adrianwaj (u/adrianwaj)

adrianwaj commented on Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void askmike.org/articles/blog... · Posted by u/askmike

balamatom · 17 days ago

Oh, it absolutely can work! What you describe makes sense, I'm just not particularly optimistic that it will be allowed to happen at all. If it's a technological inevitability, what I expect to happen is for a self-defeating version of your model to be rolled out at a snail's pace, so that the people who depend on the old ways have the time to live their life, die, and be replaced by ones who'll be like "hey, this was tried last generation and didn't work" (because it wasn't actually tried). Meanwhile the people excited about it will have time to go through enough stages of grief in recursive iterations to forget what they were even excited about.

adrianwaj · 17 days ago

> I'm just not particularly optimistic that it will be allowed to happen at all

Maybe, but in a recent comment of mine I alluded to a "long-tail" of AIs popping up. So there's a possibility in one of those. But if no one has any money to invent or create, or they feel there is a risk in sharing, it won't really work too well.

I bet to get to AGI, humans will have to actively help: it can't be a parasitic relationship. People are pessimistic about AI, but why can't it lead to free energy, patent obsolescence (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNR_6aBQyDk), supernatural abilities and utopia instead? Wait those things will come, they will just remain with the special people in the "breakaway civilization," perhaps.

adrianwaj commented on Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void askmike.org/articles/blog... · Posted by u/askmike

balamatom · 18 days ago

At scale? It'll just put a nail in the coffin of mass literacy, cognitive ability, emotional well-being, sheer sanity. The nonsensical will become even more normalized, while the reaction to someone e.g. doing maths will come to be: "ew, die"

adrianwaj · 18 days ago

Okay, so if you open up your site for free, there should be a way for an AI chat to link to the paid version of the free page when referencing in the chat window. That link can be obfuscated in some way too, perhaps. Also, it'd be very cool to split that payment back to the AI.

- You help the LLM by putting something up for free and pinging it upon publishing

- The LLM helps back by linking to you (hopefully)

- The user helps by paying you when they visit the paid version

- You help the LLM by splitting that payment back to it

optional: your free page can have reference links.. so other pages that helped you reach your final version can get a split of the payment as well. Perhaps the LLM can handle that part in "upstream distributions."

In fact, your reference links can lead to even more reference links further upstream when stepping back through the totality of references: the pyramid slice. Perhaps it should be capped at say 3 steps back.. that can be decided somewhere or the payments can be diluted the further back the focus.

So here's the crux - there should be a way for the user to decide how much they want/can pay you. A tipping culture can work. If you're broke, just don't tip anything or put it on hold. Big Business can be transparent on their payments and build up social capital by disclosing their "giving." There can be a level of transparency and privacy that can be tweaked for each situation.

adrianwaj commented on Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void askmike.org/articles/blog... · Posted by u/askmike

adrianwaj · 19 days ago

In the past, you also used to ping a bunch of search engines (eg Technorati) for each new post. Going forward, you should be able to ping AIs but there should be a paywall before they can train on your content.

Also, how are AIs going to train for new languages and business rules in the future? People may start to get defensive. It must be worth something.. enter x402.

AIs are dumb - they can't really make sense of anything new without a human first to put it into context.. right? Remember that!

adrianwaj commented on Ask HN: Do you still think public blockchains/stablecoins are useless/a scam? · Posted by u/spir

spir · 19 days ago

Coincidentally, there is a renaissance in micropayments happening in crypto right now. It is only a few months old and growing fast. It's called x402.

https://www.x402.org/

https://www.x402scan.com/

Related to x402 micropayments is the ERC-8004 standard for AI agent reputation.

https://8004scan.io/

https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8004

adrianwaj · 19 days ago

Yeah, it may well end up being used for "maxipayments" too, as coupled with biometrics, perhaps.

But what will make it ubiquitous?

Also, there's something cumbersome and risky about using today's wallet apps. Imagine you're taking a train, about to buy a book on Amazon, and the guy next to you pulls out a knife and wants you to drain your wallet into his when he sees what you're doing. Or your computer is hacked somehow? Or you get a home invasion?

I think as money-printing keeps ramping up, people will just gravitate to crypto anyway.

But in the future, I expect AIs to become more common: at one point there was only Bitcoin and no long-tail of coins. And all these new AIs will need to be trained. Will x402 make that easy for them? How will the AIs access the new and original knowledge?

People will just expect AI as they expect sat-nav today in their cars, and eventually will expect self-driving cars. When was the last time you went into a library to access a physical encyclopedia? Banks may eventually fall away too as clusters of relationships form across the world to provides goods and services of value and seek refuge from tariffs but also access to resources.

Globalization is fine, but maybe the tech just wasn't/isn't ready yet? Cultural groups are also becoming increasingly intertwined too - but so are AI translation abilities.

adrianwaj commented on Ask HN: Do you still think public blockchains/stablecoins are useless/a scam? · Posted by u/spir

adrianwaj · 19 days ago

Well, if there was a way to monetize bot traffic, wouldn't that be useful? And bots may be willing to pay, given they are training on your data. So getting on the receiving end of the trillion dollar paywall... not useless at all.

I think the idea was for stablecoins to be used to sell government bonds and treasuries. Interesting use cases for digital nomads.. assessing possible geographic locations according to the strength of their stablecoins and government integration.

So it's about micropayments and making them viable and useful. That's still the 'cold fusion' of today's internet. I personally think they should be opt-in and scalable to one's generosity/means. If people are willing/able to pay for something, they should.

Blockchain just needs to be implemented better, that's all.

"Ping the AI and then charge it when it comes" is the future, quite possibly.

adrianwaj commented on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/fleahunter

lxgr · 24 days ago

Claude? I’d be extremely surprised.

Gemini? As gemini.google.com or as the thoroughly mediocre “AI summaries” on top of Google Search results?

adrianwaj · 24 days ago

Yeah, Google should have got gemini.com and gemini.ai before settling on that name, just like Claude. Instead they go to the same crypto service. It would've cleared up some confusion.

adrianwaj commented on X402 – protocol for micropayments and the rise of an agentic economy oasis.net/blog/x402-https... · Posted by u/adrianwaj

adrianwaj · 24 days ago

OP here. I just thought this system of micropayments could really help with web quality/signal/remuneration...the web's own longstanding "cold fusion" challenge.

"x402 operates through standard HTTP mechanics, meaning it can integrate with any existing web infrastructure without requiring specific SDKs or tooling. Add a line of middleware, configure your endpoint, and you're good to go."

So let's say ChatGPT/Perplexity or another "AI service" linked to you, they would send the user to your page and a micropayment would then be earned from the visitor, but the referring service would also get a commission on that payment within the transaction. Yes it is a paywall, but so what, there could also be a non-paywalled version.

Also, the AI service could provide a summary of that page, to be embedded on your page to give the page more value to the end user (hopefully.) Also, users can change in their AI service settings whether to see paywalled/non-paywalled reference links in their chat box.

The AI service (and you) would see in realtime how much they are earning by sending visitors to your site. There can also be charts and metrics to see what is trending at any one time and payments can be lowered the older content gets.

Micropayments can mean less ads. It can also mean higher content quality.

So the risk here is a "clone web" appearing where all paywalled content is mirrored for free somewhere. Fine, the AI service works out ways to filter that content out of its harvesting destinations. Also, when you post new content, you ping the AI service that you have just published new content, and the service can more quickly work out when/if it has been cloned elsewhere. The other benefit of doing this, is that the service can better work out if content is original (and harvestable) vs being recycled/derivative/generative. Also, the "clone web" may be older - sure you can go to it, but it might not be as timely.

Another thing is having adjustable micropayments - the user decides how much to pay - and suggestions can be made how much or little to outlay within their "tipjar." It depends on how expensive the AI service or publisher wants to be... or how stingy the user wants to be.

Also, with micropayments, bot traffic should decrease too, or at least be monetizable. Payments from bot traffic could really be ramped up.