Reading Fedora infrastructure update about yet more problems with AI scrapers. It's really disgusting the pain that these bots are inflicting on the rest of the Internet. I hope users of these tools are conscious of how the vendors are acquiring their data, and taking pains to avoid the vendors or projects that ignore robots.txt (and such) and go out of their way to avoid being blocked.

These parasites are *worse* than spammers; typically spam is a nuisance, but not something that causes so much damage. It is flat-out unethical what these companies are doing, and equally unethical to support them.

Hello from Tokyo!

I curated a set of medium-format film photography from previous years, featuring autumn colors at various locations around town.
(This year's leaves aren't quite as advanced yet)

📷 Mamiya 6, 50mm f/4
🎞️ Fuji Pro 400H (1)(2)(4), Portra 400 (3)

#photography #streetphotography #naturephotography #filmphotography #fotografie #japan #tokyo #japanlife #tokyolife #autumnvibes #japaneseautumn #photographersofmastodon #mamiya

True story: I once spent an afternoon scrolling through someone's Facebook account to find out when he had acquired each of his cats because he had named successive releases of a software package he maintained after the damn things in the order in which they joined his family and I needed to know whether Pickles came before Chocolate or vice versa.

Today, my VPS served over 51.5 million requests. Well over 99% of that was AI crawlers and other obnoxious shits.

This is not normal. This is complete and utter bullshit. This is also happening all over the place.

It can be caught, it's not even hard. But we shouldn't need to. This is about three orders of magnitude more requests I'd normally receive, and it's almost entirely useless garbage.

Every single one of you who use GenAI tools, you personally, are complicit in this. You are responsible for these bots hammering the entire internet, you are enabling it.

If you think this price is acceptable, that every single person who hosts anything outside of BigTech walled gardens deserves this relentless assault of thieving robots, then you are a garbage human being.

But it is not too late to change course. You too can look back at the carnage you enabled, and feel remorse. It's okay. We'll forgive you.

You don't need to look at the environment damage LLMs cause - we can have an educated guess (it's very bad). You don't need to look at the unsustainability of it all. All of those are things that we don't directly feel right now.

But look at the damage these things cause to everyone outside of the BigTech walled gardens. That is measurable. These attacks are fact. You can't debate it. You can't justify it.

You, dear enabler of GenAI bullshit, you are responsible for enabling this carnage. Think about that. Feel bad about it, and stop. Today is a great day to do that.

Please donate if you can to help legendary game designer Rebecca Heineman in her final days:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-rebecca-ann-heineman-fight-aggressive-cancer

My first Minecraft experience probably was very different from yours. The year was 2012, I had no idea what Minecraft was, and a friend invited me to join a "survival server with Industrial Craft" installed. There were about 200 players on the server, and the rules were very simple: PvP allowed, private land not allowed, server map is 4000 by 4000 blocks.

What do you do when you spawn in a world like this? Do you break some wood to make your first pickaxe? Do you scavenge for food? No, no-no-no. You run.

You run as fast as you can, as long as your hunger doesn't start to get you. Mature players won't camp at the spawn point, but angry bitter _poor_ nothing-to-lose kids did.

Moreover, the land was barren. The server didn't do wipes for months. There were no trees in the 1k block radius. No animals. No resources to mine, either.

In this game, the priority was on sustainable survival. Kind of like "skyblock" map, but with cunning PvP players.

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