busybee

So, I’ve been no fan of Gumroad for quite some time, and now they’ve gone even further all-in on using AI for everything and being especially gross about it.

Here’s some alternatives that are worth considering.

A couple days ago, the fucking crawlers ramped up their efforts to get past my 429 error page, so I finally set up a fail2ban rule that would block anything that kept on poking at things.

Hoo boy that was the wrong thing to do. When the bot farms started to detect that I was blocking them at the IP level, they started a massive onslaught coming from massive coordinated botnets that came from everywhere, because apparently the bot networks have decided that if they’re being blocked, they’re going to do whatever they can to get around the block, and they were specifically only making a single request from every one of the tens of thousands of IP addresses.

After several hours of frustration I decided to take this site down for a bit, and found that as soon as my server started responding with error 502 making it look like it was down for the count, the botnet slowed to a trickle. Which tells me that they don’t give a shit about polite requests to please slow down, but will stop when they think that the server has been overwhelmed and taken down. But of course as soon as I brought it back up and a single bot saw that my site was back up, so returned the torrent of bullshit.

So, I changed my anticrawl thing a bit where now a failed check sends an inappropriate error 502.

As a test I did see if I could put my existing automated sentience check on the error page and the bots were still trying to submit the form, so I’ve changed the form to be manual, and to require filling in the world’s simplest (and hopefully most accessible) CAPTCHA.

Repeated failures to get past the CAPTCHA will still result in an IP block, but for now it seems that this is keeping the bots at bay.

Anyway, as soon as I instituted that change on this site, they started hammering my music site instead, so I put the same mitigations in place there too, and now my server is out of crisis mode.

I hate that I have to spend so much fucking time on this fucking bullshit, and that the solution requires violating HTTP standards. Because that seems to be all that these fuckers understand.

I’m tired, y'all.

xkeeper posted a blog post about their issues running TCRF.

On a related note, here’s my webserver’s HTTP response code stats for today, across all of my websites:

fluffy@nautilus[/var/log/nginx] fluffy$ cut -f3 -d\" access.log | cut -f2 -d\  | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
      3 408
      4 502
      4 503
     10 410
     20 504
     56 307
     60 403
    165 406
    225 401
    462 499
    662 405
    670 500
    819 202
   1739 304
   2989 400
   6299 206
  16352 302
  32402 301
  52673 404
  83035 303
 192512 200
 308859 429

This is pretty disheartening.

A few days ago I happened upon this video about visual snow syndrome and I watched it even thinking that it was kinda clickbaity, since I always figured that visual snow syndrome is something that a lot of people have and it’s not a big deal.

But it actually made me realize that there’s a lot of stuff that’s possibly interconnected in my brain. Because one of the things the presenter mentioned is that it’s also linked to tinnitus and heightened pareidolia, which are both things I’ve always had. As well as migraines. And I wonder how much of my other brain shit is also explained by this?

Man, I am so tired of being tired.

On the plus side I’m finally working on music again. Hopefully I can keep up a more sustainable momentum this time around, because I really do want to finish Misfits sometime this year. But I also don’t want to do my usual multi-month crunch that leaves me even more drained when I’m done with an album.

I’ve also been working on the next version of the-protocol-formerly-called-Canimus. At present the tentative rebrand name is “Chorus” although I’m not totally sold on it (but my various collaborators like it). Anyway, for now folks can look at the WIP draft branch and maybe comment on it? I’ve gotten some really good feedback from some folks but more eyes would be better, I think.

I’ve also been doing voice training again, this time with a practitioner who knows what the hell she’s doing. It’s going okay.