The sheer power of AI astroturfing right now is kind of blowing my mind, and not in a good way.
In the span of roughly 3 days, I went from never once having heard the terms "clawdbot" or "gas town" to seeing them brought up repeatedly throughout every single tech discussion space I frequent (with no real use cases ever brought up, of course, just vague claims it being the next big thing, I still have no idea what either of these things actually do).
This "clawdbot"'s github repository apparently went from 5k stars to 70k stars in the span of a week, according to the graph proudly displayed on the readme. And I'm supposed to believe these are 70k real people, not 70k bot accounts.
I think this is the final nail on the coffin for human-to-human communication on the internet. I'm just going to assume it's all bots now.
I just tried to purchase pro from within the app just to see what the price is, and the Google Play purchase popup tells me it's not available. Interesting.
I accidentally gave my wife a prompt the other day. Everything was hellishly busy and I said something along the lines of “I need to ask you a question. Please answer the question. Please don’t answer any other issues just yet.” She looked at me and asked “Did you just PROMPT me?” We laughed. (The question was the sort that might spawn talking about something else and was completely harmless. In the abstract, my intent was fine but my method was hilariously tainted.)
> this new technology has changed my job and I refuse to use it because I'm afraid
You're confusing fear with disgust. Nobody is afraid of your slop, we're disgusted by it. You're making a huge sloppy mess everywhere you go and then leaving it for the rest of us to clean up, all while acting like we should be thankful for your contribution.
> I just don't really want to hear about your personal opinion on it any more.
And I don't want to hear about how the world of software engineering has been revolutionized because you always hated programming with a passion, but can now instead pay $200 to have Claude bring your groundbreaking B2B SaaS Todo app idea to life, yet that's basically all I hear about in any tech discussion space.
You should ask your AI assistant to explain to you why people would go out of their way to take a stand against this.
Being a 503c, they're required to disclose their expenditures, among other things. CN gives them a perfect score, and the expense ratio section puts their program spend at 77.4% of the budget
https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703#overall-ratin...
Worth mentioning that Wikipedia gets an order of magnitude more traffic than the Internet archive.
In their latest available annual report, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that in 2024 they brought in $185M in revenue/donations, of which they spent $178M. Of that $178M, $106M was spent on salaries and benefits, and $26M on awards and grants. So, that accounts for 75% of their spending. "Internet hosting" is listed at only $3M though there are other line items such as "Professional service expenses" at $13M that probably relate to running Wikipedia too.
Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section:
If you look at the audited financial report of last year.
$3,474,785 was spent on hosting. Which makes sense its basically a static site.
This is out of expenses of $190,938,007
Thats about 1.8%. This is not new. Its been the case for years. Wikipedia has never had very high hosting costs. Its always been going into their grants or whatever else.
Despite the nonsense about AI overloading their servers even if it doubled the load it would barely affect the budget.
My countdown to donating to Wikipedia when a random MAGA nerd makes some baseless claims is getting close. When Elon had his little rant a couple of years ago it got triggered as well.
> This was strange. I asked a lot of Indian people about it and they said that it has to do with "saving face". Saying "I don't know" is a disgraceful thing.
I've recently learned that this particular type of "saving face" has a name: "izzat". Look that up if you want to know more.
A lot of the stuff written on "izzat" is questionable or wrong, but it is true that India has a collective concept of saving face. This can be an adjustment even if you're used to the East Asian concept of saving face.
I'm not sure how to write that better, but the way you worded that made me suspect it was NSFW and I hesitated, but eventually decided I'd risk it. At least everything I found was work safe, and I learned a lot. I encourage everyone else who hasn't heard the word to look it up.
> Boycotts of businesses, cutting off family and friends, etc
You'd think that, after the last decade, people would've learned that demonizing and ostracizing your political opposition is not a great way to get them to join your side.
Now I'm actually curious to see statistics regarding the usage of em-dashes on HN before and after AI took over. The data is public, right? I'd do it myself, but unfortunately I'm lazy.
In the span of roughly 3 days, I went from never once having heard the terms "clawdbot" or "gas town" to seeing them brought up repeatedly throughout every single tech discussion space I frequent (with no real use cases ever brought up, of course, just vague claims it being the next big thing, I still have no idea what either of these things actually do).
This "clawdbot"'s github repository apparently went from 5k stars to 70k stars in the span of a week, according to the graph proudly displayed on the readme. And I'm supposed to believe these are 70k real people, not 70k bot accounts.
I think this is the final nail on the coffin for human-to-human communication on the internet. I'm just going to assume it's all bots now.
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