David Gerard @ dgerard @awful.systems Posts 540Comments 1,302Joined 2 yr. ago

i love awful systems so much
The Register said in its Builder.AI obit that the company is really into making its devs use AI coding. lol.
ahem Little Big
quite amazing that (a) Microsoft basically bought open source with GitHub (b) and are now trying to fuck it up so hard people leave
new Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php
also featuring our old friend Zack Davis
a shitload i expect. but checking authorities actually exist is probably gonna become an obvious thing to do lol
word i hear is that too many lawyers fucking love this shit, they see plausible words and think that's sufficient to replace supplement the office peons
then this happens to them and lol
finally we have constructed a completely unsexy robot
someone said it was Kendrick and Drake, i thought it was two Drakes pointing at each other
it will explain its position with interpretive twerking
Egan already told Hanson to fuck off in a previous story, Zendegi:
"My IQ is one hundred and sixty ... You can always reach me through my blog, Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future —"
jwz gave the game away, so i'll reveal:
the One Weird Trick for this week is that the bots pretend to be an old version of Chrome. So you can block on useragent
so I blocked old Chrome from hitting the expensive mediawiki call on rationalwiki and took our load average from 35 (unusable) to 0.8 (schweeet)
caution! this also blocks the archive sites, which pretend to be old chrome. I refined it to only block the expensive query on mediawiki, vary as appropriate.
nginx code:
# block some bot UAs for complex requests # nginx doesn't do nested if, so we set a test variable # if $BOT is both Complex and Old, block as bot set $BOT ""; if ($uri ~* (/w/index.php)) { set $BOT "C"; } if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/[2-9])) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/1[012])) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($http_user_agent ~* (Firefox/3)) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($http_user_agent ~* (MSIE)) { set $BOT "${BOT}O";} if ($BOT = "CO") { return 503;}
you always return "503" not "403", because 403 says "fuck off" but the scrapers are used to seeing 503 from servers they've flattened.
I give this trick at least another week.
why is this robot not sexy soyweiser
sounds dumb as hell and I'm not surprised they avoided tagging me in then
This discussion has made it clear to me that LLM enthusiasts do not value the time or preferences of open-source maintainers, willfully do not understand affirmative consent, and that I should take steps to explicitly ban the use of such tools in the open source projects I maintain.
I didn't see that thread. But I stand by the image as being perfect for the story on several specific points.
"it's a tool" - a tool
this post has also broken containment in the wider world, the video's got thousands of views, I got 100+ subscribers on youtube and another $25/mo of patrons
Musk’s xAI gas turbines: no emission controls, filling Memphis air with smog
Lloyd’s offers corporate insurance against AI chatbot errors! Now try to get a payout
Soundcloud claims the right to train AI on all your songs — but swears it hasn’t yet, honest