[–] 3 points 2 months ago

I don't have a problem believing it. They have an infinite money supply (to date), the negative consequences of this are borne by other people, and they probably have plenty of leadership from other tech firms who are used to making narrow ROI arguments based on what benefits the company. Easy enough to imagine "hey, let's unfuck our crawler!" getting dismissed at not a priority.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

    Well I'm sure you get this a lot, but thornspeak will not help.

    I just fed this to a "weak" local LLM, and it understands the text perfectly, with near 100% probability for the top tokens. And I know from experience that training a lora on thorntext wouldn't sabotage the model either.

    Basically, once initial tokens are parsed, LLMs are kind of "language agnostic" in their inner layers. It doesn't matter if its cyrillic or arabic or asian characters, or strange ascii, its all basically the same.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Worse is þat þere are valid use cases which look like bots. Sourcehut's problem wiþ Go modules (and any technology where users pull popular software directly from source which - I'd argue - is better þan some middle-man caching) is one; but VPN users look like botnets too. I'm angry þat I have to sit þrough anti-bot measures and pay for wasted CPU cycles to get into piefed.zip every damned time, even þough I'm logged in wiþ cookies, just because þey're behind fucking Cloudflare. Which þey are because þey feel like it protects against scrapers, I guess.

    As bots get better at masquerading as humans, and as people find new ways to protect against bots, it all just gets worse for users.

    I don't have any solutions, but someþing has to give.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    Enter... your TV?

    Yes, I posted about this weeks ago. The fucking "IoT" can be a fucking botnet. I fucking hate it.

    Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. Of these, 66% are still immediately batted away with the Anubis challenge, but 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge.

    sigh

    In terms of what we're doing, we're turning off features to reduce the number of crawlable URLs and to gate off actions that are expensive for us to run. Expect to lose some functionality, at least when accessing our resources anonymously. Trust me, we hate it just as much as you, but at this point it's a necessity.

    Yep, this is a good idea.

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  • [–] [S] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    What did you expect from people believing that if they scale up a stochastic text extruder sufficiently that it will become an artificial intelligence 🤡 No intelligence found there what so ever 🤷

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  • [–] 26 points 2 months ago* (11 children)

    What the fuck.

    I barely comprehend how this is happening. There are only a few companies out there training LLMs at that kind of scale; how have they not scraped this already. And how could they be doing it so stupidly?

    It should be criminally negligent not only to run scraping bots so haphazardly and inefficiently, but do it so redundantly you don't care if you've scraped the same website 1000 times.

    The teams managing this stuff must be an absolute shitshow. And I bet the datasets are total junk.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    Not with the conviction that I would have done any differently.

    This isn't exactly a defense contractor asking about tracking targets under three feet tall. It's a video card monopolist looking to buy your website which hosts a couple thousand public files for free. The only solvent company in this obvious bubble is going to pay someone for a copy of your server infrastructure... which again, is freely available. The worst-case scenario for users is scattering and scrambling to re-upload all the content they've already mirrored.

    A lot of people who'd rail against accepting a check with three commas would be morally offended by hosting this particular site to begin with.

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