dgerard

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

If you're after streams-crossing - this guy is a rationalist who does Manifold Markets

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

finally we have constructed a completely unsexy robot

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

someone said it was Kendrick and Drake, i thought it was two Drakes pointing at each other

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

it will explain its position with interpretive twerking

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Egan already told Hanson to fuck off in a previous story, Zendegi:

"My IQ is one hundred and sixty ... You can always reach me through my blog, Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future —"

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

jwz gave the game away, so i'll reveal:

the One Weird Trick for this week is that the bots pretend to be an old version of Chrome. So you can block on useragent

so I blocked old Chrome from hitting the expensive mediawiki call on rationalwiki and took our load average from 35 (unusable) to 0.8 (schweeet)

caution! this also blocks the archive sites, which pretend to be old chrome. I refined it to only block the expensive query on mediawiki, vary as appropriate.

nginx code:

        # block some bot UAs for complex requests
        # nginx doesn't do nested if, so we set a test variable
        # if $BOT is both Complex and Old, block as bot
        set $BOT "";
        if ($uri ~* (/w/index.php)) {
            set $BOT "C"; }

            if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/[2-9])) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
            if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/1[012])) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
            if ($http_user_agent ~* (Firefox/3)) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
            if ($http_user_agent ~* (MSIE)) {
                set $BOT "${BOT}O";}

            if ($BOT = "CO") {
                return 503;}

you always return "503" not "403", because 403 says "fuck off" but the scrapers are used to seeing 503 from servers they've flattened.

I give this trick at least another week.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 13 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

why is this robot not sexy soyweiser

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 4 weeks ago

sounds dumb as hell and I'm not surprised they avoided tagging me in then

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 15 points 4 weeks ago

This discussion has made it clear to me that LLM enthusiasts do not value the time or preferences of open-source maintainers, willfully do not understand affirmative consent, and that I should take steps to explicitly ban the use of such tools in the open source projects I maintain.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 3 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I didn't see that thread. But I stand by the image as being perfect for the story on several specific points.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 4 weeks ago

"it's a tool" - a tool

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 17 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

this post has also broken containment in the wider world, the video's got thousands of views, I got 100+ subscribers on youtube and another $25/mo of patrons

 

video - another outside broadcast from sunny suburban London

 

video version - see my back yard!

 

Video version, with clips of the bot-DJ

 

video version - not a fan of the Pixel 4a front camera

view more: ‹ prev next ›