From 8af269fa02ac97e793e8909b2da22a3531acdab8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Lethe Beltane Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2024 20:40:16 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] fuck your AI and fuck your scrapers --- 2024_books.html | 18 ++++++++++++++++++ blog/2020/august/endgame.html | 2 +- blog/2022/january/worth.html | 2 +- blog/2022/october/email.html | 2 +- robots.txt | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ rollcall.html | 7 ------- 6 files changed, 47 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) delete mode 100755 rollcall.html diff --git a/2024_books.html b/2024_books.html index 8a91659..9360a00 100755 --- a/2024_books.html +++ b/2024_books.html @@ -71,6 +71,24 @@ 2024-W4 Fourth Wing Rebecca Yarros + An embarrassing amount of heterosexual sex. + + + 2024-W5 + Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing + Olga Mecking + + + + 2024-W6 + The Marriage of Opposites + Alice Hoffman + A library nearby is holding a winter reading challenge. This month is to read a book that takes place on an island. This was one of the recommended books. It came with a cute little bookmark of a cup of limeade. + + + 2024-W7 + A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry + Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides diff --git a/blog/2020/august/endgame.html b/blog/2020/august/endgame.html index abd2129..0f26d8f 100755 --- a/blog/2020/august/endgame.html +++ b/blog/2020/august/endgame.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

It feels like there is no viable middle ground anymore, even though intellectually I know there still is (for the time being). Either one is actively heading away from bloat or towards it. Either one is actively cutting corporations out of their life or exalting their virtues while sucking on the cock of VC money. Either one is desperately holding back the tide of aging and obsolescence or keeping up with the Joneses.

But will those picking the latter run to keep up with them when the tsunami comes? I am looking at two lifeboats and debating which one will be less likely to sink.

The Goddess-as-muse argues with me as the long night wears on, as I grow more and more weary. "What is the endgame?" she asks me. What is the point of expending all this effort on optimizing my writing for the web at large when what I write, who I write for, already excludes 90% of its inhabitants from the get-go? Am I really doing myself a favor by leaving myself available to be picked apart, criticized without context, ravaged, by any old "used" from the silos? Would I really be doing myself a favor by hiding from them instead, marking the used off as a lost cause when maybe, by doing nothing, I could still convert maybe one?

-

She asks me to consider what I will do when I know I am nearing the end of my life. Likely I will gather up all of the writing of mine that has survived the test of time and bind it all up into a book, maybe two or three if the sheer volume is enough. I might submit my website to places like the Internet Archive. Heavens know I will not be able to keep the original online, whether through the money in my Vultr account running out or a malicious family member pulling the plug or just a simple server crash I am not around to rectify. Websites from the golden age of Discordia are almost all but gone, vanished, but their books remain.

+

She asks me to consider what I will do when I know I am nearing the end of my life. Likely I will gather up all of the writing of mine that has survived the test of time and bind it all up into a book, maybe two or three if the sheer volume is enough. I might submit my website to places like the Internet Archive. Heavens know I will not be able to keep the original online, whether through the money in my Vultr account running out or a malicious family member pulling the plug or just a simple server crash I am not around to rectify. Websites from the golden age of Discordia are almost all but gone, vanished, but their books remain.

When I read books on one of my devices, rarely do custom typography or CSS styles add any value to the book. I always immediately disable embedded fonts and adjust the line height and paragraph padding to my liking. When the book is in EPUB format, I strip those annoying publisher's ads from the ends of books, sometimes even convert chapter headings hardwritten as images into their textual equivalent. (Feed by M. T. Anderson, which I recently finished, has chapter heading images in a font so tiny I have to squint to read what each one says. And my eyes are still decent!) If the publisher has put the table of contents in the back of the book for whatever reason, I move it to the front of the book or delete it altogether with Calibre's tools.

I sound like one of the people slobbering all over the Gemini specification, writing scrolls' worth of screeds about "user sovereignty". Maybe this is what they meant. They know gussying up their words will mean nothing in the end, so they don't even try, just shove the duty of beautification onto the reader.

But doesn't a publisher at least have the duty of making the words readable?

diff --git a/blog/2022/january/worth.html b/blog/2022/january/worth.html index b5526eb..662e74c 100755 --- a/blog/2022/january/worth.html +++ b/blog/2022/january/worth.html @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@

I open my RSS feed reader. There's a post at the top of the screen. It's okay to be low-IQ, it reads. It's okay to be a follower. It's okay to not think. It's okay to not have a hobby or anything you're interested in. It's okay to accomplish absolutely nothing in life, do nothing, be nothing, become nothing.

And I find it so revolting, so viscerally upsetting, that I have to resist the urge to puke all over the keyboard and end up breaking yet another one of my laptops.

"I think I've found my criteria," I whisper to myself.

-

I'm not buying the propaganda that says I have to "slow down". Even though I've managed to free myself from the "life purpose" that demanded I make a piece of art far beyond my technical skills with no assistance whatsoever, there is still a voice in my head, an exhortation, to keep going and, at the very least, finish the book I'm working on before I die. Because what am I without the will to create? What am I without the words I build my mausoleum with? What kind of life would I have lived without pushing myself to do something sans the approval or assistance of my parents, with what feels like the whole of the world pushing back, demanding I crawl back into the cardboard box of mediocrity and stay there?

I look to my brothers for a guess, a potential example. I want to shake their shoulders, demand them to answer, "How do you live like this, never creating anything of your own volition? How does your soul survive only consuming, myopic, too lazy to see there's a whole world beyond this ivory tower? Is there even a soul still in your body? What are you allowing yourself to become?"

+

I'm not buying the propaganda that says I have to "slow down". Even though I've managed to free myself from the "life purpose" that demanded I make a piece of art far beyond my technical skills with no assistance whatsoever, there is still a voice in my head, an exhortation, to keep going and, at the very least, finish the book I'm working on before I die. Because what am I without the will to create? What am I without the words I build my mausoleum with? What kind of life would I have lived without pushing myself to do something sans the approval or assistance of my parents, with what feels like the whole of the world pushing back, demanding I crawl back into the cardboard box of mediocrity and stay there?

I look to my brothers for a guess, a potential example. I want to shake their shoulders, demand them to answer, "How do you live like this, never creating anything of your own volition? How does your soul survive only consuming, myopic, too lazy to see there's a whole world beyond this ivory tower? Is there even a soul still in your body? What are you allowing yourself to become?"

What am I, really?

Nobody else has ever offered to give me a whole world before. Nobody else has ever thought me worthy of that kind of freedom.

Even if I can't give you anything else? Another income, stability, a comfortable existence...

diff --git a/blog/2022/october/email.html b/blog/2022/october/email.html index d1450d0..6b09f69 100755 --- a/blog/2022/october/email.html +++ b/blog/2022/october/email.html @@ -15,7 +15,7 @@
-

The nice thing about being the admin of Let's Decentralize is that, whenever I wish there was a way to do something on the Internet anonymously, I already have a mental record of which of those things I can do simply by hopping onto Tor Browser. Need to look at a public Twitter feed? Peep that shit using a Nitter instance. Need to look up a weird health symptom or something potentially incriminating (like if it's spelled sodium nitrite with an I or nitrate with an A)? Searx instances have an awfully hard time tracking 127.0.0.1. Publishing code for a project that enables the user to do something illegal, like download massive amounts of music off Deezer? Codeberg and Notabug are pretty Tor-friendly, but you can do one better by using a hidden service.

+

The nice thing about being the admin of Let's Decentralize is that, whenever I wish there was a way to do something on the Internet anonymously, I already have a mental record of which of those things I can do simply by hopping onto Tor Browser. Need to look at a public Twitter feed? Peep that shit using a Nitter instance. Need to look up a weird health symptom or something potentially incriminating (like if it's spelled sodium nitrite with an I or nitrate with an A)? Searx instances have an awfully hard time tracking 127.0.0.1. Publishing code for a project that enables the user to do something illegal, like download massive amounts of music off Deezer? Codeberg and Notabug are pretty Tor-friendly, but you can do one better by using a hidden service.

Unfortunately I also have a bad habit of giving moids on the Internet the time of day and falling victim to Cunningham's law. So when I booted up Beres, the worst RSS feed reader in existence (I should know; I made the damn thing), and saw that our (formerly-)favorite moid was failing at technology yet again, naturally I felt the urgent need to respond. Thankfully I managed to calm myself before sitting down to write this post. I decided to not make you slog through a misandrist rant. You're welcome!

The argument of the aforementioned article is twofold:

    diff --git a/robots.txt b/robots.txt index 9ff128b..9710712 100755 --- a/robots.txt +++ b/robots.txt @@ -51,9 +51,35 @@ Disallow: / User-agent: SpiderLing Disallow: / +# Fuck your AI and fuck your scraping + +User-agent: CCBot +Disallow: / + +User-agent: ChatGPT-User +Disallow: / + User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / +User-agent: Google-Extended +Disallow: / + +User-agent: anthropic-ai +Disallow: / + +User-agent: Omgilibot +Disallow: / + +User-agent: Omgili +Disallow: / + +User-agent: FacebookBot +Disallow: / + +User-agent: Bytespider +Disallow: / + User-agent: * Disallow: / diff --git a/rollcall.html b/rollcall.html deleted file mode 100755 index 253b952..0000000 --- a/rollcall.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7 +0,0 @@ -

    The only reason you should be seeing this message is because

    -
      -
    1. you're on Freenet
      2. -
    2. I misconfigured my server
      3. -
    -

    The Hidden Rollcall is now on Let's Decentralize.

    -

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