Cloudflare continues to push the worst shit combination of centralization of the internet and genAI bullshit but congratulations, they've hit a new combo so bad I didn't even consider it possible https://blog.cloudflare.com/agents-stripe-projects/

[ben@mastodon.lubar.me]

@cwebber also click the hackernews comments link at the bottom of the article for a surprise

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@cwebber sorry, what???? $100k of free credits? that's ....... well, any startup that falls for that deserves to fail but that's already true of most startups so it's not a very interesting thing to say

[eramdam@social.erambert.me]

@cwebber this reminds me of the shit I saw on a fintech company’s careers page the other day lol

[cwebber@social.coop]

@ben lmao

[samir@mastodon.functional.computer]

@ireneista @cwebber IMO it sounds quite good for something that needs finite compute, like a research project, though.

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@samir @cwebber yeah we have definitely seen academics successfully take advantage of free samples in other areas, hah. there's an art to it.

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@samir @cwebber there's an important mismatch between the needs of academics and startups which we think causes sales teams to fall for that stuff

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@samir @cwebber like for a business, the assumption is that if you find something worth doing at all, it will drive revenue for you on an ongoing basis, so you'll be motivated to pay to keep doing it

and that isn't how grants work at all

[artemist@social.mildlyfunctional.gay]

@ireneista @cwebber i wonder how efficiently one can turn many of those giant startup credits directly into money. they probably try to detect mining

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@samir @cwebber we don't condone taking advantage like that, but we don't know that we really blame academics for it, either, heh

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@artemist @cwebber alas the most efficient use is probably spam

[artemist@social.mildlyfunctional.gay]

@ireneista @cwebber true, it's just that mining is legal and doesn't require finding customers.

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@artemist @cwebber yeah

[thejacenallen@mastodon.social]

@cwebber uh oh

[monkeyben@mastodon.sdf.org]

@cwebber

As if the Internet wasn't overflowing with AI Slop without this insane bullshit already.

[holdenweb@freeradical.zone]

@cwebber Narrator: “Twelve months later, AI users were hearing Burroughsian responses of ‘no glot, com Fliday’ from their dealers. But they needed their fix, so they kept paying. As did their customers. And thus the real Matrix was born.”

[holdenweb@freeradical.zone]

@cwebber @ben Sorry, the Ministry of Truth have stopped news sources from supplying the Wayback Machine (which, by the way, is a service of the non-profit Internet Archive) with feeds. F**k capitalism.

[agowa338@chaos.social]

@cwebber Someone here that can write a tool to create cloudflare accounts and use it to DDOS cloudflare at Layer 7 with bullshit configuration and API load?

[unlofl@mstdn.social]

@cwebber Smart, in the sense that they are selling shovels in the dumb-shit gold rush, and they're even letting you finance it with some other suckers money!

[keirfox@tiggi.es]

@cwebber Well, it was nice but I am off to live in the woods now.