151–160 of 342 posts
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So what would you suggest as an alternative if I have a site where I don’t want the content used for LLM training?
Auth? Because whatever Cloudflare is doing isn't going to stop anyone serious about scraping data.
I've heard lots of people on HN complaining about bot traffic bogging down their websites, and as a website operator myself I'm honestly puzzled. If you're already using Cloudflare, some basic cache configuration should guarantee that most bot traffic hits the cache and doesn't bog down your servers. And even if you don't want to do that, bandwidth and CPU are so cheap these days that it shouldn't make a difference.…
I too am a bit confused / mystified at the strong reaction. But I do expect a lot of badly optimized sites that just want out. I struggle to think of a web related library that has spread faster than Anubis checker. It's everywhere now! https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis I'm surprised we don't see more efforts to rate limit. I assume many of these are distributed crawlers, but it feels like there's got to be pools o…
- opposition to generative AI in general
- a view that AI, unlike search which also relies on crawling, offers you no benefits in return
- crawlers from the AI firms being less well-behaved than the legacy search crawlers, not obeying robots.txt, crawling more often, more aggressively, more completely, more redundantly, from more widely-distributed addresses
- companies sneaking in AI crawling underneath their existing tolerated/whitelisted user-agents (Facebook was pretty clearly doing this with "facebookexternalhit" that people would have allowed to get Facebook previews; they eventually made a new agent for their crawling activity)
- a simultaneous huge spike in obvious crawler activity with spoofed user agents: e.g. a constant random cycling between every version of Chrome or Firefox or any browser ever released; who this is or how many different actors it is and whether they're even doing crawling for AI, who knows, but it's a fair bet.
Better optimization and caching can make this all not matter so much but not everything can be cached, and plenty of small operations got by just fine without all this extra traffic, and would get by just fine without it, so can you really blame them for turning to blocking?
I’ve been using this for a while on my mastodon server and after a few tweaks to make sure it wasn’t blocking legit traffic it’s been really working great. Between Microsoft and Meta, they were hitting my services more than any other traffic combined which says a lot of you know how noisy mastodon can be. Server load went down dramatically. It also completely put a stop to perplexity as far as I can tell. And the rob…
Have you considered Anubis? I know it's harder to install, but personally, I think the point of Mastodon is trying to avoid centralization where possible, and CloudFlare is one of the corporations that are keeping the internet centralized.
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I write online (comments here, open source software, blogging, etc) because I have ideas I want to share. Whether it's "I did a thing and here's how" or "we should change policy in this specific way" or "does anyone know how to X" I'm happy for this to go into training models just like I'm happy for it to go into humans reading.
Tbh, that content I'm mostly fine with. My only real issue is that people are making trillions off the free labor of people like you and me, giving less time to create that OSS and blogs. But this isn't new to AI, it is just scaled. What I do care about is the theft of my identity. A person may learn from the words I write but that person doesn't end up mimicking the way I write. They are still uniquely themselves. I…
> people are making trillions off the free labor of people like you and me
I read "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" to also include LLMs and especially the cases that we most deeply disagree with.
Either we believe in the principles of OSS or we do not. If you do not like the idea of your intellectual property being used for commercial purposes then this model is definitely not for you.
There is no shame in keeping your source code and other IP a secret. If you have strong expectations of being compensated for your work, then perhaps a different licensing and distribution model is what you are after.
> that information is then being locked behinds paywalls and becoming more difficult to be found through search
Sure - If you give up and delete everything. No one is forcing you to put your blog and GH repos behind a paywall.
Few people realise that virtually everything we do online has, until this point, been free training to make OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. richer while cutting humans--the ones who produced the value--out of the loop. It might be too little, too late, at this juncture, and this particular solution doesn't seem too innovative. However, it is directionally 100% correct, and let's hope for massively more innovation in defendin…
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I write online (comments here, open source software, blogging, etc) because I have ideas I want to share. Whether it's "I did a thing and here's how" or "we should change policy in this specific way" or "does anyone know how to X" I'm happy for this to go into training models just like I'm happy for it to go into humans reading.
Thank you for having this attitude. I have never attempted any blogging because I always figured no one is actually going to read it. With LLMs, however, I know they will. I actually see this as a motivation to blog, as we are in a position to shape this emerging knowledge base. I don't find it discouraging that others may be profiting off our freely published work, just as I myself have benefited tremendously from o…
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With that opinion, are you also suggesting that we ban ad blockers? Because it's better I not click & consume resources than click and not be served ads, basically just costing the host money. It means sense to allow for RAG in the same way that search engines provide a snippet of an important chunk of the page. A blog author could not complain that their blog is getting ragged when they're extremely liable to be Goo…
What I want to know is if the flood of scraping everyone has been complaining about is coming from people trying to scrape for training or bots doing RAG search. I get that everyone wants data, but presumably the big players already scraped the web. Do they really need to do it again? Or is it bit players reproducing data that's likely already in the training set? Or is it really that valuable to have your own scrape…
And I'm talking about ecommerce websites, with their bot scraping every variation of each product, multiple times a day.
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valid. ...but OTOH it's their customers who want all of that and pay to get that, because the alternative is worse. rock and a hard place.
Right - do I want them getting some info from me, or do I want my IP address exposed? Besides CloudFront, which still costs money, what other option is there for semi-privacy and caching for free?
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It's cloudflare and parasites like them that will make the internet un-free. It's already happening, I'm either blocked or back to 1998 load times be cause of "checking your browser". They are destroying the internet and will make it so only people who do approved things on approved browsers (meaning let advertising companies monetize their online activity) will get real access. Cloudflare isn't solving a problem, th…
Yep this terrifies me, 100%. We’re slowly losing the open internet and the frog is being boiled slowly enough that people are very happy to defend the rising temperature. If DDoS wasn’t a scary enough boogeyman to get people to install Cloudflare as a man-in-the-middle on all their website traffic, maybe the threat of AI scrapers will do the trick? The thing about this slow slide is it’s always defensible. Someone ca…
* curl | bash
* Docker
* Anything that smacks of cryptocurrency or other scams
Just a standard repo for Debian and RHEL derived distros. Fully open source so everyone can use it. (apt/dnf install no-bad-actors)
Until that exists, using Cloudflare is inevitable.
It needs to be able to at least:
* provide some basic security (something to check for sql injection, etc)
* rate limiting
* User agent blocking
* IP address and ASN blocking
Make it easy to set up with sensible defaults and a way to subscribe to blocklists.
> If A.I. companies freely use data from various websites without permission or payment, people will be discouraged from creating new digital content I don't see a way out of this happening. AI fundamentally discourages other forms of digital interaction as it grows. Its mechanism of growing is killing other kinds of digital content. It will eventually kill the web, which is, ironically, its main source of food.