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   Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 13-Feb-2026 23:22:16 JST Gabriele Svelto

   When talking about the energy consumed by LLMs don't be fooled by arguments focusing solely on the direct power consumption of these models, because they are externalizing a lot of it. Browsers are now doing proof-of-work calculations to access many websites, because websites need to protect themselves from AI scrapers. That takes power! Let that sink in: every computer, tablet or phone on earth is now consuming more power *every time it accesses a webpage* because of "AI".

   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Friday, 13-Feb-2026 23:27:35 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @gabrielesvelto Proof of Waste does absolutely nothing to stop LLM and other kind of pretend intelligence scrapers - as the attackers have racks and racks and racks or servers with plenty of processing power.
     
     It happens to mitigate poorly programmed scrapers, but those can be identified and bombed in other ways.
     
     Rather than attack the users with proprietary malware to achieve nothing, every last site host should rather feed as much slop and as many GNUzip bombs as possible to such scrapers, therefore putting an end to such scraping (it will be no longer be useful to scrape the whole internet, when all you get is slop).
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     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Friday, 13-Feb-2026 23:36:29 JST 翠星石

     in reply to

     • Zergling_man
     @Zergling_man @gabrielesvelto If you have a website that is actually used (for example, it hosts a software mirror), you will be hammered by LLM scrapers day and night until you start serving GNUzip bombs and then the scraping slows down somewhat.
   • Embed this notice
     Zergling_man (zergling_man@sacred.harpy.faith)'s status on Friday, 13-Feb-2026 23:36:31 JST Zergling_man

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     @Suiseiseki @gabrielesvelto >because websites need to protect themselves from AI scrapers
     [disputed claim]
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     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 15-Feb-2026 09:33:44 JST 翠星石

     in reply to

     • Zergling_man
     @Zergling_man @gabrielesvelto What does "~.:|:;~" do?
   • Embed this notice
     Zergling_man (zergling_man@sacred.harpy.faith)'s status on Sunday, 15-Feb-2026 09:33:46 JST Zergling_man

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     @Suiseiseki @gabrielesvelto I still think just sending them into a mirror maze is a more reliable trick.
     
     >you will be hammered by LLM scrapers day and night
     I had a bunch of them crawling over my gitea site for a while, indexing all sorts of weird intermediate objects that I didn't even know existed. I only noticed because I also got some 4k sign-ups, so after dealing with that I decided to fuck with them:
     
     if ($http_user_agent ~* "(claudebot|amazonbot|gptbot)")
     {
     return 418 "~.:|:;~";
     }