Kremor's recent activity

  1. Comment on What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all in ~tech

    Kremor
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    The Numbers felt this shift in two distinct waves. The first started around 2024:

    We saw a big increase in crawls as AI training joined the search engine crawlers. The AI crawlers are generally less well-behaved than the search engines, which increased the management tasks for us to keep the site running smoothly.

    And the second wave was stronger and more damaging:

    Around December 2025, we saw another big spike in traffic which I attribute to agentic AI: a combination of AI agents that scrape sites in response to prompts, and people being able to write agents that scrape sites.

    Bruce says that only 10% of their traffic is from humans browsing the site, with the rest coming from AI bots and automated traffic.

    Around 90% of our time was spent keeping the existing site running while we spent our spare moments working on a new and improved system.

    12 votes

  3. Comment on The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. in ~science

    Kremor
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    It's funny, as someone from a third world country, I worry about the exact opposite. LLMs will only exacerbate the current global inequality. Someone who can comfortably spend 300 USD on tokens...

    if anyone can write papers and proposals and code as fluently as he could, then people like him lose their competitive edge.

    It's funny, as someone from a third world country, I worry about the exact opposite. LLMs will only exacerbate the current global inequality. Someone who can comfortably spend 300 USD on tokens will always have an advantage over someone for whom 20 USD is a tenth or even a twentieth of their income, even if their level of understanding is the same.

    Edit: I realized that I did the math wrong and didn’t mean to use such low numbers. I recently met a developer who makes 500 USD a month and is subscribed to the 100 USD ChatGPT tier. Somehow, in my mind, “spending a substantial amount of your income” automatically translated to the cheapest subscriptions. Regardless, my original point still stands.

    13 votes

  5. Comment on Gamer Homer shares his top six favorite Odysseys in ~books

    Kremor
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    Super BunnyHop is well known for his video game essays and critical analyses, hence the ironic "Gamer" in the title. In the video, he shares his favorite adaptations of the Odyssey while also...

    Super BunnyHop is well known for his video game essays and critical analyses, hence the ironic "Gamer" in the title. In the video, he shares his favorite adaptations of the Odyssey while also taking a deeper dive into how it was written and what gets lost in translation.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on I got slopped: someone used AI to write my biography in ~tech

    Kremor
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    I just remembered that in 2021 I met a technical writer who was planning to change careers by writing romance novels. Not because it was her dream, but because, as we would say now, it was easier...

    I just remembered that in 2021 I met a technical writer who was planning to change careers by writing romance novels. Not because it was her dream, but because, as we would say now, it was easier to write formulaic slop. I wonder if she was successful, and if she’s using AI now to streamline the process.

    13 votes

  8. Comment on I got slopped: someone used AI to write my biography in ~tech

    Kremor
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    Recently, I received a strange text from a new acquaintance. “You have your own biography???” it read. [...] This was news to me. I went to Amazon to investigate. There it was. A biography of Kashmir Hill [...] My life story had a mottled brown cover and a publisher I’d never heard of before. It had no reviews until I wrote one, asking, as the subject of this work, if I could please speak to the author.

    “Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”
    It is hard to disagree with that, though I can’t say I agree with Mr. Johns’s solution: Have an A.I. chatbot do it instead.

    9 votes

  10. Comment on Be the chatbot in ~games

    Kremor
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    Then I definitely don’t recommend you listen to this podcast, where they interview a real African worker who pretended to be an AI when all of this was getting started.

    Then I definitely don’t recommend you listen to this podcast, where they interview a real African worker who pretended to be an AI when all of this was getting started.

    5 votes

  13. Comment on Rural NY school district will be one of first to bring humanoid robot into classroom in ~tech

    Kremor
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    The classroom marks a new venture for Realbotix, a Toronto-based robotics company formerly known as Tokens.com, that helped customers use cryptocurrency to rent “digital land” in the Metaverse. In April 2024, the company acquired Simulcra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, which has spent decades creating hyperrealistic sex dolls and later expanded into sex robots that remain on the market today.

    6 votes

  15. Comment on Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? in ~tech

    Kremor
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    I think the article asking what's the point of open source at that point then? What will happen to critical projects when their maintainers retire and no one else has a good idea on how they work?...

    I think the article asking what's the point of open source at that point then? What will happen to critical projects when their maintainers retire and no one else has a good idea on how they work?

    Think of it this way, would Linux have become what it is today if only a selected few were allowed to contribute to it? In the age of AI, would something like Vue be possible, where its creator can make a living through Patreon, if AI recommends the more popular tools like React? And would Godot have built enough momentum to become an alternative worth considering?

    9 votes

  16. Comment on Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? in ~tech

    Kremor
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    Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by Miklós Koren, an economist at Central European University in Vienna, released a paper titled “Vibe Coding Kills Open Source”. [...] In experiments with six coding models, the researchers found that open-source software packages that were frequently recommended by models saw large increases in download numbers — but that activity did not translate into the engagement that typically sustains maintainers. The paper concludes that, “under the traditional business model, where developer revenue depends entirely on direct user engagement, the open-source ecosystem cannot survive widespread AI adoption”.

    If everybody is using the same tools for writing code anyway, what is the value of collaboration, especially with those who don’t know their way around your project? In the past, a new contributor would gradually build knowledge about your project and hopefully one day become a trusted maintainer. But if they simply point a tool at it, there’s no reason to believe that accepting their contribution will lead to any growth in their knowledge of, or investment in, your project. And why should other developers, maintainers and potential employers assign any value to those contributions?

    Comeau worries about a generation of developers whose coding education is supplanted by interactions with LLMs, which often try to solve problems directly and narrowly, rather than by providing broader context. “AIs will know how to answer the question that you have, but you don’t know what questions you should be asking that you’re not asking,” he said. The lack of a bigger-picture understanding “seems like a serious skill deficit that’s going to become a problem when the current generation of developers, who learnt before these tools existed, start to retire or move on”.

    “Until very recently,” Rich Harris told me, “the idea that you would effectively pay rent to a Silicon Valley company for the privilege of being able to write software would have been considered completely absurd.”

    “One of the beautiful things about software development is that it’s completely permissionless,” Harris said. “Anyone can do it, and the tools that we use to create software are themselves fully available open-source software. Now, suddenly, it’s completely normal to have to pay $100 or $200 per month in order to do software development.”

    “In general, writing code the first time was never the problem for any project,” says cURL’s Stenberg. “The challenge for any project is maintaining it over time, fixing bugs over time. If you don’t understand it, you have to rely on the AI to fix all of the problems, going forward.”
    He continued: “They are not that good at fixing the problems; they’re much better at finding the problems.”

    Nearly 60 years ago, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote an essay titled “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!”. She argued that the work of maintenance is often unappreciated and devalued — “a drag; it takes all the fucking time” — next to the more celebrated work of creation. “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” asked Ukeles, who has served as the artist in residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977. She argued that society “confers lousy status” on those who do maintenance.

    This is perhaps truer than ever in the era of the “creator economy” and tech industrialists who burn and build and move fast and break things. To the “creators” go wealth and prestige while the maintainers work in the background, scraping rust and justifying their existence to a society that takes them for granted.

    17 votes

  18. Comment on Is it possible to not want to be happy? in ~talk

    Kremor
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    To want to be happy is to think it's possible. To want to be unhappy is to avoid the fear of disappointment.

    To want to be happy is to think it's possible. To want to be unhappy is to avoid the fear of disappointment.

    16 votes