Tavi

Well, that’s surprisingly close to what happened in the past. The issue is that “Agents” (humanity/AI irrelevant here) aren’t really something that is exploitable in a consistent manner.

1. You can automate small jobs, but LLM-based* agents are behind the curve.
2. Taking transaction fees is easier than doing a job.

Agents already exist, have been autonomous for 10+ years. Currency arbitrage, sentiment based stock market analysis down to micro seconds, capital intensive ticket scalping, dynamic hardware reconfiguration for crypto mining… all exist as fully autonomous compute based money makers. LLMs can’t compete with the incumbents, so it has to compete with random people on the Internet, and since LLM aren’t consistent enough to be profitable, (insanity irrelevant, re: Pepsi Vending Machine) they just get turned off.

See also: Mechanical Turk (really anything Amazon 2014ish) Ticketmaster vs Taylor Swift, Verilog Impl Bitcoin, Jane Street, Bitcoin Transaction fees, Fivver Transaction fees, Credit card transaction fees, LinkedIn trying to suck blood from a stone, eBay transaction fees, Apple Store transaction fees, Valve sale transaction fees, toll roads…

How many times is this gonna get posted? It gets dunked on every time too…

ooooohh it’s so dangerous and capable ooohhhhh please we need to be regulated ooooooo we’re not releasing it to the public it’s so dangerous ooooooo

I’m not much for introspection, but when you put it like that … yes actually.

I will tell you that I grew up a bit conservative and one of the things that “The American media apparatus and conservative think tanks and their unholy amounts of billionaire funding Koch et al.” did was build up the idea of politics as a sleazeball game to disenfranchise people. I still believe it a bit. Biff had by and large built up a cult following based in no small part that he was at one point an outsider and “tells it like it is”, unapologetically petty, stupid, but also affable and a joker, racist and greedy.

He (was?), genuinely bonafide stupid and watches TV all day and enough people thought that that was their best reflection. “Authentic” but also… really bleak.

“if he trusts the people planning” LOL nah.

https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2017-10-20/president-trump-thinks-hes-the-smartest-person-in-the-room

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/25/trump-staff-incompetent-sycophants

You are ascribing a level of logistical forethought to his team that just, isn’t possible. What is consistent with his every action, is that a media obsessed opportunist looked at the “man, woman, and camera” and decided to strike a pose from Breakfast Club or whatever thing he last remembered. Biff Tannen, Home Alone, The Apprentice, yadda yadda.

I thought about it for a while and decided, nah. It’s easy to dismiss offhand that these people are just stupid, but if you think about it a bit longer, these people aren’t just stupid, they are really, really, really, stupid. The model architecture is bad, the data is poisoned, improvement is O(data^2), and performance gains stalled in 2024. No AGI in sight or even a viable method of getting there.

They looked at these charts and thought, the others spent a lot of money, then made a lot of money. If we spend a LOT of money, we’ll make EVEN MORE!

Why don’t we put up the WeWork or MoviePass charts hmmm?

Chemicals in this case is another one of those vague amorphous things to be scared of, right up until you know what it is… Could be anything really, baking soda, 5G mind control powder, dusted Bin Laden, your aunties fingernails.

Everything in the world is chemical, including all your natural GMO free organic foods, got that adenosine triphosphate, cellulose, chlorophyll, dihydrogen monoxide.

Gonna go around scaring people by telling them I’ve been buying skewered avian carcasses to eat instead of beef, and showing them a rotisserie chicken.

Urban sprawl, &_&

jkjk as long as they include mixed use residential

Not a sysadmin, just a casual IT.

If it is open, it is going to get hit by scanners, scrapers, everything and the sun, even if it is secure. Generally, 443 for your websites via reverse proxy with an IP whitelist + password is okay. Not special, lets you add subdomains, very convenient.

Now, there isn’t anything special about any given port, but you still need to have some form of access control that you need to set up. If it is an API have some sort of API key in place. Implement 2FA. Try to isolate the service from the machine. Isolate the machine from bare metal. Keep the bare metal machine isolated from your home network. Take up farming. Change the default port and add some form of access alerts/logs. Have some sort of fail2ban service in place because you will be firehosed with scripts and bad traffic.

Maybe some of the stuff I recommend is paranoid overkill, but I don’t know enough to cut corners. Security is a hassle, a breach is a nightmare.