> We now continue to work as before, getting social media engagement for us and our clients, applying to YC 2026 and other VCs.
Why would YC fund a clickfarm? Besides that, there's something frustrating about these people setting up emergency infrastructure specifically to profit off making the internet worse.
I'm very impressed that even in time of war, when one's bare necessities are not met and explosive devices are flying over one's head, everything is done to make the internet -and by extension, ironically, the world- a worse place to be.
But let's keep pumping these fake engagement numbers up boys! This is fine.
Foreign dollars buy foreign goods. When your country is on fire, you have to look outside for stuff like food and weapons. The ethical lines move pretty far when facing starvation.
The big ones are also diesel, run at different RPM. ~3500 RPM For the smalle gas ones and around 1800 RPM for the big diesel ones. The noise characteristcs are also different. The big diesels produce more low frequency noise, whereas the small gas generators are literally lawn mower / leaf blower engines and sound the same.
The enclosures of the big generators remove mainly lower frequency sound, making them perceptually even quieter.
At this point, is the most "effective ethical" career path for a software developer to work on LLMs to flood social media and ad-clicks to speedrun the collapse of digital marketing? And thus freeing competent but money-driven software engineers to work on something else?
By collapse of digital marketing you mean collapse of social networks?
I cannot say I would miss them, but I doubt it will solve the problem.
Because yes, software engineers would love to work on many interesting things. But they also love being able to buy food and pay rent.
If the ad companies don't pay money anymore, who will replace them?
(I still dream of a world with donation for free services as default, but I am usually not taken serious with this.)
And .. about ad companies and LLMs - I think the madness just started. Once the marketing companies get their product placements directly into the models and the agents sophisticated enough, that you cannot trust anything posted online anymore, it will just destroy anonymous communication, as you cannot trust any anonymous account anymore at all. And will have a hard time finding out who is, who they say they are.
Check out the guy's social media (links in the original article). The shit is downright hilarious. He's very self-conscious about how horrible his business is.
Click farms effectively function as janitors, mopping up spam someone else paid to throw so that no real user stumbles upon it, so they are beneficial.
It's ultimately spammers and scammers fighting against each other, so you could say the trash is taking itself out. Every dollar they spend fighting is one less dollar spent spamming actual users, so it's a win.
Because, it is much easier to buy a cheap 230V AC inverter and plug it into your server power supply than it is to make a bespoke power supply that takes 12V and distributes it to various components. Inverters are stupid cheap right now, and 90%+ efficient.
For folks outside of warzones with plenty of time and access to international shipping (i.e. not OP), there are off-the-shelf adapters that accept DC input and produce the ATX voltage rails with the proper motherboard plug. Search for "DC-ATX" or "PicoPSU", they're pretty neat devices using DC-to-DC converters.
It's significantly more difficult to get a working DC-DC setup up and running that's actually reliable and safe. The power supplies on these devices expect 220V AC so it's easier to just feed that in, and rely on the onboard power supplies to handle the complexities of creating a DC source that is within tolerance for the actual device.
I love the ingenuity of this, truly in the hacker spirit! I also lol'd at how fast this got onto the FP given what these guys do, jolly good show gents! Well Played.
To limited extend by Ukrainian army, more like a fallback method if something happens to Startlink.
Mesh networks are getting used more and more by Russian army for coordinating drone attacks and surveillance - they use Chinese modems e.g. 70M-6Ghz/Uper C-X-Ku).
How inspiring. In a war torn country, a man perseveres and continues making the internet worse.
The founder's LinkedIn describes his job as "Automating phones for you - Dead internet as a service", and also has a post where he proudly states that this post was "banned on Hacker News", so I don't doubt that he's abusing the phones here too.
If you check out the man's social media, the hilarious part is that he is not even trying to sugar coat it in anyway. It's like: "yup, I'm ruining your internet, what are you gonna do about it?"
That depends on what the source of your heating is.
Say, in Norway we largely use (hydro-) electric power for heating, anyway.
So, the 2% efficient (for lighting) incandescent bulb doubles as a 98% efficient space heater, utilizing the 2% loss to light said space. 100% efficient!
Why would YC fund a clickfarm? Besides that, there's something frustrating about these people setting up emergency infrastructure specifically to profit off making the internet worse.