Butlerian Jihad
This page collects my blog posts on the topic of fighting off spam bots, search engine spiders and other non-humans wasting the precious resources we have on Earth.
Link tags: sysadmin
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Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries - Ars Technica
As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companies—extracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensation—risks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend.
Go To Hellman: AI bots are destroying Open Access
AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet.
FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:
LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.
Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale.
This matches my experience with The Session. In fact, while I had this article open in a tab, I had to go deal with a tsunami of large language model bots. It’s really fucking depressing.
Please stop legitimizing LLMs or AI image generators or GitHub Copilot or any of this garbage. I am begging you to stop using them, stop talking about them, stop making new ones, just stop. If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers and making every sysadmin you know miserable and ripping off code and books and art at scale and ruining our fucking democracy isn’t enough for you to leave this shit alone, what is?
Last.fm – the Blog · Various Positions
Last.fm are hiring. If you're London-based and in the job market, I can think of a lot worse places to work.
The Sysadmin Song
Geeky but good.