RIP.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

RIP. Another feed gone from my RSS reader, because the author fully succumbed to AI propaganda and doomerism.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

Yes, will rant about it, but bedtime stories first.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

In today's episode of "algernon goes unfiltered on fedi instead of writing a blog post", he will talk about why the advice of "You probably shouldn't block AI bots from your website" is a bad advice, and why you should do the exact opposite.

Kind of.

I mean, you shouldn't block them, that much I agree. You should serve them garbage. But lets not rush ahead yet!

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

But that's how progress works: there are winners and there are losers.

Dude. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of "progress". Progress means moving forward, to grow. The slop machines don't do that.

These bastards are killing the open web, moving us backwards by making it even harder to self-host anything, driving us towards centralization, which is the exact opposite of progress.

They steal and plunder, and make the life of everyone outside the billionaire / fascist class miserable. That is not progress.

Companies keep firing people "because AI will take over their jobs", only to re-hire them at lower wage, because the AI absolutely can't. This is not progress.

It's being pushed and forced on us. That is not progress.

And the bit about winners and losers? The fucking bubble is bursting. Who the fuck do you think will win? The billionaires and fascists.

Why the everlinving fuck should we concede to them?

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

Even if it's painful, losers need to adapt

So, you're telling me we should bend over and get fucked?

How about no.

"losers need to adapt" my ass. Humanity prevailed to this day because we fucking didn't give up.

Sure, the world is on fire, our leaders and the elite are driving us towards catastrophe. But that is all the more reason to not bend over. Bending over is not serving progress.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

While we, the content publishers, are the clear losers of the AI revolution

What revolution, my man? What revolution? Large scale fraud is not revolution.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

it's also inevitable.

Oh, please. Cryptocurrency was inevitable. NFTs were inevitable. Web3 was inevitable. Fascism was inevitable. Gun deaths are inevitable. Now AI is inevitable.

Considering past hype cycles, I remain unconvinced.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

AI chat is a better search experience than traditional search engines

Weeelll.... only because traditional search engines are full of ads and scam, and the slop machines filled the internet with garbage, which these search engines keep pumping up.

Traditional search engines became crap the moment advertisement found its way there, and the moment they became generic and all-encompassing.

I've been using my own search engine (a YaCy instance) for the past few years, and it continues to work remarkably well, thank you very much. Better than any slop machine, better than any traditional search engine.

If you look past the shitstained windows of BigTech's walled garden, there's a whole world of beautiful, working internet out there. Free of advertisement, free of dark patterns, free of the slop machines.

The trick is to not believe their lies.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

we need to prepare for a world where AI agents will fulfill most tasks that we are currently doing with a keyboard and a mouse.

Oh, yeah, right, where we needed to prepare for a world where cash wouldn't exist, banks wouldn't exist, and we'd all be paying with Bitcoin and live in a perfect dream world of decentralized finance! Wooo-hoo!

Same way we needed to prepare for a world where we'd strap on some goggles and do everything in a Metaverse!

Those were inevitable too. Their proponents spent a great deal of money and time and effort despearetly trying to find some use for any of that shit.

They failed. And so will the slop machines.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

Most importantly, as with all security measures, trying to stop bots can have a negative impact on the experience of real humans, and I refuse to disrespect the time of my readers with CAPTCHAs and other annyoances.

That, I agree with. Luckily, the bots are dumb as fuck. Three ifs in a trenchcoat gets rid of most of them, and the remaining few, even those that piggy-back on real browsers, will usually crawl URLs collected by the cheap, dumb bots.

Catch most of them cheaply, serve them garbage, with URLs you can later identify as being garbage, and then none of them will get through.

That is why you actually shouldn't block them. If you block them, you won't have the advantage of poisoned URLs, so if/when they come back using real browsers, you'll have a much harder time to fight them.

See the attached screenshot! Those green parts of the graph? "Generated URLs". All of those bots evaded every other defense, but got caught there. That's only possible because I served them poisoned URLs, and nothing else. They never saw a single good one. I didn't lead them into a trap, I straight up served them garbage with no way out.

And that allowed me to continue defending against them, when the rest of my defenses were evaded. That let me keep them at bay.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

In practice, letting bots in is not really expensive

For you, maybe. My €3/month VPS was really unhappy with well over 1k request / second. Just handling TLS, looking at the URL and aborting the connection kept Caddy spinning at 1.5 vCores.

Granted, Caddy is not the most efficient server, but even the best one would have had trouble keeping up.

And this doesn't even include serving anything. If you serve static content, unless you pre-compress it, you'd pay a huge compression tax. Or if you don't compress it, you waste a lot of bandwidth. Perhaps not yours, if you're uncapped, but your visitor may not be. Your human visitor may not be as fortunate as you are.

If you are a victim of the "bandwidth mafia", it's time to take your stuff out and move.

Fuck off you privileged elitist prick. I'm glad you have the option. Not all of us do.

[algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club]

I will remain a staunch Malicious Actor. I will embrace that title, and wear the badge with pride. It goes well with being a Luddite.

I like computers, I like technology. But I like humans a whole lot more, and believe that technology and progress should benefit us. If it hurts us, if we feel like losers, it is not progress, and we should, nay, we need to fight it.

So I will.

I will continue to serve the bots garbage, because that benefits me, and benefits my human visitors, because my sites aren't knocked offline by the crawler DDoS. I will continue serving them garbage, because that makes it easier to defend against them.

I will serve them garbage because they fucking deserve it.

And you know what? Having survived the attack the other day, seeing them disappear a day later makes me feel like a winner.

Every thwarted attempt, every crashed Chrome-riding fucker, evrey visit into the maze is a victory. And I have tens of millions of tiny little victories a day.

11 months since I started working on iocaine. 11 months of winning every day.

I don't know about you, but I'd call that spectacular success.