I didn't say anything about the "prevent instances from being overloaded" part being good or bad. I didn't even give an opinion on ActivityPub, just pointed out the practical limitations and incompatible design goals.

Personally, I've got no problem with websites implementing rate caps and whatnot to ensure that their traffic remains within the limits they can handle, or throttling specific IPs. I am very concerned with how Cloudflare in particular has become the single centralized "gatekeeper" for vast swaths of the Internet, though. If they decide that some particular client isn't allowed to see stuff then poof, a big chunk of the Internet is cut off. That's worrisome IMO.

Your original post didn't specify a particular kind of data scraping. TropicalDingdong had no way to know you were only specifically interested in that one kind of data scraping, so his comment is appropriate - you can't stop data scraping in general, and attempting to do so in the general case goes directly against the goal of ActivityPub.

This sort of nonsense, along with idiocy like that guy who uses the þ character in place of "th" in all his comments, does absolutely nothing to hinder AI training. The only effect it has is to bother human readers. Completely counterproductive.

That's a very narrow view of data scraping, there's lots of ways to get data.

The Fediverse is built on ActivityPub, which is an open protocol that's designed to broadcast data with no limitations or restrictions. If you don't want your data to end up in the hands of anyone who wants it - including those nefarious AI trainers - then that's an inherently incompatible goal with ActivityPub.

If you're just worried about specific instances being overloaded with requests, then sure, all the usual rate limiting DDOS-prevention Cloudflare tricks will work. But the data itself isn't "protected." Someone who wants it could simply run an instance of their own specifically to collect it.

Indeed! When I saw that title I sighed and thought "alright, time to post the link to the Dartmouth workshop where the term AI was coined in 1956 and get downvoted a bunch for it." But someone else took my bullet? How dare!

And worse, the thread in general seems to be filled with mostly rational comments about nomenclature and stuff!

I don't know how to respond to this.

Well there's a headline that's going to have a lot of sane comments under it.

It's possible that it's a bluff at getting ready for another round of mobilizations. If Putin thinks that Ukraine is at a breaking point and is relying on Russia also being at a breaking point then doing things that make it seem like Russia's ready to draw this out a lot longer might force them to the table.

I don't think Ukraine actually is at a breaking point, but Putin might think so - I seriously doubt he's getting good intel from his underlings.

It's so dumb that these things are done "in rebuke" to things.

Israel should recognize the Armenian genocide because it fucking happened. As should every other country, for whatever it's worth that a country officially "recognizes" facts like these.

[ Removed by Reddit ]

Ah, this is that Daenerys bot story again? It keeps making the rounds, always leaving out a lot of rather important information.

The bot actually talked him out of suicide multiple times. The kid was seriously disturbed and his parents were not paying the attention they should have been to his situation. The final chat before he committed suicide was very metaphorical, with the kid saying he wanted to "join" Daenerys in West World or wherever it is she lives, and the AI missed the metaphor and roleplayed Daenerys saying "sure, come on over" (because it's a roleplaying bot and it's doing its job).

This is like those journalists that ask ChatGPT "if you were a scary robot how would you exterminate humanity?" And ChatGPT says "well, poisonous gasses with traces of lead, I guess?" And the journalists go "gasp, scary robot!"

Meanwhile, Europe is pursuing replacements for Ukraine. Obviously none as good as Starlink and there'll be a rough time in the switchover, but Musk is not the only source for this kind of service.

And in the meantime, by merely making this statement Musk has doomed Starlink to never be seriously considered again as a provider for critical services like this elsewhere in the world.

Stack Overflow has been toxic for a long time already. It's one of the things that a lot of people seem pleased to see AI devour.