When I say residential IP addresses, I mostly mean proxies using residential IPs, which allow scrappers to mask themselves as organic traffic.

Edit: Your point stands on there are a lot of services without these protections in place, but a lot of services are protective against scrapping.

I completely agree. The only deviation from past policies is that the United States did not want to take land, just keep the country under their thumb as to gain the economic advantage without the cost of actually making the country a US territory. The fact the United States has territories that are a long way from being states while they are talking about sovereign countries becoming the “51st state” due to supposed economic value is ridiculous. This is only being said because the incoming leadership is a strongman moron who just wants to appear strong, and stealing is something strongmen do.

South America from what? Imperialism is different than taking the land outright. The United States has exploited far more than South America, but they never seized their land (except during the expansionary period in the past, the United States did steal land then but I’m talking modern times past stealing Hawaii, as bad as that was).

Edit: Replace “America” with “The United States” because saying America exploited South America is a bit confusing.

The only way I can think of is require users to authenticate themselves, but this isn’t much of a hurdle.

To get into the details of it, what do you define as an AI bot? Are you worried about scrappers grabbing the contents of you website? What is the activities of an “AI Bot”. Are you worried about AI bots registering and using your platform?

The real answer is not even cloudflare will fully defend you from this. If anything cloudflare is just making sure they get paid for access to your website by AI scappers. As someone who has worked around bot protections (albeit in a different context than web scrapping), it’s a game of cat and mouse. If you or some company you hire are not actively working against automated access, you lose as the other side is active.

Just think of your point that they are using residential IP addresses. How do they get these addresses? They provide addons/extensions for browsers that offer some service (generally free VPNs) in exchange for access to your PC and therefore your internet in the contract you agree to. The same can be used by any addon, and if the addon has permissions to read any website they can scrape those websites using legit users for whatever purposes they want. The recent exposure of the Honey scam highlights this, as it’s very easy to get users to install addons by selling users they might save a small amount of money (or make money for other programs). There will be users who are compromised by addons/extensions or even just viruses that will be able to extract the data you are trying to protect.

This is a prime example of capitalist brain rot. Capitalists think their money is ethereal and controls the world. Money is a means of conducting trade in a more efficient manner, it can’t materialize anything out of nothing. You can’t just value Greenland based on how exploitable the land/resources are. The only way you could buy Greenland is if the Danish government agreed to sell it, and this isn’t the game of monopoly and the Danish are not looking to sell their territory.

International shipments will be subject to duties and taxes. The seller does not need to notify you of these, this is just the cost of directly importing products from another country.

I’d just skip OpenVPN altogether and get started with Wireguard or Headscale/Tailscale.

This one was huge for me. OpenVPN is pretty heavy with CPU overhead, where as wireguard is almost free. I was getting throttled due to the overhead of OpenVPN and roasting the CPU on my Netgear R6350 (it’s what I had lying around). With wireguard I get nearly the same speeds as without a VPN and my loads are very reasonable.

Also with weaker routers like mine, be wary of trying to use QoS, this will probably not help network congestion and instead become a bottleneck (like it did for me). This is where a beefy dedicated router really shines.

My question is, why give it for free? Has their product developed enough to win in the AI developer space? Are we reaching the point where you could self-host an AI code assistant as good as copilot? Or are projects such as johnny.ai (renamed, I’m not going to advertise it) challenging Microsoft’s market share in the AI developer space?

My only guess is Microsoft wants you to get used to their ecosystem and further ingrain developers into their development ecosystem. At best, once you are used to their ecosystem you’ll stick with them out of familiarity. At worst, they can use your input (prompts, refactors, etc) to further the development of copilot.

To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?

Edit: johnny.ai seems to be a domain offered for resale by godaddy. I didn’t mean to link them but I’ll leave it here, don’t give godaddy money as they are a terrible domain name registrar.