Yeah, the worst part is feeling suspicious of new things because who knows if anyone actually put any thought into it or if it's just slop.
Also while a lot of this generative ai stuff is technically interesting, I do wonder what the opportunity cost is. What else could we have gotten if big tech and investors decided to spend 1.5 trillon dollars on other things? Instead of a machine that outputs the most likely token given an input.
Also the amount of spam that is going to being and going to be created because of these tools is very frustrating. It feels like the open internet is going to be coming to a close just so communities can manage the spam tsunami. And I don't just mean signup to view websites I also mean private internets created with tools like Netbird or Tailscale so your content doesn't get scrapped anymore.
It's JIT only, and it needs to be in a particular shape to be effectively compiled. It's mostly for numeric code, but there are many other cases where native code would be better.
Nearlyfreespeech is a great service though not a 100% independent as your still relying on them. I think the closest you can get to 100% independent without running your own internet infrastructure is either port forwarding from your home (if allowed) or hosting a website through TOR which isn't too hard. You just have to download the browser and edit a config file (torrc) with the port you want on the network. Not ideal of course though because anyone who wants to visit your website will need the tor browser and explaining to people that your website is on the "dark web" is a little hard to do.
I am a little surprised that doing so isn't more popular on in the indie web scene though as you do it on hardware you own, from your home, and the tor network protects people from knowing your servers ip address if that's something you care about. You could even go to your domain provider and have one of your domains redirect to your .onion address so people don't need to memorize it.
There also used to be the beaker browser which let you create and host your own website directly from the browser but that project got shut down. Hopefully something similar will show up at some point. Maybe a website creating plugin for tor would be enough to make it more popular.
A source repo link often gets more traction here than a link to what might turn out to be a closed, probably subscription based, service. The repo's main readme likely links direct to the product/ service/other main location [if the forge isn't being used as that] or demo location [if a public demo instance exists] should that be where I want to go immediately.
Though maybe posting both the repo link and a "live" link would be better still.
I just happen to not self-host my own code base. But your acting like I paid a penny for that, and self hosting git isn't possible, and we aren't on a forum which exists on the commercial internet.
Why did you still not post an onion link? It's as if you feel people don't like onion links. Which is true, and it's why people don't post onion links.
Does it not demonstrate the trivialness of it which was the case I'm making?
I simply do not want to announce my address here, it's ancillary to the discussion...you shed a layer of security by deciding to make your address public, non of which would benefit the whole point of any of the services I linked.
Circling back to the main discussion of indie web, tor is a great alternative if your circle of visitors is of reasonable size and you want a place outside of the commercialized internet. It's available to anyone.
Paying the penny will certainly give you robustness and reliability...but honestly that's part of the fun of indie web.
>you shed a layer of security by deciding to make your address public, non of which would benefit the whole point
It's possible to host something with no intention of making it internet-public. I also have services like that, that I only use myself or with friends. GP argument is that they don't want to share the onion link to their website, because (bluntly) we are not invited. Onion domains are actually relatively private (i mean unguessable - unlike clearnet domains), so it's possible to host private websites without any additional authorization.
Having said that, onion links carry a implicit baggage, so while I think they're great for sharing things with (technical) friends or a private VPN, they're probably not the best way to host services intended for public.
> It's possible to host something with no intention of making it internet-public.
But this is completely opposite of what most people hosting pages online are doing. Ask a thousand people why they are using Github pages, or Vercel, or netlify... how many of them are not looking for a cheap/free way to have something in the public internet?
> You could even go to your domain provider and have one of your domains redirect to your .onion address so people don't need to memorize it.
Apparently [1] there are also ways that Tor Browser supports, for directing visitors to the onion address via the “normal” internet:
- Onion-Location
> The Onion-Location method was introduced on Tor Browser 9.5 as a way for service operators announce their Onion Services in their regular HTTPS sites. It's specified under tor-browser-spec's Proposal 100 - "Onion redirects using Onion-Location HTTP header".
- Alt-Svc
> Similar to Onion-Location, the Alt-Svc method also uses an HTTP Header (the Alt-Svc Header, specified by RFC 7838), which means that the user first need to access the regular site before their browser discovers the alternate Onion Service address.
> But contrary to Onion-Location, the Alt-Svc method:
> - Does not support an HTML tag, as it relies entirely in the Alt-Svc Header.
> - Is fully transparent: all the discovery and upgrade happens automatically, without user intervention.
- Additionally, they also speak of future possibilities for DNS or DNSSEC-based Onion Association.
Perfect is enemy of the good. Like you said, the only way to be truly independent if people ran their own infrastructure, and if all the hardware was as 100% FOSS.
Of all the compromises we have to do (relying on Telco providers, equipment manufacurers, etc), using Nearlyfreespeech is the less risky one. They have no history of abusing the trust users have placed on them, and service costs virtually nothing.
The internet isn't even capable of handling 8 billion people each with their own infrastructure. Even if everyone got IPv6 and their own PI address block, most DFZ routers can't handle that many routing table entries. Pooling resources is mandatory for the internet to work. However, there needs to be (and are) plenty of choices of who to pool with, so that you can find a trustworthy one.
Note: you don’t need to “download the browser” to use Tor. Tor is a service, not a browser. The “Tor Browser” bundles a privacy-friendly browser with the Tor service, for your convenience. You can run a Tor site on your headless server without installing any browser at all.
Few people host their websites as hidden services because it's just asking too much from anyone who uses your site.
Imagine you are in a conversation with a stranger. You want to show him your personal website. Consider the following two sentences. Which has the highest probability of actually helping him getting on your website?
"Go to myfirstnamelastname.com. Yeah, it's spelled with a K."
"Go to $FIFTYSIXRANDOMCHRACTERS.onion. Oh you need to use the onion browser. Let me help you install it on your phone. Can't find the service? Oh my bad it's actually $FIFTYSIXRANDOMCHARACTERS.onion. There you go."
i host myself with 2 fixed IPs from telekom germany business, its not as expensive as one might expect, under 90€ for a fiber and vdsl line, so next to hosting your own auth ns servers and mail you get failover at home which is nice.
Deutsche Telekom is well known as one of the worst ISPs due to their peering policy. Basically all traffic in or out of DT to/from another ISP is either paid by that ISP at extortionate rates, or takes circuitous routes to avoid paying extortionate rates. For this reason I believe they should be boycotted.
This is a common pattern for ex-national carriers in many countries btw - they believe they should be paid by both sides for all traffic that traverses their network, not just by one side, because they feel like they are God of the Internet in that country.
Indeed. I also depend on my power company, the entire global supply chain to provide me with computers to purchase, copper mines for the networking cables I use, oil fields all over the globe for the plastic, etc etc etc.
It's not just you. A lot of people have had AI cause them issues due to it's sycophancy and the constant parroting of what they want to hear (or read I suppose).
US dollar derivative that will lower government tax collection in long term with all negative consequences...
Despite all talks around - financial blow up in next up to 3-6 months is inevitable so brace for impact
IMO US is heavily exporting its inflation by leveraging its world reserve currency status as other countries have to buy it's treasuries (petrodollar system legacy). No other country would be able to run 30+% budget deficits and sell long duration government bonds under 5%.
This will break, sooner or later.
When external buyers stop buying treasuries US will have to massively inflate its money supply, taking bondholders and a bunch of other groups to the cleaners. Such events have a lot of collateral damage, which may fit the definition of financial blow up. But I would place us much further away than 6-12 months, likely at 5-10 years. If there is a viable alternative to US treasuries, potentially sooner, but still not in 12 months. My 2c.
Interesting, almost inevitable (I think) and scary in more ways than one; but I agree, this is probably not going to happen tomorrow, nor in 2026.
In the shorter term...
NVIDIA is 8% of the US stock market.
88% of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, and half of that is purchased by only 4 companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
By the end of 2025, these 4 companies will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion.
And then there's Tesla, which is 'worth' more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined.
So, 6 out of the 7 largest companies in the US are in a strange position.
Only Apple, the laggard in AI, seems relatively safe to me.
This is already happening if you know where to look and it isn’t esoteric data. The share of retail in treasury buyers has been increasing for years. If the administration doesn’t reduce spending (it won’t since it can’t) yields will blow out, we had a taste of this a couple times in the past years. Watch 5.5% on the 10. Expect YCC. Possibly buy gold if you think of buying treasuries…
Yes. When I said 5-10 years it wasn't to say that the effects would start then. That was my WAG at the time when normal, mild methods like localized YCC stop working and we should expect significant system-level problems.
For investments, I think now "buying index" will stop working well and buying chosen quality, profitable companies will work much better. My 2c.
> For investments, I think now "buying index" will stop working well and buying chosen quality, profitable companies will work much better. My 2c.
Eh, that's what the index should be comprised of anyway, with some lags.
Or, to put it differently, nothing new: it was always much better, if you knew which companies will exceed expectations. After they do so consistently, they get included in the index eventually.
Gold was also inversely correlated to long term US interest rates, which no longer holds true. So, nations and large institutions already hold the opinion that inflation will be higher (>2%) for longer in the future. Maybe the target should be moved to ~3%, which is defacto the case.
I was wondering when the free lunch for these tools was going to end. All the AI stuff has been incredibly subsidized by investors and it'll be interesting to see whay the real cost is going to be when companies like Anthropic and OpenAI need to make money.
Wasn't it like 2$ in electricity for every 1$ they take in revenue at OpenAI? I think it was a Flemish podcast where they mentioned that such numbers had leaked (episode was recorded a month ago), hard to find back among a 2-hour podcast episode but as a ballpark figure
Trademark isn't copyright, those are two different things. Trademarks can be renewed roughly every 10 years [1] until the end of time and are about protecting a brand. Now copyright law lasts for "author plus 70 years. For anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, the copyright term is 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first." [2]
Is copyright too long? Yes. Is it only that long to protect large media companies? Yes. But I would argue that AI companies are pushing the limits of fair use if not violating fair use, which is used as a affirmative defense by the way meaning that AI companies have to go to court to argue what they are doing is okay. They don't just get to wave their hands and say everything is okay because what we're doing is fair use and we get to scrape the world's entire creative output for our own profit.
It does matter if things get worse and it's very uncaring to say otherwise. The import taxes are going to make wealth inequality much worse and significantly hurt not just almost all American's but large swathes of the world too.
Also while a lot of this generative ai stuff is technically interesting, I do wonder what the opportunity cost is. What else could we have gotten if big tech and investors decided to spend 1.5 trillon dollars on other things? Instead of a machine that outputs the most likely token given an input.
Also the amount of spam that is going to being and going to be created because of these tools is very frustrating. It feels like the open internet is going to be coming to a close just so communities can manage the spam tsunami. And I don't just mean signup to view websites I also mean private internets created with tools like Netbird or Tailscale so your content doesn't get scrapped anymore.