In and around 2023, Roy and Rianne Schestowitz were subject to a horrific campaign of online harassment. Unfortunately they blamed me for it, and in turn wrote and published an astonishing array of articles making false accusations against me. Last year, I sued them in the high court in London. In turn, they countersued me for harassment. The case was heard last month and I'm pleased to say that the counterclaim was dismissed and I prevailed in my case. The court awarded me £70,000 in damages.
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.
🏳️⚧️ - Friendly Fediverse Fops 
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.