🔗 What Chafes My Groin #9

Is the GME Scam over Now?

Meme stocks rallied recently as the influencers who propped them up in the first place resurfaced. Generally speaking, nothing new ever happens in the stock market. There are no original stories in the stock market. Every story is the same story seen countless times since the very opening of the stock markets. Even stories like "full self driving" and Mars colonies are manifestations of the usual vaporware lies that have been pumping stocks and enriching conmen for centuries.

What probably is different today is the all-encompassing reach of the Internet and social media, things that did not exist in the past. Humans can be very irrational, and when millions of irrational people from all over the world come together, irrational things happen. This fact doesn't give birth to new and original stories, it simply supercharges (get it?) the irrationality. Because nothing here is rational:

This is not a rational progression, and it shows an investing public that has zero experience with the stock market and has pretty much lost its fucking mind. Every time you look at a stock price chart for a company, and the price skyrockets almost immediately before dying again, you know you've witnessed a scam. When you see it doing it again a few years later, you know that people have not learned their lessons.

The GameStop story was unique in that the story was not told by the company itself, at least as far as is known. The stock skyrocketed back in 2021 because an unrelated third party convinced millions of people that if they by $GME shares, they'll be rich. That's all there is to it.

You can tell by how the goalposts moved as time went by and investors did not—in fact—become rich. At first, the company was said to be massively shorted by institutional investors who did not believe in the company (or wanted to see it die for some reason), and that buying $GME shares would drive up the price, forcing the shorters to cover their shorts at a loss, which would further drive the price up, more and more until we're all very very rich.

But time went by and that didn't happen. $GME shorts kept dropping more and more, meaning shorters were covering their shorts, and yet the price only kept inching downward. So we had to find other catalysts to maintain our delusion: a new CEO that will turn the company into a behemoth; an NFT marketplace that will conquer the world; a mass transferring of all retail stocks to DRS will kill the shorters. None of that made any positive difference.

So what did make a difference now that brought on this rally? The original story-teller coming back to tell the exact same story: the shorters did not cover their shorts, salvation is near. And the believers were caught, hook, line, and sinker.

One day people will wake up to the fact that this was not a new story, and that the only person who had truly gotten vastly wealthy off of it was the one who told the story to begin with, and the only reason they've gotten so rich was because we gave them all our money.

The Web Continues to Die

Remember Cloudflare? Cloudflare started as a Content Delivery Network, or CDN. The idea was that instead of serving your website yourself, Cloudflare would serve your website for you, faster, by caching your website's content closer to the visitor. There's a lot of CDNs and Cloudflare certainly wasn't the first, but their foothold on the web is gargantuan. Many websites serve themselves for the most part, but rely on CDNs for serving certain resources such as JavaScript libraries, CSS frameworks, web fonts, etc.

CDNs had a lot of fundamental problems in early years, and continue to have some of them today, even if for a lesser extent. Partial CDNs, such as those that only serve individual assets, do not make sense at all when it comes to performance. When you visit such a website, you create a TCP connection to the website's server, and every resource you load can reuse the same TCP connection. But when that website uses a CDN for certain resources, it forces you to create new connections. For years, it was common to see a website's content load quickly, but without the actual design, and you could see at the bottom of your browser that it was waiting to receive some bullshit CSS file from some bullshit CDN, for seconds after loading the actual page.

Cloudflare and its rivals make more sense from performance-wise in that they serve the whole website (or at least the static part of it), but their request routing was very iffy. These CDNs still made websites much slower for people like me who live in Israel, because it was not financially viable for these companies to purchase and maintain servers in such a small country, so they would route my requests in a much-less-than-optimal way.

Still, people (and companies) kept putting Cloudflare in front of their websites. Even when it became clear that when the CDN misbehaves, your website is dead. It is now extremely common that your most visited websites are served by a CDN such as Cloudflare.

So speed has definitely improved over the years as CDNs evolved, but the problem is that they evolved into something else. Cloudflare is no longer really a Content Delivery Network, it's the Internet's doorman. A bouncer if you will. You see, CDNs weren't created only to make websites faster, they also advertised themselves as solutions to problems that used to plague the web quite frequently in the past: shitty servers and Denial-of-Service attacks.

As the web grew, attracted more and more automated bots, and the Internet became something that controls our lives rather than augments it, security became a bigger and bigger issue, and CDNs billed themselves as the protectors. Not of users, but of websites. Put a CDN in front of your website and we'll protect it from the evil bots.

This is how it became that CDNs now decide whether you're worthy enough to enter the sacred web. And you're not worthy if you do any of the following:

• Use Firefox or other browser with a low usage share.
• Use a VPN.
• Use an ad blocker.
• Are not logged in to Google/Facebook/TikTok or some other bullshit.

If you're one of the above, you do not get to use the Internet. If you're all of the above, you're a monster. Or a bot. You're probably a bot. Today, when you visit a website, even one you've never visited before, if that website uses a CDN, and none of the above are true for you, chances are they can identify you down to your name and address in milliseconds.

You didn't need to be a scientist to realise the algorithms used by these CDN companies to block bots were bullshit, but for years there was reasonable doubt, and lunatics like me could easily be ignored when we complain that we can't use a government website because some CDN decided we're a bot. But then came OpenAI with ChatGPT (and other LLMs) and proved it to everybody that those CDN companies indeed were only blocking regular people and automated bots were running wild and free. And now everybody is in a panic, doubling down on further restrictions and stricter algorithms in an attempt to prevent their shitty content from being scraped for AI purposes.

Don't get me wrong, intellectual property can and should be protected, and it's clear that AI is creating a gigantic issue for IP, copyrights, and even privacy. But this should be taken care of by our legal institutions (who are wont to turn a blind eye when tech companies commit crimes that inflate stocks and make the rich richer), not by making life even more miserable for humans.

This is what I get when I try to use the Israeli Post Office website now:

It immediately redirects me to a nondescript website in a domain (perfdrive.com) that has zero information about on the web. Go ahead, run a WHOIS search on it, or just run a regular web search for it. You won't find any information about it or who owns it. They don't even have an actual website for themselves (try perfdrive.com in your browser).

This perfdrive thingy thinks I'm a bot, probably because it cannot easily identify me directly as Ido Perlmuter. So they ask me to solve a CAPTCHA, which have really gotten ridiculous recently:

So I solve this shitty grainy stupid CAPTCHA, thinking that this should make me worthy enough to enter the god damn Israel Post Office website, and this is what I get:

Look at this. Read it in all its glory. This is what the Internet is now: bots blocking humans from using the Internet because they think they're bots. What an incredible achievement for AI. And for what? To protect the Post Office website? Get the fuck out of here.

A Photography Website for My Father

Well, the web may be dying, but it isn't dead just yet, and I recently created a website for my father's photography. My father Haim is quite an artistic person. For many years he was a painter, and his paintings were exhibited in art galleries in Israel on several occasions. He's also an accomplished woodworker, engineer, electrician, technician, builder, and pretty much practices any practical field that can be turned into an art.

Over the years he drifted from being a painter into being a photographer. He loves to travel in Israel and outside, and had visited many different parts of Earth, taking incredible photographs. By now it should be clear that I share many of his fields of interest, even if in different ways.

I've been telling my father for years that he should share his pictures on the web, but he's a very private person, and so finally I created a website for him myself. Like this website, and as opposed to the websites who use Internet doormen, you don't need an account, an app, or shares in an Elon Musk scheme to visit this website. You can use a VPN, an ad blocker (there aren't any ads anyway), and whatever modern browser you want to use. It even works with JavaScript disabled. You couldn't handle so much innovation.

But I digress. I'm really happy to finally see my father's photography shared on the Internet. His photographs are beautiful and a fantastic showcase of the beauty of our world. I encourage you to take a look at hperel.photos.