at this point.

This time it isn't actually about AI itself, or rather very intelligent dogs that got a few nice tricks up their sleeves but rather about the fallout that comes with it. Main subject here is of course Cloudflare, you know it, you heard about.

There are tons of articles that already talk about, go in-depth for specific aspects and are overall filled with more knowledgeable people than me.

So, why do I write now anything. Its not like I am someone with influence or of importance that changes the world?

I set up LinkDing a bookmark manager. Other than many people I actually don't have that many bookmarks, its a few hundred across browsers on all devices and some notepads I saved stuff on. Some of my links are dead now, not a great loss but sometimes I don't even know what it was. As it happens, LinkDing also got a snapshot function, that bloats the installation quite a bit, but its the one feature I like the most. Mostly because most of my links already work if the text and some scrapes of the website are saved. That feature would work really good...if I wouldn't be blocked at every second site.

The reason is quite obvious, its an automatic crawler that accesses random websites and saves their content. Which is by coincidence exactly what all the AI locusts do. I am of course very different and only come once for one specific links, just like a normal user would do, but they don't care.

In the newest HackerNews article above someone said

Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop.

And that is totally true. And also totally depressing. I liked the old Internet, even when it was never the way people dream it back to have been be. Every interaction is basically also a social interaction and there were of course bad ones. The Internet of ye olden days had its dark corners. Its basically impossible to great an utopia without someone sliding in and grabbing the free lunch that has been given.

But, and thats a great but, it was a place from people for people, the Corpos came in a bit reluctant but they came (I kinda find it funny that before CP2077 I never saw the word Corpos but now it pops up everywhere, might be confirmation bias tho).

And now everything is up for grabs, for years I cursed Discord for its closed up nature and taking away forums from us (with all its bad sides) but in terms of the new world, it might have been a smaller blessing by accident. Although, I am quite sure there are enough bots that crawl random discord servers as well.

In my uneducated view it always follows the same pattern. Human interaction is to give without being given first, a gesture of goodwill the preludes social contact. And tech bros and their masters see it only as free real estate and commodify it. And that is mighty depressing. As already said, I don't really have any technical expertise that is deeper than that was others have said. So there are only vibes here. And that current vibe is depression and that sucks.

That Cloudflare bullshit is mostly the reaction of AI but it has always been there, another Gatekeeper that blocks your way if you are using socially unacceptable ways of accessing the so called free internet data highway. If your are using Chrome it might be no problem, but with Firefox under Linux I see my fair share of "are you human?" prompts. Some never go away and make me open up some Chromium flavor of the month browser that may or not may be a bit more private than the Googleâ„¢ approved variant.

For now, its only a nuisance but the walls are coming up everywhere, and the dream of free communication and exchange drowns step by step. Remember when people had public accessible APIs? Pepperidge farm remembers. I am actually a bit surprised that it was greed this time and not the people that post content that involves minors everywhere to poison the pathways this time.

So I am mostly surprised it wasn't the scorpion but the greedy pig that smoothers hopes and dreams.