and whether the Internet is doomed to be slow in locations where the only avian carriers available are flightless.

Where would that be? Even inland Antarctica has skuas.

People are really fed up with politics and electing more and more nationalistic/extremist politicians because they don’t feel represented. The economical crysis and this dissatisfaction is an environment very similar to when hitler got elected. Last time we had millions of people dying and europe being destroyed, what will it take today to remove a dictatorship in the biggest military spender of the world?

All true. I was really making the fine distinction between “everything is awful forever because AI” and “everything is still awful”.

It’s not even clear which technologies are driving the backsliding, if any. The early thought was that everyone was radicalising in a social media bubble, but then research showed being in a bubble actually promotes moderation, so that’s out. It’s also not just economics.

We have AI possibly disrupting a lot of the service economy, while automation is slowly eating away the manual workers jobs, possibly resulting in mass unemployment.

See, the service industry has legit uses of AI. Those won’t go away, the same way people were still doing tons on the internet through the 'oughts and eventually internet businesses did become huge. Any discipline where the stakes aren’t close to zero or where training on the internet can’t help much will be less effected. Non-AI automation and backlash against it has been ongoing since the 1700’s, so I’ll put that in the situation-normal category.

Who is going to save the US if it slides into dictatorship?

It’s kind of a tangent after all that, but nobody, and it doesn’t seem like just “if” at this point. I’m hoping to head off expansionism into my nation and not much else at this point. Maybe rescue a bunch of the good Americans.

Well, that’s a typically abstract, to-the-letter take on the definition of software freedom from them. I think the practical necessity of doing something like this, especially for services like Invidious that are at risk, and the fact it’s a harmless nonsense calculation really deserves an exception.

There’s heavy, and then there’s heavy. I don’t have any experience dealing with threats like this myself, so I can’t comment on what’s most common, but we’re talking about potentially millions of times more resources for the attacker than the defender here.

There is a lot of AI hype and AI anti-hype right now, that’s true.

If a request is taking a full minute of user CPU time, it’s one hell of a mitigation, and anybody who’s not a major corporation or government isn’t going to shrug it off.

Eh, we’ve seen that kind of thing tried before. The dotcom bubble was before my time, and maybe yours, but it happened, a lot of “innovator” livelihoods collapsed because you can’t defy economic gravity forever, and in the end the underlying technology found it’s appropriate uses in it’s own damn time.

Even the fascist regime thing seems to be happening the old-fashioned way, and will probably have an old-fashioned eventual fate.

That’s a bit dramatic. Like, if AI was AGI, sure, but it’s not so clear anything like that is imminent.