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Sacrificing accessibility for not getting web scraped

tilschuenemann.de

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Re: Sacrificing accessibility for not getting web scraped

#41
post #23
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't use Claude Code. I just pasted it directly into the web interface and said "I can't read this, can you help?" and then I excerpted the result so you sighted folks didn't have to reread, you could just verify the content matched. So basically this person has put up a big "fuck you" sign to people like me... while at the same time not protecting their content from actual AI (if this technique actually caught o…

But it's "made with ♥" (the footer says so). (He's broken mainstream browsers, too - ctrl+f doesn't work in the page.) GPT 5.2 extracted the correct text, but it definitely struggled - 3m36s, and it had to write a script to do it, and it messed up some of the formatting. It actually found this thread, but rejected that as a solution in the CoT: "The search result gives a decoded excerpt, which seems correct, but I’d…

This is the point I was making downthread: no scraper will use 3m36s of frontier LLM time to get <100 KB of data. This is why his method would technically achieve what he asked for. Someone alluded to this further down the thread, but I wonder if one-to-one letter substitution specifically would still expose some extractable information to the LLM, even without decoding.

Re: Sacrificing accessibility for not getting web scraped

#42
post #33
post #18

At least the blog author is self-aware about making accessibility worse? I just found it funny how reactionary and backfire-y this was. (In politics, a reactionary is a person who favors a return to a previous state of society which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.)

I sympathize with the reactionary. Obviously there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, but it would be nice to live in that world where writing stuff helped human readers more than it helped billion-dollar corporations.

You do still help human readers. I've been absolutely having the joy of my life for example reading the advent of compiler optimization posts that surface here everyday.

Granted there is a lot of AI slop here also now but I'm still glad humans write so that I can read and we can discuss here!

Re: Sacrificing accessibility for not getting web scraped

#43
post #37
post #14

Jeez, all this "LLM avoidance" is so horribly silly. We will remember it in 10 years like we now remember the decision to setup our great European cookie popup laws. As well intentioned, but very detrimental. You will not stop scrapers. Period. They will just pay for a service like firecrawl that will fix it for them. Here in Poland one of the most notorious sites implementing anti-bot tech is our domestic eBay compe…

> You will not stop scrapers. That's no reason to go down without a fight! > Second argument against these "protections" is, there are people behind bots That doesn't hold much water in the context of hosting a blog.

> That's no reason to go down without a fight!

I suppose, if you assign no value to your time and don't care at all about any collateral damage.

Otherwise, assuming it's true, it sure is a damned good reason to go down without a fight.

Re: Sacrificing accessibility for not getting web scraped

#44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You will not stop scrapers. That's no reason to go down without a fight! > Second argument against these "protections" is, there are people behind bots That doesn't hold much water in the context of hosting a blog.

> That's no reason to go down without a fight! I suppose, if you assign no value to your time and don't care at all about any collateral damage. Otherwise, assuming it's true, it sure is a damned good reason to go down without a fight.

> if you assign no value to your time

We're talking about a personal blog; this sort of fun is what they're made of.

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