So called "Democratization" also means every baby can create dangerous code without understanding what he unleashed.
Yes, this largely depends on how they use it. I think, everybody uses AI differently. When it comes to computer programming, I use AI to learn new things. For example, I ask questions like "How do I get the length of a string in Lua?" or "How do I open a file in binary mode in Python?" and Google AI gives an answer. It's the first thing that appears above the search results. Often I don't even click anywhere; I just read what was written by AI. I've found that sometimes AI quotes someone else word for word. For example, I click on the first result, and it takes me to a thread on Stack Overflow or somewhere where someone asks the same question and the answer that AI prints on the first page of the search result is the same that someone else wrote. So, AI is almost like a personal assistant that does research for me. I like it. As long as you ask very specific questions to which the answer can be found all over the web, there is no problem.
Sometimes AI tries to improvise. For example, I asked for a regex search and replace code in Lua, and it wrote something that didn't work. It was supposed to replace a substring within a string, and instead of replacing just that substring, the code written by AI replaced everything all the way up to the substring and the substring itself as well. So, that's not what I asked it to do, but whatever... I read up on it, and I understand now that Lua's version of regex is like a lame old man compared to Perl's. It's seriously disabled. Anyway, the point is that even AI couldn't figure out how to write a regex code for Lua that would work. So, when it comes to complicated tasks, you have to test it and double check everything to make sure it did exactly what you asked for, otherwise it's prone to make mistakes. But generally, I've found that AI makes life easier. Just don't ask complicated questions! Lol | [reply] |
there is no problem.
There is an absolutely colossal problem. Have you not noticed the unresponsiveness and at times complete unavailability of this site over the past 18 months or so? If you are using generative AI for anything at all then you are contributing to this problem.
The sooner the AI bubble bursts the better. I will not be paying for AI usage directly and I will not be using any AI system which is funding itself through advertising. We all have a responsibility to cut off the revenue from the perpetrators of the LLM training bot catastrophe if we want our web back.
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Unfortunately I don't see that ever happening. The only way perlmonks is coming back is through optimization or more resources. Or, if AI training sets eventually become cheaper to download from aggregated collections than re-scraping them.
I've been meaning to offer to help with that, but haven't found time yet. But I think a good option would be if one of the host names (e.g. "perlmonks.org") was designated as the one to use when logged in, and the other aliases were directed to a second server which would serve cached anonymous-view content from a database which was a replication slave of the real one. If I could run that on a Digital Ocean droplet or Linode, I'd be happy to pay a few bucks a month to offload traffic from the real perlmonks.
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For the record, on a site I frequent there was a MediaWiki installation that consisted of maybe twenty pages. It was just one thing running on the domain -- there were far more important things hosted there. The wiki seldom had edits, it mostly just existed to serve some documentation.
Last May this wiki started getting hit by so many scrapers that the rest of the site had become unreachable. The admin mentioned over 60k accesses a day.
There was some effort done blocking IP ranges, but in the end, the MediaWiki installation got closed, converted to static pages. It was probably the only option available left to the admin.
The site was/is hosted on a VPS I believe. So, yeah. It's not just Perlmonks that is affected, nor is it Perlmonks' ageing hardware that is singly at fault. Unlike the neighbouring poster insinuated.
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