ReHacked vol. 336: AI crawlers destroying websites, The day Return became Enter and more
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If you want to support artists, buy their work. If you don't, don't pretend Spotify streams are "support." --Some wise guy on internet.
AI crawlers destroying websites in hunger for content • The Register #internet #ai
With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots.
Cloud services company Fastly agrees. It reports that 80% of all AI bot traffic comes from AI data fetcher bots. So, you ask, "What's the problem? Haven't web crawlers been around since 1993 with the arrival of the World Wide Web Wanderer in 1993?" Well, yes, they have. Anyone who runs a website, though, knows there's a huge, honking difference between the old-style crawlers and today's AI crawlers. The new ones are site killers.
Fastly warns that they're causing "performance degradation, service disruption, and increased operational costs." Why? Because they're hammering websites with traffic spikes that can reach up to ten or even twenty times normal levels within minutes.
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False scarcity | Seth's Blog #ideas
Often, the things we want the most aren’t directly related to the things we need.
The Universe within 12.5 Light Years - The Nearest stars #nature #space
This map shows all the star systems that lie within 12.5 light years of our Sun (Zoomable down to 14 bn light years). Most of the stars are red dwarfs - stars with a tenth of the Sun's mass and less than one hundredth the luminosity. Roughly eighty percent of all the stars in the universe are red dwarfs, and the nearest star - Proxima - is a typical example.
Why I Ditched Spotify, and How I Set Up My Own Music Stack | LeshiCodes #software #internet #copyrights
For years, I relied on Spotify like millions of others. The convenience was undeniable stream anything, anywhere, discover new music through algorithms, and share playlists with friends. But over time, several issues became impossible to ignore: artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream, fake Artists and ghost Tracks, AI music and impersonation, creepy age verification complicity and the fact that despite paying monthly, I never actually owned anything. So I decided to take back control of my music experience. Here's how I built my own self-hosted music streaming setup that gives me everything Spotify offered and more.
Finnish City Inaugurates 1 MW/100 MWh Sand Battery - CleanTechnica #energy
As we reported when the first prototype was unveiled three years ago, the idea of a sand battery began with two Finnish engineers, Markku Ylönen and Tommi Eronen. The concept is simplicity itself. Make a really big pile of sand. Heat it with excess renewable electricity to around 500°C (932°F), then use that heat later to heat homes, factories, even swimming pools. They say the sand can stay hot for 3 months or more. The pair have founded Polar Night Energy, which constructed a prototype consisting of 100 tons of sand inside what looks like a silo in the town of Kankaanpää.
The day Return became Enter – Aresluna #hardware #history #longread
In the popular imagination, the transition from the world of typewriters to the universe of computers was orderly and simple: at some point in the 20th century, someone attached a CPU and a screen to a typewriter, and that turned it into a computer.
But the reality is much more fascinating and convoluted. The transition was meandering and lengthy, and traces of its many battles and decisions remain scattered across keyboards today. And no key might better represent the complexity of that journey than the Return key.
Child psychologist: Parents who raise kids who listen use 6 'magic phrases'
6 ‘magic phrases’ that make children listen to their parents TL;DR:
- I believe you.
- Let’s figure this out together.
- You can feel this. I’m right here.
- I’m listening. Tell me what’s going on.
- I hear you. I’m on your side.
- I’ve got you, no matter what.
The staff ate it later - Wikipedia #interesting
"The staff ate it later" (Japanese: この後、スタッフが美味しくいただきました, romanized: Kono ato, sutaffu ga oishiku itadakimashita) is a caption shown on screen when food appears in a Japanese TV program to indicate that it was not thrown away after filming (it is generally not socially acceptable to discard food in Japan). Some question the authenticity of this statement or believe the caption lowers the quality of TV programs.
Webb Telescope Spots Sparkling Crystals and Life’s Ingredients in the Butterfly Nebula #nature #space
One of the Hottest Stars in the Galaxy The Butterfly Nebula’s central star is one of the hottest known central stars in a planetary nebula in our galaxy, with a temperature of 220,000 Kelvin.
This blazing stellar engine is responsible for the nebula’s gorgeous glow, but its full power may be channelled by the dense band of dusty gas that surrounds it: the torus.
The new Webb data show that the torus is composed of crystalline silicates like quartz as well as irregularly shaped dust grains. The dust grains have sizes on the order of a millionth of a metre — large, as far as cosmic dust is considered — indicating that they have been growing for a long time.
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