busybee

People often talk about how bad AI is for the environment, but only focus on the operation of the LLMs themselves. They seem to ignore the much larger impact of what the AI scrapers are doing: not only do those take massive amounts of energy and bandwidth to run, but they’re impacting every single website operator on the planet by increasing their server requirements and bandwidth utilizatoin as well. And this makes it everyone’s problem, since everyone ends up having to foot the bill. It’s asinine and disgusting.

At one point, fully 94% of all of my web traffic was coming from a single botnet like this. These bots do not respect robots.txt or the nofollow link rels that I put on my site to prevent robots from getting stuck in a trap of navigating every single tag combination on my site, and it’s ridiculous just how many resources — both mine and theirs — are constantly being wasted like this.

I’ve been using the nginx ultimate bad bot blocker to subscribe to lists of known bots, but this one particular botnet (which operates on Alibaba’s subnets) has gotten ridiculous, and enough is enough.

So, I finally did something I should have done ages ago, and set up UFW and set up some basic rules.

UPDATE: This article has started getting linked to from elsewhere (including Coyote’s excellent article about the problem), but I no longer use this approach for blocking crawlers as it’s become completely ineffective thanks to the crawlers now behaving like a massive DDoS. These days I’m using a combination of gated access, sentience checks, and, unfortunately, CloudFlare UPDATE TO THE UPDATE no I’m not.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I’ve had to go back to using this technique selectively as some of the crawlers have managed to get around my other mitigations. If only these bot authors would spend 1% as much time on making their bots not be utterly broken as they do on trying to inflict themselves on everyone.

Okay so a couple months ago I finally rearranged my bedroom, having spent four years here and finally realizing that the layout could be a lot better. It was a one-day project where I was just rearranging stuff and it’s made a huge difference to my quality of life, but it didn’t require any cash outlay, just a lot of energy and such.

While considering that stuff I also started to consider a rearrangement of my living room (for the same reasons), and Sunday I started to enact that plan, only to quickly discover that the particular furniture I have wasn’t a good fit for things and that my idea would make a bunch of aspects of my living room way worse.

My pain flareup is finally subsiding today, and also I had a followup appointment with my ENT and another CT scan on my sinuses, which found that I do not currently have sinus polyps, although I do have a mild deviated septum. The ENT thinks it’s not necessary to get surgery and that I can just continue to manage the occasional sinus infections as they come up, and that my usual ongoing management strategies are the way to go (which I assume means saline rinses and Sudafed, although we didn’t actually discuss those at all).

Here’s some stuff about stuff.

The last few days I’ve been having yet another awful chronic pain flareup. So it’s been one of those time periods when I kind of wish I didn’t have a body, or at least didn’t have to exist so much.

This time I don’t even know what brought it on, it just kind of came out of the blue, after a whole week of being too fatigued to do anything substantial.

I’m trying to finish up my remaining commitments for strawberry jam although everyone waiting for music from me is understanding and not in a huge rush. There’s one piece I want to get done today because the team is trying to wrap up development today but they also waited until the last minute to give me a specification for what they wanted so I’m not feeling too bad if I can’t get anything done for them, I guess.

For now I’m just going with Notion. Some aspects of its UI really piss me off and I especially wish I could turn off the AI bullshit and get it to stop trying to guess what I mean when I’m trying to FUCKING TELL IT WHAT I MEAN (especially since it always gets it wrong, but its guess overrides what I’m trying to write in the first place, please software developers stop doing this shit!!!) but it at least gives me the project/task nesting I need and its workflow is flexible enough that I can add the columns that I need.

The various responses I’ve gotten to yesterday’s post tell me that I need to be a bit more specific about what I mean by a “project,” because how it relates to my work is very different than how the various project-tracking tools do it.

Project-tracking tools think of a project as being a distinct set of work items, often shared by an entire team, going for a single end-goal deliverable. The tasks for a single project live on the project’s own board, and they do not intermingle.

However, in my situation, I am making music for a whole bunch of separate projects (external to me and my own planning), but which I want to all have visible in a single place. Some of these projects might only need one track. Some of them might need a dozen or so.