Or, the odds of a random 64-bit integer being a 32-bit integer are the same as you or me guessing a random 32 bit integer.

Wait how is being late worse than not doing it at all? Is it true for mortgage payments and apologies?

Analogies are like metaphors, they’re illustrative rather than literal.

How does that view align with Anthropic leasing data centers from others?

I don’t know OpenAI’s infra, but to the extent they are buying GPUs and building data centers with their own money, that sounds like a bad move.

Satya has mismanaged the AI transition in many ways, but one thing he got right is that models are commodities, and the value is in applications that apply them to create user benefit. I agree that any company trying to build a moat with a model is not long for this world.

Then they go bankrupt.

Sounds great. Link us to your project?

Because the work would be done by the compromised residential device. No bothnet owner is going to care if their 100,000 rooted routers have to do a little more work. It’s still “free” from their perspective.

I mean coal power plants work, so building new ones is not stupid by that standard.

I think we have to expand the definition of stupid to include things that work but have net negative externalities. Not sure where PoW falls in that way of looking at things, but we should at least consider it.

(Thinking about it, Captcha is PoW, just theoretically work by the human)

It’s always amusing when someone brings up the “just tell banks that if they reduce account takeovers by 80%, it will drive off 3 customers a year (and those are the same 3 customers who call site support to complain the website doesn’t work well on their homebrew Chromium for when running on BSD”

Cloudflare only exists in its current form because banks and such already enthusiastically accepted that trade off.

Sure, this is the age-old “knife used to cut steak is indistinguishable from knife used to stab people” thing.

Tools are inherently amoral; only people can have motives we can celebrate or condemn.

Is the value provided by Cloudflare to public so great, that we are willing to pay for it by enabling mass surveillance?

> Is the value provided by Cloudflare to public so great

turnstile is not a public good, it's a private product, promoted to private entities that want to achieve a certain outcome that is beneficial to them privately.

The mass surveillance is a side-effect - an externality that cloudflare does not have to pay for (but we as netizens pay collectively).

It is the role and responsibility of gov't to regulate away externality (or make those who benefit from it pay a cost somehow, to equalize said externality). Unfortunately, like with climate change, nothing has been forthcoming, and only a few people care about the actual damage enough to even talk about it.

So it will go on, and the masses do not have a say.

That’s a better question. So far the answer seems to be yes.

Large companies and banks see >95% fraud on sign in / sign up flows. It’s a constant battle and the law of large numbers says even a tiny false negative rate can be catastrophic.

A bogus GCP or AWS or Azure account costs those companies hundreds to thousands of dollars. I don’t know what the average loss is on fraudulent bank signins, but probably on that order. And there are millions, sometimes billions of attempts per day.

I worked at a tech company that used an off-brand, truly awful captcha provider. Think “drag the mammal to the habitat it lives in, avoiding the wiggly lines”. When this awful provider went down (frequently), we fell back to recaptcha. Fraud rates were 100x higher in those minutes-to-hours outages. Though of course real users were also able to get in at higher rates.