I do want to add some more gibberish generation to mine. Once a visitor hits the honeypot route it does replace the rest of the site content with nonsense but I think it'd be fun to have it spewing really daft, really long LLM-generated essays on toasters.

I also explicitly tell all crawlers not to index the images on my site, actually, so I feel even better about serving the ones that do complete junk.

Not sure why I get more crawler traffic than I do legitimate traffic tbh - it's a relatively new website that I've been trying to sort out the SEO for as I'm trying to get photography work, so it's probably started cropping up on the radar of scrapers looking for training data.

Elixir's really fun to do this in because the BEAM will let you have hundreds of thousands of processes sat around doing nothing quite happily, so slow IO and such is something it's weirdly well-suited to.

This is on my photography site so I'm less fussed about them harvesting my writing, and more about causing problems for image harvesters. I'm sure they'll get some stuff anyway but at least one bot got stuck in a 400 page hellhole earlier today so I'm overall very pleased :D

https://ibb.co/mCgXPZPg https://ibb.co/qFxVRQGW https://ibb.co/9m6xV1xg

I only just added the token wasting measure so I'm really curious to see what happens if another bot loads over 400 pages.

Instead of the proof-of-work system of Anubis, I've gone down the iocaine route but implemented it in my application itself, as it's built in Elixir and causing problems for scrapers is really fun when it takes almost no server resources.

Currently I trick bad scrapers into a fake infinite black hole path with the promise of tasty data, then serve images to them one byte at a time over 15 minutes (after sending the header quickly), bloat the responses to cost them tokens, and randomly return AI generated images of sexy toasters. I have an admin dashboard with a little leaderboard for which ones get the most stuffed, and it keeps my heart warm on these wet autumn evenings.

I tried to find an article covering this but I've had no luck, so I'm just going off memory here, but I'm pretty certain that's all that was required.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471603

Points: 2

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I'm retired from programming professionally and I liked using Sourcehut for my personal projects because it just got out of my way, and I could put my mostly-old open source projects up there without worrying about people trying to contribute to them thanks to the friction of the system. I do slop-code hobby projects because I'm pretty much done with programming for fun now, but they're always private and I know that my relative load is low as I don't do much different from how I would personally use it.

Personally I'm in favour of blocking LLM pull requests/merge requests/patches to open source repos - the sheer volume of crap is out of this world. I saw a repo with 1.1k unmerged PRs yesterday! The code can be from an LLM but the request to merge it damn well better be written by a human. I'm not going to put effort into reviewing something someone else couldn't be bothered to even write a blurb for.

But for private projects, just shove a rate limiter on the endpoints and be done with it.

Lately I'm very conflicted about software development as a whole. I've always aspired to be good, both in my work and in my relationship with others in the industry. But I can't be arsed any more - the joy has gone out of software, and I just want it to be done and out of my way. And now I have to move my photography portfolio repo that has fewer commits per day than I could write by hand, because there can't be grey areas or compromise on the modern internet.

I used to work for GitLab, for what it's worth (and they've gone quite far down the AI toilet), and I honestly don't think I can be arsed setting up that or anything else. I might as well just shove bare repos on my NAS and go do something I actually enjoy.

Being principled in your choice of services as an individual these days is challenging, as so many companies pursue money over all else. It is doable, however, and Kagi won't feature in my life again no matter how many cool features they add. The internet has become such a cesspit that it warms my heart to know there are still other people who believe in being good and principled, not just making money.

It was absurdly cheap for its spec (£260 is what I paid, delivered) and can be run entirely without internet access with no issues. People were a bit miffed when they announced a v2 with multi-filament support, but they just announced an addon to upgrade the first version to a similar spec and it's again really cheap - £55 delivered here in the UK.

If I was printing more professionally I'd probably go for a Prusa, but the cost/benefit isn't there for someone new to it, unless you have plenty of dosh - in which case go for it. As someone getting into it, the price of the Centauri Carbon is so reasonable that it's hard to argue against it.

1. One of the bed temperature sensors reported a fault, this was a loose connection and took about 10 minutes to open and reseat, which was nice

2. I sometimes get an error in Chinese that blocks a print and requires pressing a continue button on the touchscreen. I've tried translating this and I have no idea what it's on about, so if anyone does know what it is then lemme know. Doesn't cause me much trouble though

Overall I'm really pleased with it - it's pretty much a bargain. Mine has never been connected to the internet and very rarely has print failures (and they're nearly all my fault when I have had them). I've ordered the multi-filament addon which they've just announced, and I was pleased to see them offer that as an upgrade for purchasers of the first model.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222092

Points: 2

# Comments: 0