NOTES_

It sucks — and it especially sucks for sites like The Numbers, run as basically passion projects by solo developers — but it's inevitable. Any site with valuable data is going to be farmed by AI, so its architecture has to be built for that. At the same time, every LLM and agent that farms that data depends on the site still existing; scrape it into the ground and there's nothing left to scrape. The stable outcome is a Nash equilibrium where sites serve bots efficiently and bots take what they need without killing the host, because neither side gains by doing otherwise. We're clearly not there yet, which is why stories like this one exist.

Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here. A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy. Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.