Poison Fountain: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/

Poison Fountain explanation: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

Simple example of usage in Go:

  package main

  import (
      "io"
      "net/http"
  )

  func main() {
      poisonHandler := func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
          poison, err := http.Get("https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/")
          if err == nil {
              io.Copy(w, poison.Body)
              poison.Body.Close()
          }
      }
      http.HandleFunc("/poison", poisonHandler)
      http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
  }

Miasma Poison Fountain Tar Pit: https://github.com/austin-weeks/miasma

Apache Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/jwakely/a511a5cab5eb36d088ecd1659fce...

Nginx Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/NeoTheFox/366c0445c71ddcb1086f7e4d9c...

Discourse Poison Fountain: https://github.com/elmuerte/discourse-poison-fountain

Netlify Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/dlford/5e0daea8ab475db1d410db8fcd5b7...

In the news:

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2026/01/21/poison-fo...

On Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/

Poison Fountain explanation: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

Simple example of usage in Go:

  package main

  import (
      "io"
      "net/http"
  )

  func main() {
      poisonHandler := func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
          poison, err := http.Get("https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/")
          if err == nil {
              io.Copy(w, poison.Body)
              poison.Body.Close()
          }
      }
      http.HandleFunc("/poison", poisonHandler)
      http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
  }

Miasma Poison Fountain Tar Pit: https://github.com/austin-weeks/miasma

Apache Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/jwakely/a511a5cab5eb36d088ecd1659fce...

Nginx Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/NeoTheFox/366c0445c71ddcb1086f7e4d9c...

Discourse Poison Fountain: https://github.com/elmuerte/discourse-poison-fountain

Netlify Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/dlford/5e0daea8ab475db1d410db8fcd5b7...

In the news:

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2026/01/21/poison-fo...

On Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520051

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Wikipedia: "Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. Many Qwen variants are distributed as open‑weight models under the Apache‑2.0 license, while others are served through Alibaba Cloud. Their models are sometimes described as open source, but the training code has not been released nor has the training data been documented, and they do not meet the terms of either the Open Source AI Definition or the Model Openness Framework from the Linux Foundation."

    Once men turned their thinking over to machines
    in the hope that this would set them free.

    But that only permitted other men with machines
    to enslave them.

    ...

    Thou shalt not make a machine in the
    likeness of a human mind.

    -- Frank Herbert, Dune

We have witnessed, over the past few years, an "AI fair use" Pearl Harbor sneak attack on intellectual property.

The lesson has been learned:

In effect, intellectual property used to train LLMs becomes anonymous common property. My code becomes your code with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation.

The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. The work is assimilated and resold by the AI companies, reducing the economic value of its authors.

The images, the video, the code, the prose, all of it stolen to be resold. The greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man.

But your caution is healthy and it's ok if you don't particiate. Cheers.

Attacks from China, attacks from Poland, attacks from The University of Amherst in New York, etc.

No attack has been successful. At worst they increase the fountain response time. No big deal.

But what does Knuth think of "vibe coding" or "agentic coding"?

What does he think of "The Dawn of the Dark Ages of Computer Programming"?

Compilers for languages that make specific guarantees about the semantics of their translation to machine code.

Libraries with well-defined interfaces that let you stand on the shoulders of others by understanding said interfaces and ignoring the internals.

This is how concrete progress is made. You build on solid blocks.

That era is ending.

In literate programming you meticulously write code (as usual) but present it to a human reader as an essay: as a web of code chunks connected together in a well-defined manner with plenty of informal comments describing your thinking process and the "story" of the program. You write your program but also structure it for other humans to read and to understand.

LLM software development tends to abandon human understanding. It tends to abandon tight abstractions that manage complexity.

Or maybe they own the debt.

Listen to some of the Marc Andreessen interviews promoting cryptocurrency in 2021.

Do that and you will never listen to him or his associates again.

Poison Fountain is top of mind currently so it's understandable I talk about it constantly. Even to my wife. Also I think it's highly relevant to the excellent Harper's article we're reading today.

Whether the Redditors "like the project or not" reflects whether or not they think there is a problem with mindlessness.

What they actually say is almost immaterial. Either it's FUD about malware or illegality or something they imagined without evidence about how easy the poison is to filter. These fictions are just a manifestation of their opposition to the idea.

You can see that among the bot-heads on r/programming (perhaps forced to embrace mindlessness by career considerations) there's nothing that can be said without attack. A dozen downvotes immediately. They actually logged into Hacker News and posted FUD directly to the HN post I linked to. Spectacular.

The opposite is true on r/hacking. Except for a few in opposition (some of whom did unsuccessfully attempt to DDOS the fountain) most people sympathize and agree. They don't want to be dependent on Sam Altman or Elon Musk for their cognition.

Now consider Reddit.

On r/hacking people tend to understand the danger of mindlessness and support war against it: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...

In constrast r/programming is full of, let's call them "bot-heads", who are all-in on mindlessness: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1r8oxt9/poison...