It's a statically generated React site I deploy on Netlify. About ten days ago I started incurring 30GB of data per day from user agents indicating they're using Prerender. At this pace almost all of that will push me past the 1TB allotted for my plan, so I'm looking at an extra ~$500USD a month for the extra bandwdith boosters.

I'm gonna try the robots.txt options, but I'm doubtful this will be effective in the long run. Many other options aren't available if I want to continue using a SaaS like Netlify.

My initial thoughts are to either move to Cloudflare Pages/Workers where bandwidth is unlimited, or make an edge function that parses the user agent and hope it's effective enough. That'd be about $60 in edge function invocations.

I've got so many better things to do than play whack-a-mole on user agents and, when failing, pay this scraping ransom.

Can I just say fuck all y'all AI harvesters? This is a popular free service that helps get people off of their Microsoft dependency and live their lives on a libre operating system. You wanna leech on that? Fine, download the data dumps I already offer on an ODbL license instead of making me wonder why I fucking bother.

Now that said, if we did find alien life, how would your feelings about God change?

People get attached to bots quick I guess! I recommend: 1) communicate to the provisional user how many moore messages they get before having to login and 2) persisting those pre-auth chat histories.

The commander resisted the start of the first live TV broadcast in space for safety reasons. The mission had both technical and public relations goals, and it's fascinating to see these in understandable conflict.

Google I feel's is this age's General Electric. They already borrowed all the wrong ideas from Jack Welch. Most people, if they dug a bit, just want Google to keep what it's already built running and not charge for it. It's just not a place you expect radically good innovation to come from anymore. So, like your Whirlpool dishwasher, you expect it to do its thing, never rave about it to anyone, and moan about it when it breaks.

Forums will be forums and the trolls get the spotlight. Pixel phones, particularly the cheaper 'a' models, are very popular and good value. What significant things are much better on non-Google Android phones?

How to fund the development of a risky but long-term valuable new platform? Whomever was calling the shots on that question failed spectacularly and in a way that technology companies usually don't. You're already losing hundreds of millions making the tech, why not spend a few more loss-leading the user growth?