Ah I was wondering if you’d find this thread

I did! It was lucky I found it so soon, I usually do a search once or twice a week - and it just happened I did one of those yesterday.

previously I kept running into articles about princess bride

That's normal, iocaine's name is from the Princess Bride, after all - and the book and the film are much better known than my software (as they should be).

Unfortunately I have nothing to host on the internet but I wonder it could be paired with something that traps the clanker in the maze with a proof of work in between each page. That way they are ingesting poison and working for it. I get a lot of joy from the idea of a swarm of bots stuck in an infinite maze.

The ingested poison doesn't do much, it'll get discarded before training. So if you have nothing to put behind iocaine, I don't think it's worth it to run it. It can generate endless amounts of garbage, yeah, and will tie up some crawler resources too, yup, but it also costs you bandwidth and CPU & RAM you otherwise wouldn't need to spend (since there's nothing behind it, there's no "more expensive" endpoint iocaine is taking a hit for). I don't think that's a good trade. As for Proof of Work: most bots won't bother, and for the few that do... the cost/benefit ratio is still bad if there's nothing behind iocaine.