Hizonner (u/Hizonner)

Hizonner commented on Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law wired.com/story/bluesky-g... · Posted by u/BallsInIt

crowbahr · 13 hours ago

AT protocol is open source.

Bluesky is private but the underlying mechanism is OSS and accounts are portable.

Go build the replacement and people can port their accounts across.

Hizonner · 13 hours ago

... but any replacement you build will, in practice, have to include a single centralized "relay" that aggregates all content. Since that's a lot of content, it has to be run by a big, easily found, easily pressured organization. And everybody "porting their accounts across" means a flag day that's going to be almost impossible to organize in practice. It'd effectively be just as much work as switching to an entirely new protocol.

Maybe you could theoretically have an AT "app view" that takes data from multiple relays, but nothing in the implementation does anything to support that, and as far as I know nothing in the protocol does anything to help it discover the relays... which in practice means that even if you extend the app views to use multiple relays, there will never be more than a handful of relays with meaningful reach.

The AT protocol is at best a really crappy excuse for decentralization. And frankly a pretty poor example of open source too, given the usability and organization of the code they release.

Compare with, say, Nostr, which is actually decently decentralized... but, in not-unrelated news, suffers from massive content discovery problems. Or compare with Briar, which is even more decentralized but has both discovery and scaling problems. Or for that matter Usenet.

Hizonner commented on Margin debt surges to record high advisorperspectives.com/d... · Posted by u/pera

Fade_Dance · 2 days ago

The April meltdown was a great example of how markets react to net capital outflows from global investors. Interestingly enough, since the foreign buyer strike, money has been roaring back into US financial markets. I'll zip my mouth when it comes to judging their decision on that front, but I'll at least say that I suspect that the AI narrative has a strong pull, and much of the world really has no good option to participate in this apparently extremely intoxicating investing narrative other than to buy US tech. To be fair, the US has these sorts of narratives running more often than not, so we'll see how it plays out long term. As of now, talk of foreign money being pulled from the US was a flash in the pan.

Hizonner · 2 days ago

You may of course be right. The reason I think you're probably (possibly?) not right is that it's nice to participate in this or that boom, but there's no point if you don't get to keep the profits.

I don't think "the market" has internalized how risky the US is becoming, and I think it'll take somewhere between a few more months and a few years for that to happen.

It's not just about chaotic dumbassness like tariffs. It's not just about disrupting the labor force for stupid reasons. It's not just about attempts to undermine the independent management of the monetary system. Those are bad, but worse is that the whole underlying system of institutions is being trashed. Random shakedowns are being normalized. Government (including courts!) is being deliberately packed with partisans and cronies.

For a really, really long time, the US has been a place where you could expect your counterparty to perform on a contract, and if they didn't you could expect the government to come to your aid, no matter who they were and even if you were a foreigner. You definitely didn't expect a "personal tax" on your company if you didn't suck up to the right people (or just because you happened to be handy). Oh, and you also didn't expect to be dealing with the kind of people a system like that selects for.

People just assume the US isn't run by gangsters, like they assume there'll be air the next time they breathe in. They're so used to that high trust that they don't even consciously factor the question into their decisions. It takes a long time for that kind of mental habit to change. It doesn't happen in a few weeks or a few months. But if US trustworthiness goes away (which it seems to be doing), and people figure it out (which they eventually will if it keeps up), then they're going to start assessing risk accordingly.

Admittedly some of the random stupidity and even more of the outright gangsterism seem to come from Trump personally. He's 79 and in theory he only gets 4 years regardless. But that doesn't mean that it all comes from him, and he and those around him are trashing institutions and norms really fast, in ways that are really hard to repair. It's a big gamble to assume that can or will be reversed by a successor, especially since the systems that are supposed to choose that successor seem to be being rigged to favor candidates with similar approaches. And it won't help you if you're out of business before then.

Hizonner commented on Margin debt surges to record high advisorperspectives.com/d... · Posted by u/pera

Fade_Dance · 3 days ago

Data shows that retail participation has been near all-time highs, which does tend to correlate with bubbly market activity.

The market in general is fairly highly valued when looking at the standard valuation metrics, but corporate earnings have been strong as well. That said, the most obvious grey swan would be the market concentration in the top names, which market cap weighted index funds do not avoid and indeed contribute to on a mechanical level. That said, the names will eventually swap around within the index, and as long as capital flows to US financial markets don't reverse (see the back to back 7% down days for market cap weighted indexes during the tariff scare) these rotations won't ultimately be a problem.

Beyond that though, it's not as bad as it looks at first glance. Other areas of the market have pretty large pockets of value, or at least more average valuations. Some names in consumer discretionary are still at the bombed out post tariff scare valuations (ex: LULU which is a good example of a name that had optimism and now has extreme pessimism and low valuation, ANF which has good earnings despite tariffs and is cranking buybacks sub-10 PE) and sectors like healthcare (you have to be a real contrarian to get in here, but when Buffett is buying the value proposition is usually pretty extreme), and energy (quality energy names like FANG trading near single digit PE with management that is showing extreme capital restraint in the face of uncertainty, for once). Smallcaps in general aren't that expensive, since they are on the back-end of the huge, crowded long/short trade (that has been unwinding for a few days now).

Even in megacaps it isn't all bubbly. Google has a lot of pessimism and isn't that expensive, which may or may not be warranted but it is a counterexample. The ridiculous valuations are quite concentrated in the AI related space, specifically in specific names which retail is obsessed with (ex: PLTR( or hedge funds are obsessed with (ex: GEV).

Hizonner · 3 days ago

> as long as capital flows to US financial markets don't reverse

A rather large and probably counterfactual assumption, if the US continues, or even looks like it might continue, on the path it's been on.

Hizonner commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso

Hizonner · 3 days ago

I interrogated my innermost self, and it says it doesn't give a damn about those people's feels. And furthermore your little dig at the end there says that you live in a bubble full of intensely repulsive individuals.

The cutesiness is still annoying, though.

Hizonner commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso

JdeBP · 3 days ago

Guru Meditations and Sad Macs are not your thing?

Hizonner · 3 days ago

That also got old when you got it again and again while you were trying to actually do something. But there wasn't the space to fit quite as much twee on the screen...

Hizonner commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso

xandrius · 3 days ago

The original versions were a way to make fun even a boring event such as a 404. If the page stops conveying the type of error to the user then it's just bad UX but also vomiting all the internal jargon to a non-tech user is bad UX.

So, I don't see an error code + something fun to be that bad.

People love dreaming of the 90s wild web and hate the clean cut soulless corp web of today, so I don't see how having fun error pages to be such an issue?

Hizonner · 3 days ago

This assumes it's fun.

Usually when I hit an error page, and especially if I hit repeated errors, I'm not in the mood for fun, and I'm definitely not in the mood for "fun" provided by the people who probably screwed up to begin with. It comes off as "oops, we can't do anything useful, but maybe if we try to act cute you'll forget that".

Also, it was more fun the first time or two. There's a not a lot of orginal fun on the error pages you get nowadays.

> People love dreaming of the 90s wild web and hate the clean cut soulless corp web of today

It's been a while, but I don't remember much gratuitous cutesiness on the 90s Web. Not unless you were actively looking for it.

Hizonner commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso

Dylan16807 · 3 days ago

The traffic I'm seeing on a wiki I host looks like plain old scraping. When it hits it's a steady load of lots of traffic going all over, from lots of IPs. And they really like diffs between old page revisions for some reason.

Hizonner · 3 days ago

That sounds like a really dumb scraper indeed. I don't think you'd want to feed very many diffs into a training run or most inference runs.

But if there's a (discoverable) page comparing every revision of a page to every other revision, and a page has N revisions, there are going to be (N^2-N)/2 delta pages, so could it just be the majority of the distinct pages your Wiki has are deltas?

I would think that by now the "AI companies" would have something smarter steering their scrapers. Like, I dunno, some kind of AI. But maybe they don't for some reason? Or maybe the big ones do, but smaller "hungrier" ones, with less staff but still probably with a lot of cash, are willing to burn bandwidth so they don't have to implement that?

The questions just multiply.

Hizonner commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso

johnea · 3 days ago

My biggest bitch is that it requires JS and cookies...

Although the long term problem is the business model of servers paying for all network bandwidth.

Actual human users have consumed a minority of total net bandwidth for decades:

https://www.atom.com/blog/internet-statistics/

Part 4 shows bots out using humans in 1996 8-/

What are "bots"? This needs to include goggleadservices, PIA sharing for profit, real-time ad auctions, and other "non-user" traffic.

The difference between that and the LLM training data scraping, is that the previous non-human traffic was assumed, by site servers, to increase their human traffic, through search engine ranking, and thus their revenue. However the current training data scraping is likely to have the opposite effect: capturing traffic with LLM summaries, instead of redirecting it to original source sites.

This is the first major disruption to the internet's model of finance since ad revenue look over after the dot bomb.

So far, it's in the same category as the environmental disaster in progress, ownership is refusing to acknowledge the problem, and insisting on business as usual.

Rational predictions are that it's not going to end well...

Hizonner · 3 days ago

> The difference between that and the LLM training data scraping

Is the traffic that people are complaining about really training traffic?

My SWAG would be that there are maybe on the order of dozens of foundation models trained in a year. If you assume the training runs are maximally inefficient, cache nothing, and crawl every Web site 10 times for each model trained, then that means maybe a couple of hundred full-content downloads for each site in a year. But really they probably do cache, and they probably try to avoid downloading assets they don't actually want to put into the training hopper, and I'm not sure how many times they feed any given page through in a single training run.

That doesn't seem like enough traffic to be a really big problem.

On the other hand, if I ask ChatGPT Deep Research to give me a report on something, it runs around the Internet like a ferret on meth and maybe visits a couple of hundred sites (but only a few pages on each site). It'll do that a whole lot faster than I'd do it manually, it's probably less selective about what it visits than I would be... and I'm likely to ask for a lot more such research from it than I'd be willing to do manually. And the next time a user asks for a report, it'll do it again, often on the same sites, maybe with caching and maybe not.

Thats not training; the results won't be used to update any neural network weights, and won't really affect anything at all beyond the context of a single session. It's "inference scraping" if you will. It's even "user traffic" in some sense, although not in the sense that there's much chance the user is going to see a site's advertising. It's conceivable the bot might check the advertising for useful information, but of course the problem there is that it's probably learned that's a waste of time.

Not having given it much thought, I'm not sure how that distinction affects the economics of the whole thing, but I suspect it does.

So what's really going on here? Anybody actually know?

Hizonner commented on Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on August 20, 2025 gfw.report/blog/gfw_uncon... · Posted by u/kotri

hunter2_ · 4 days ago

I guess they would find it the moment someone in China using a Chinese resolver tries to resolve your rogue record, since that would recurse to one of the root mirrors in China, which presumably feeds this mechanism.

Seems like a very minor speed bump in your plan, though: presumably something like https://www.chinafirewalltest.com would achieve that, or send a few emails for folks to click.

Hizonner · 4 days ago

I swear to use this power only for lulz.