Interesting, so the spoofing is only active during attacks? That explains the short duration.
I am wondering what changed though, since this hasn't happened before in the previous 4 years. More spoofing installations maybe? Higher radio transmitter power?
I'm also very curious, do you have any technical mitigations for this to be able to use your GPS devices? Or is it now just a fact of life?
> Interesting, so the spoofing is only active during attacks? That explains the short duration.
As far as I know, only during.
> I am wondering what changed though, since this hasn't happened before in the previous 4 years. More spoofing installations maybe? Higher radio transmitter power?
No clue about changes. All I can say is I never saw it when I was here last, mid-2022 for about nine months.
> I'm also very curious, do you have any technical mitigations for this to be able to use your GPS devices? Or is it now just a fact of life?
Technical mitigations? read the road signs and figure out where you are :-)
I did read about someone having trouble with scooter apps, where the app was very confused to find the scooter now in Lima.
Same problem on my web-site, where I research Amazon Redshift.
I've put up a username/password firewall - free, but blocks AI bots.
This has led the site to be almost wholly deranked by Google, but this is in effect what happened anyway, since the AI summaries were absorbing so much traffic.
This in turn leads to the next problem, which is that it seems now uneconomic for me to research Amazon Redshift. If I allow the site to be searched, AI bots will copy it. If I do not, Google will make the site disappear from search. At no point do I see a return on my work.
This means there will be no research in the first place, for the AIs or for normal people. The parasite has killed the host.
Over the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years.
This was for a question about how billing works.
It went like this;
1. Case created.
2. Unassigned for seven days.
3. Open real-time chat, talk for 25 or so minutes where I guide a first-line Indian chap who plainly doesn't know about the subject in hand and who is as we talk reading the AWS docs I've already read. At the end, just as I couldn't find an answer, he couldn't - which is good, he didn't try to give me the wrong answer - he escalates. That's fine - a lot of questions are simple and even silly, and first line support is there to handle them - but they could have done all this without me, if they'd opened the ticket themselves rather than me having to chase.
4. Eleven days later, comes back with exactly the wrong answer. In the meantime, I had figured out the correct answer, and reply, explaining it to him.
5. Next day, I get a wall of plainly AI generated text telling me my answer is correct.
It seems to me a key issue here relating to AI generated text, is a misunderstanding on the part of AWS that I as a consumer will value that answer exactly (or indeed, even remotely) as I would value the answer from a human.
I do not. I almost ignore AI generated text, as I think it as unvalidated response.
AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague.
Even Stripe - once legendary for the quality of its support - has apparently given up now. I had to deal with it recently over a case where the merchant was seeing an unexpected change in the way it was collecting payments and the AI bot was worse than useless - it actively suggested incorrect explanations and resulted in several days of trying to change the wrong things while the problem persisted.
For my own businesses we give this issue a heavy weight when choosing which services to use. We have even seriously considered moving existing integrations to different services over this one issue recently. If we're integrating with a service then we want to know there's a real person who can actually help if we have questions or anything goes wrong. Failing to provide that because it's cheaper to push everyone through the AI bot is a statement of intent about how much you value your customers.
The problem is using AI to “push” the answer to an asker.
Unless the company has hidden docs they use for support (which why would that ever benefit them), I could get just as good of an answer if I point my LLM at your docs (“pull” an answer). In fact, the response might be better because I have context set up to tune it to my understanding.
Instead, you (company / support agent) have decided that I should instead have a conversation with an LLM through a worse, more opaque harness to the detriment of all of us.
It would be interesting to hear the other side, the people running support. I wonder what fraction of requests are answered by basic knowledge and stuff clearly in the docs. At some very high fraction I could see a lot of pressure/incentive to optimize for these cases.
From talking to people I know on support teams at hyperscalers and other tech companies: A mind-boggling huge portion.
But even as an AI believer and thinking it's great for this sort of thing, I also think if it's good enough for this sort of work, it should be good enough to identify when it's not capable of providing value, too.
Gosh, that's kind of sad. I hate having to wait 12 to 24 hours for an answer from AWS support - there's no way I'm raising the ticket without exhausting all avenues from my end.
> AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague.
I disagree, personally. The way they were employed in GP's example, yeah, that's annoying and hostile.
But almost every time I go to some documentation page for a commercial product now and it doesn't have that, I find it pretty annoying (I don't expect an open source library to wire this up and pay for it, ofc).
It means I have to convey these docs to my own LLM, I will waste cycles and tokens fetching them, etc.
Your version sounds like it's potentially useful. The thing that winds me up is when the online chat that used to be talking with real support people gets quietly replaced with some LLM-backed noise generator and there's no way to contact real support people any more (possibly because 95% of them were laid off).
Yeah that's a totally different thing, agreed that's really hostile and companies over a certain amount of revenue should be forced to have human support agents.
> AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague.
Meh. It's no big change to before, where you had first-level support search for something vaguely related and just dumping a template to the user.
The thing is... it actually works better than I'd like, because in a lot of cases it turns out that you (as the user) forgot to follow one tiny step in the documentation.
What I'd actually like to see as the user is the AI actually going over my AWS account, looking up the resources and their state on its own, and figuring out what exactly I missed, but (un?)fortunately that cannot be easily done for IAM permission reasons...
The big difference IME is that first-tier support at decent companies at least had the grace to recognise when they couldn't help and needed to escalate. I can count the number of times I've seen an AI bot automatically escalate when it was unable to find the solution on zero hands.
Agreed. I remember a couple of years ago raising an AWS support ticket and eventually got an answer about it being some undocumented limitation in Aurora Serverless v1. Now I get equivalent of googling my question before I can even raise a ticket.
Even more annoying, is when the integrated "chat with AI" boxes don't actually have full knowledge about the website. Tried a couple of different such boxes, and in the end I still had to crawl the website on my own to find the information.
I've been at places where the AWS annual spend was a real lot of money, let's say way over 100k but not 1 million USD.
Support tickets went unanswered for months, assigned account reps left us hanging for months with multiple follow ups, etc.. All tickets opened within the last 6 months got AI generated responses with massive delays that indicate the ticket wasn't read by a human due to how inaccurate the response was based on the questions asked.
I had an obscure KMS issue a few months ago, I reproduced it and opened a ticket. It was a low severity. A guy emailed me back in about 4 hours, acknowledged it and thought I was doing it right. Came back 2-3 days later noting that it was a bug, and would be fixed in a few weeks. As a workaround he updated my script with a less obvious/efficient solution to get me through.
It can be two things. People’s main complaint about Google’s cloud services is that you are forever at the risk of an automatic and unappealable ban of your whole account.
We recently had an issue with our production Oracle database. Our in-house DBAs spent hours trying to get the AI support bot to assign a real person to join the incident call. It took more than 2 hours to get an actual person on the call.
We literally pay hundreds of thousands a year in Oracle support contracts, and this is what we get? AI bots? Nope. Migrating to Postgres is now a top priority.
This "replace people with AI" nonsense has to stop. [0]
Just happens that these very-lesser-paid workers are usually Indian, Filipino and Moroccan, I guess. And if a company goes this route, they're most likely significantly cutting costs at the expense of the provided service
It is _very_ different. In the case of outsourcing, where companies offer decent local wages in developing countries, it can not be compared to slavery which is the perpetual ownership of a person.
Now with H1B sponsorship, where I've heard rumors of companies taking away passports of their workers, it is very much evil, but not slavery.
As of about 4 years ago software developers in India were making .20 of US counter parts. I was managing a team of 7 and 5 left for higher pay elsewhere. Same has happened in China and other countries. They are not so cheap anymore.
It’s not their race, it’s that they are completely removed from the business context, given simple resolution scripts and little power to escalate out of their call center.
When you hear the accent, you know it’s likely the business has done this, unfortunately.
Indian tech support works just fine when it’s more integrated with Indian engineering and product ownership, as support in the US would be with an American company.
To the best of my knowledge, the Indian support teams for AWS have all the same access their US/EU/etc. support teams have when it comes to escalation and communication avenues. Obviously real time communication is harder for them than the US counterparts speaking to teams in Seattle, but the same is true for a team in Ireland or Australia.
If you are building a follow-the-sun support organization for a technology company, would you really avoid building a support team in India? Seems like it's the country most likely to have a large enough number of people with the expertise and language skills to staff for the need, even if you were paying them the same as their US counterparts.
That’s my personal preference, to hire great remote employees around the world and treat them as first class as headquarters employees regardless of role.
I was just explaining the unfortunate correlation Indian support centers have with the business practice to minimize and alienate support.
I’m glad to hear that Indian AWS support is fully integrated.
Indeed, why is it relevant? We should ask companies like Amazon, because they're the ones who choose to outsource customer support to India specifically 99% of the time.
westerners are loaded with the context that much work is outsourced to india for profit purposes. is indian a race? if it isnt a race, why are you making this about race?
To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall.
It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.
If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would not exist for OpenAI to take, or for anyone else to read. We all lose.
It seems parasitic, and on the face of it, acting to kill the host.
In fact, it essentially seems like abrogation of the concept of private property.
The AI companies can take what I make, without my consent, which they sell for profit, where that profit it seems to be was formerly substantially coming to me, the return on my efforts.
I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content. The methods provide are a fig leaf and put the onus on me, and in any event in a way which can never be known to have removed my content - "if you can show your content from a prompt, we will take steps to try to prevent that content from showing".
As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.
True. It's a massive shift of power, all being centralized.
As you mentioned, they know they need good data though, so they might actually try to find some equilibrium.
If not, it's possible that the creation of new valuable content, to feed the LLMs, will be produced in-house by the AI labs. Sounds insane, but Netflix also makes their own content.
I think the AI labs will become so big that they'll take on more roles than just offering LLM inference. I think they'll become as or more powerful than many current nation state governments.
> True. It's a massive shift of power, all being centralized.
It may seem that way in the short term. But in the long term, the tendency in technical development is for the infrastructure and capital requirements for new technology to start off very high, but then shrink over time, such that use cases that required massive amounts of upfront investment in the early stages become incrementally more viable at smaller and smaller scales.
People were saying the same things about computers in general in the 1960s as they are about GenAI now. That was an era when computer technology itself had developed to a point when it was economically impactful, but still only affordable to large institutions. People making predictions that increasing use of computers would lead to massive centralization of economic and cultural power didn't predict that merely twenty years later, computing power equivalent to contemporary mainframes would be available in a convenient desktop box available at a local shop to any individual or main-street business that cared to buy one.
The widespread availability of computing technology from the '80s to present actually had the opposite effect, and led to quite a bit of decentralization, as enterprising individuals and new startups started applying that technology to do at small scales what only large enterprises could do before. In fact, a lot of the reaction to AI in its current stage may actually be because it's disrupting the expectation of decentralization and autonomy over our technology that the personal computing revolution established in the first place.
Like most new technologies, GenAI in its initial stages has required massive infrastructure investments that have led to the early iterations being offered by centralized institutions, but that might not last. Open-source AI models are approaching the capabilities that the big players' frontier models had arrived at only a couple of years ago.
In 2026, we're already at the point where local inference is economically viable for commercial use cases -- at my own company, while we do use our Claude Enterprise account for a variety of use cases, it turned out to make much more sense in terms of both cost and risk exposure to instead process certain datasets (e.g. a large volume of phone recordings containing PII) with local models running on commodity GPUs. That proved to be entirely effective, and the one-time hardware investment (which created a bookable asset for the company) turned out to be less than the cost of running the same task on Claude (which would have been pure OpEx).
Your positive view makes sense to me and is refreshing. Let's see how things play out. So the pattern will be: that which can be done with smaller models will be decentralized first; gradually the more advanced stuff will become within reach.
I already do use google search's AI Mode (probably a 300B model) for many quick questions. Local models would be great for things like checking my email and many other things (sensitive + continuously running = not suitable for Opus). My 64GB DDR4 laptop can already run Qwen 47B at .7 tok/s, that's already usable for some usecases (overnight stuff mostly).
That was for SEO/copyright reasons, so I guess not?
This mostly feels like a meme though. Most of the recipes I see have instructions, notes and photos, then a recipe. It's unfortunate that people think of the worst offender and cheer for the death of the independent web.
Sad but good. The internet had become too large any way. Once upon a time it was a small pond full of interesting life, today it's an unfathomably large ocean. Everywhere you look, it's mostly empty.
The good stuff now is in small private communities, away from the bots and the eternal influx of september newbies to devolve every discussion into memes. Elitism will be good again.
But in the present moment, it seems like countries are themselves even more outside democratic control than multinational companies are.
The mechanisms of democratic accountability in political institutions are today are demonstrably dysfunctional and broken, if they ever really worked at all, whereas multinational companies are at least somewhat beholden to market pressures. Sure, they can engage in jurisdiction shopping when that's viable for them, but it's more often the case that they seek to influence those very governments in order to insulate themselves from accountability to the market.
And many of the bans and restrictions that firms try to avoid by switching jurisdictions are themselves the result of some other industry or special interest group managing to exert stronger influence over the local political institutions, and not due to any sort of "democratic" consensus. Look at the recent cluster of nearly identical age-verification laws passed by jurisdictions around the world, which there was near zero "democratic" impetus for, as an example of this.
> To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall.
> It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.
That also creates friction for new users, discoverability issues, and additional privacy concerns for people wanting to access your content.
> I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content.
Even the ones that do provide attribution and links back to the original source? Perplexity does a good job of that, for example.
> As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.
Well, yeah, if you're blocking the content from being accessed without a login, you're blocking it from being indexed by search engines.
I guess I'm a little confused as to what your ultimate goal is. If you're putting content up on the web for free, what are you gaining by blocking AI from indexing it, especially when you're blocking actual users, whether they discover it via AI or traditional search?
I understand the frustration at seeing AI tools digest your content and then repeat to users without connecting it back to your site. But that's something that other people have always been doing independently of AI -- people read articles, learn facts or understand new ideas from them, and then incorporate them into their general assumptions to be expressed in their own work without necessarily acknowledging, or even recalling, where the underlying information that informed their thinking came from. People have been writing articles and producing various forms of media content that are inspired by other people's unattributed work since time immemorial.
Yes, AI accelerates that process and makes it more visible to you, so I understand where the frustration is coming from. But consider that the expectation that everything that happens downstream of your work will always be attributable back to you may never have been a reasonable one in the first place.
To stop this, I today put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall.
It's all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.
If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would not exist for OpenAI to take, or for anyone else. We all lose.
The people who live here, who've been here the whole time, and they can't in practical terms leave, are those who endure.
I'm not a local, and I was lucky in life and work in a profession which pays well enough, so I could go if I wished, and I've only been back here now for about a month.
Your words are right and proper for the locals; let us think of it to them.
Back in early 2022, a little after the war started, TransferWise blocked transfer (i.e. donation) to the account run by the National Bank of Ukraine for support of the Ukrainian military.
Looks like it is probably against their acceptable use policy:
1.2.3 Other restricted activities
c. Weaponry, military and semi-military goods and services.
Weapons (including weapons of historic significance), military software, or any other goods or services intended for military use.
Ukraine is well known money laundering machine. Before the conflict started it was a well known fact and many banks didn't want to work with transfers to Ukraine. I am sure TransferWise shared similar risk model.
Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade. It had much more sense to launder through Cyprus for example or other EU countries like Latvia (when it was still possible) or Hungary if you’re politically connected.
Thats common knowledge for everyone even tangentially related to finance industry and likely for anyone who ever did international business with cross border payments . Not sure what kind of "sources" you expect to see here.
> Ukraine had very strict banking rules for at least a decade
Perhaps for it's own populace, but not for it's rulers and those who they work with.
Okay, so basically you’ve read some “anonymous sources” and decided they are true.
Because for me, as a person who did international business from Ukraine it makes absolutely zero sense to launder through Ukraine as it is:
1) no part of any union, so you will be unable to spend or move money outside.
2) it has extreme bank regulation, and you cannot just send money outside without cause. Receiving and sending money for fake “services” will not work (compared to a lot of other places I know)
3) it has a lot of independent anti-corruption institutions. You can be sure that any government official fears the consequences of doing something illegal.
4) it is in a state of war and any suspicious money operation will trigger investigation from SBU as well, since Russia tries to pay for its agents.
If there is corruption and money laundering happening, it is well outside of any path available for regular people.
It’s advisable not to judge within your limited worldview. Not everyone “reads” mainstream media, some people have real world experience.
Your arguments regarding why Ukraine can’t be used for money laundering are laughable and just show you are now aware how certain things in financial world work. That’s totally fine - but it gets distorted when some extended judgements are made based on very limited worldview.
So enrich my and other peoples world view - this is what this forum is about. Instead of saying "I'll leave it to your imagination", please provide any substance of your claims - anything we can talk about.
Since you didn't I have to guess, what you are talking about.
Do you mean some Russians used Ukraine as a money laundering middleman, specifically through corruption of politicians and elites in the system there? Because it sounds like it. Before the "conflict" (invasion) happened.
I'll leave your imagination to judge who used ukraine as money laundering machine. To have some supplementary data for that, we can look where the money entering ukraine come from for say last 5 years. You can easily find how much was coming from russia and compare it with flow from say EU. You should be capable of drawing your own conclusions after.
But if you look at the bigger picture, Ukraine has been invaded and occupied by a bigger countries which buys western banks to do it's money laundering through. Now is not the time to be discipling.
Yes, but that's a matter to be settled in a court. Banks and other financial institutions have no business deciding what's just; they just follow the regulations given to them by governments and the courts.
Russia invaded Ukraine, inflicting untold horror, and Russia is a threat to Europe.
In the circumstances of early 2022, I would have expected a way to be found, in the knowledge that such an action - telescope held to blind eye - would be condoned.
> Russia invaded Ukraine, inflicting untold horror, and Russia is a threat to Europe.
Realistically it is way more nuanced than that. Its a juvenile worldview to think in black and white.
Not willing to start any discussion on the matter, but you may want to know about massacres ukraine did in it's eastern side. After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all (albeit as any force causing many to suffer, it's hard to justify it).
The bottomline is - reality is way more nuanced than just black and white.
> Not willing to start any discussion on the matter, but you may want to know about massacres ukraine did in it's eastern side.
This is a Russian narrative.
> After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all
This also is a Russian narrative.
It seems to me you have been from some source been absorbing Russian material.
Putin is a dictator. A few years after he came to power in 2000, Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out. If you did, fines, prison, penal colonies with death and violence, or now and then being thrown out of windows.
It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine.
Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery - until Euromaiden. He fled to Russia. Literally immediately after that, plan B - the small war began. Finally, 2022, the big war.
There is nothing here where we go "it was not that unprovoked".
Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom. To be itself, and not to live in a hell-hole dictatorship. Putin wants to possess Ukraine, because that's how he and it seems a good part of Russian State culture sees the world; in terms of power, conquest and territory.
What is the "russian narrative"? Whats is this made up definition?
> Putin is a dictator.
Based on what?
> Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out
I don't think Russia is living in fear, neither I should be speaking out as I am not in any way related to it.
> It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine
Doubt this is true.
> Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery
Yea, all presidents/PMs were "his men". If this is not propaganda what you are desperately trying to do (and you do it quite poorly I must admit), then I don't know what propaganda is.
> Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom
Thats why ukraine sold everything it had, including it's rare minerals for years to west :) We certainly have different definitions of freedom.
Amount of theft from “military” accounts in Ukraine is staggering, if anyone would ever be interested to figure out. Everyone know that except people blindfolded by the world “military” and deluded to think money there would be used on anything else but beneficiaries whims.
Supporting evidence, please. So far you've made claims only - "everyone knows".
Kyiv Independent, who are pretty good at this and are on the spot, do not report large scale or significant military corruption. They have found and report on pretty corruption (individuals selling personal weapons). I note EU and US are very interested in keeping track of where the money is going.
You know, there was a time I’d have agreed with this, but yesterday at nearly 51 I walked up the emergency stairs of the UK’s 2nd tallest building 5 times, passing people well under half my age each time… never could have done that when I was physically young.
If you don’t completely destroy the joints, heart, kidney, liver, and lungs when your mind is young and stupid the much wiser and (hopefully) smarter mind you’ll earn can push the slightly more knackered bits further and faster then you’d earlier have thought you could go.
I feel this so much. I want to pack everything possible in my 20s because I know there are certain things that I just would not be able to do later on.
The instant I dropped this on HN, gptbot was scanning the site.
(Updated robots.txt, this site https://robotstxt.com/ai to the rescue. I had to update robots.txt on the Amazon Redshift site fairly recently - I had gone from something like 10mb of log file per day to something like 50mb of log file per day, from LLM crawlers.)
