dgerard

joined 2 years ago
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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 50 minutes ago

it will explain its position with interpretive twerking

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Egan already told Hanson to fuck off in a previous story, Zendegi:

"My IQ is one hundred and sixty ... You can always reach me through my blog, Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future —"

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

jwz gave the game away, so i'll reveal:

the One Weird Trick for this week is that the bots pretend to be an old version of Chrome. So you can block on useragent

so I blocked old Chrome from hitting the expensive mediawiki call on rationalwiki and took our load average from 35 (unusable) to 0.8 (schweeet)

caution! this also blocks the archive sites, which pretend to be old chrome. I refined it to only block the expensive query on mediawiki, vary as appropriate.

nginx code:

        # block some bot UAs for complex requests
        # nginx doesn't do nested if, so we set a test variable
        # if $BOT is both Complex and Old, block as bot
        set $BOT "";
        if ($uri ~* (/w/index.php)) {
            set $BOT "C"; }

            if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/[2-9])) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
            if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/1[012])) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
            if ($http_user_agent ~* (Firefox/3)) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
            if ($http_user_agent ~* (MSIE)) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}

            if ($BOT = "CO") {
                return 503;}

you always return "503" not "403", because 403 says "fuck off" but the scrapers are used to seeing 503 from servers they've flattened.

I give this trick at least another week.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 1 hour ago (4 children)

why is this robot not sexy soyweiser

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 9 hours ago

sounds dumb as hell and I'm not surprised they avoided tagging me in then

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 13 points 20 hours ago

This discussion has made it clear to me that LLM enthusiasts do not value the time or preferences of open-source maintainers, willfully do not understand affirmative consent, and that I should take steps to explicitly ban the use of such tools in the open source projects I maintain.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I didn't see that thread. But I stand by the image as being perfect for the story on several specific points.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

"it's a tool" - a tool

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

this post has also broken containment in the wider world, the video's got thousands of views, I got 100+ subscribers on youtube and another $25/mo of patrons

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

this user has been escorted off the premises via the fourth floor window

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

you'll be waiting a while. it turns out "i'm not saying it's always programming.dev, but" was already in my previous ban reasons, and it was this time too.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

you must understand

Sam promised me all the eyeballs I could eat

All the eyeballs

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