Traster (u/Traster) - Readit News

Traster commented on Perplexity Response to Cloudflare twitter.com/perplexity_ai... · Posted by u/Tokumei-no-hito

skeledrew · 20 days ago

> Perplexity's value proposition appears to be "we're going to take the stuff off your website, and present it to our users. We're not going to show them your ads, we're not going to offer them your premium services or referrals to other products, we're going to strip out the value from your content and take it for our users".

This, exactly this is a primary reason why I use Perplexity. I want the valued content, without the unnecessary distractions that I'll never consciously touch anyway (there have been accidental clicks now and then, because some site designers really want people to click that ad and go all out to embed it into the content, and it only leads to great annoyance and sometimes a promise never to visit that site again).

Traster · 20 days ago

Yes and the result will be one of two options: option a (more likely) the underlying sites will literally just disappear, their business model no longer works and the content that you want (but apparently not enough to respect the authors) will cease to exist. It will most likely be replaced with AI slop replicas of the content you wanted. Or option b (much less likely) the content you want will move behind premium services where AI companies will have to negotiate subscriptions you will have entered the cable TV bundle era of the internet.

Traster commented on Perplexity Response to Cloudflare twitter.com/perplexity_ai... · Posted by u/Tokumei-no-hito

Traster · 20 days ago

Perplexity has really convinced me about this. There is a clear difference between automated bots scraping data at bulk for later use, and automated bots working on behalf of users on direct requests. I can see a reasonable argument that some of the first type of automation could be tolerable for websites with strict limits, the second type I think by default should not be tolerated at all.

Perplexity's value proposition appears to be "we're going to take the stuff off your website, and present it to our users. We're not going to show them your ads, we're not going to offer them your premium services or referrals to other products, we're going to strip out the value from your content and take it for our users".

You can argue all you want about whether that's 5k impressions a day or 1m impressions a day. It should be 0 impressions a day. It is literally just free-riding.

Also, they're meant to be a professional company taking VC money to build a business, why are writing whiny posts like a teenager? The impression I get with a lot of these companies is that their business is losing money hand over fist, they have no idea how they're going to make it work and they look absolutely panicked as a result. They come across like a company I would want to be nowhere near.

Traster commented on Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers fortune.com/2025/08/03/ai... · Posted by u/robtherobber

agentultra · 21 days ago

> “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune. “If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn’t find the tool useful… This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we’re just not seeing that—we’re seeing the opposite.”

They're seeing the opposite because people are desperate. When HR teams use tools like this interviewees have no choice. Braintrust are literally holding people hostage with this. Of course the numbers look good. But you didn't ask the people being interviewed by your product what they think of it or how it made them feel.

And of course Mr. Jackson doesn't care. His company's bottom line is his performance bonus.

Traster · 21 days ago

Woah woah woah woah woah. You've missed the obvious conclusion of what Adam Jackson CEO of Braintrust is saying. The obvious conclusion is that Adam Jackson is a liar. Oh yeah, you would think that this AI slop bucket at the front of our interview process would deter people - but the guy whose stock compensation depends on it working is very happy to lie that it doesn't.

Traster commented on YouTube rolls out age-estimation tech to identify US teens techcrunch.com/2025/07/29... · Posted by u/speckx

Traster · a month ago

Funny. The story here is that Youtube is asking every customer for legal id - presumably to enhance their adtech stack and target those customers more accurately. Obviously this isn't a great story, so they've screamed "won't somebody think of the children".

I do admire how much they dress it up though, they've developed tools to stop 17 year olds from repeatedly viewing body dismorphia videos that lead to annorexia. Sure, they could've tweaked the algorithm to stop paying people to create annorexia content, but then how would they monetize that 18 year old annorexic girl.

Traster commented on Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars blog.johnluttig.com/p/hyp... · Posted by u/walterbell

Traster · a month ago

There's so much here, and not necessarily in a good way. The way this guy talks sounds a lot like those old effective alturist arguments that went along the lines of "Well if there's a 1% chance we can save a billion lives a thousand years in the future, that's actually better than saving 100 lives today". Ignoring the fact that "1%" wasn't an estimate that you could have any confidence in.

Sure, if Deepmind could save a few percentage points on their data centres that would be huge! Becuase you've taken a small number you have no basis for (a few percentage points) and timesed it by the largest number you can find! Hey Presto! Big number! But then surely the guys at Google are morons right - because they only bought 1 Deepmind, they should've been throwing hundreds of millions around willy nilly! At these savings they can't afford not to!

Secondly, it might be true that it's difficult for you to compete with these companies that are hiring in teams of researchers for hundreds of millions, but what you're also doing is handing employees hundreds of millions of dollars. What are they going to do with that money other than throw it into angel investing? You're literally sowing the most fertile ground for startups in history.

I think we should actually be viewing this blow up in compensation in the context of the hangover of ZIRP and COVID. ZIRP basically made money in silicon valley free, tech companies could hire anyone they wanted at almost any comp and as long as there was growth there were no discount factors so they could effectively make infinite time horizon bets. Then covid happened and helicopter money came in to keep the economy going and Tech hired like crazy massively bloating lots of companies. But as things returned to normal, it became obvious that hiring had just been spending, and the returns weren't there for it. I think it's going to become clear over the long term that the same is happening here, Tech has tonnes of money so they're going to spend it, but 3 years down the line someone is going to do the accounting and I would bet you we end up back in the same spot that we did with Tech hiring in Covid - a long and painful unwind as companies have to return to reality.

Traster commented on High Performance Image Sensor Processing Using FPGAs [pdf] oda.uni-obuda.hu/bitstrea... · Posted by u/teleforce

FirmwareBurner · 2 months ago

Every? On which FPGA did Nvidia simulate the 5090?

Traster · 2 months ago

If you go to nvidia's jobs website today you'll find they're actively hiring FPGA developers for ASIC prototyping. Obviously they're not dumping their 5090 RTL straight into some 10 metre wide FPGA chip. First, they grab the largest FPGA you can get your hands on - the FPGA vendors tend to have a couple of comically expensive comically large SKUs for specifically this purpose. Then you pop a few of them onto a development board and partition your design across the cluster of FPGAs with some custom interconnect, orchestration and DFT stuff. FPGAs offer quite a compelling way of getting test mileage vs simuluation/emulation in software.

Traster commented on Why agents are bad pair programmers justin.searls.co/posts/wh... · Posted by u/sh_tomer

Traster · 2 months ago

I think this has put into words a reason why I bounced off using AI this way, when I need something done I often have a rough idea of how I want it done, and how AI does it often doesn't match what I want, but because it's gone off and written a 2,000 lines of code it's suddenly more work for me to go through and say "Ok, so first off, strip all these comments out, you're doubling the file with trivial explanations of simple code. I don't want X to be abstracted this way, I want that...." etc. And then when I give it feedback 2,000 lines of code suddenly switch to 700 lines of completely different code and I can't keep up. And I don't want my codebase full of disjoint scripts that I don't really understand and all have weirdly different approaches to the problem. I want an AI that I have similar opinions to, which is obviously tough. It's like working with someone on their first day.

I don't know if it's giving the tools less self-confidence per se, but I think it's exposing more the design process. Like ideally you want your designer to go "Ok, I'm thinking of this approach, i'll probably have these sorts of functions or classes, this state will be owned here" and we can approve that first, rather than going straight from prompt -> implementation.

Traster commented on Don't let Reddit kill 3rd party apps old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdP... · Posted by u/netfortius

poomer · 2 years ago

I had a job interview with Reddit last year for a modeling related position and it was one of the strangest and most user-hostile interviews I've ever had, even as someone who's spent many years working for SV adtech companies. All product interviews were laser focused on maximizing a few specific advertiser revenue metrics, anytime I brought up effects on the consumer it would immediately get dismissed and I'd be asked to refocus on advertiser effects. My guess is their leadership is pressuring the company hard to boost their numbers, no matter the long term cost.

Traster · 2 years ago

It's well known reddit has been eyeing up an IPO, and as a result it's pretty unsurprising they're searching for ways to juice their metrics in the build up. Tells a nice growth story so you can dump stock on retail and it's not really important if you do long term damage to the business - because it'll no longer be your business. Can't imagine that would be a great place to work unless they very strongly align your compensation with the IPO (commonly employees get the oppsite, a lock-up period after IPO to make sure all the juice is squeezed by the time they get to sell).

Traster commented on Why car wheels are so flat these days theautopian.com/heres-why... · Posted by u/CoffeeOnWrite

ksd482 · 3 years ago

The part of the tire that touches the road is flat as opposed to being curved.

Traster · 3 years ago

I think it's actually not - they mean the side face of the wheel, https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/cher...

They're talking about the wheels, not the tyres.