It's how my mother died too, from years of heavy smoking. Not from lung cancer, but from respiratory failure. Do they think "AI" is going to cure that too? Seems pretty unlikely.

@ButchH11 @ai6yr

@jpoesen My two-person instance, my almost-no-traffic (well, NORMAL traffic generated by ACTUAL PERSONS) webserver... just hammered over and over and over every hour of every day.

In my more tinfoil-hat-y moments I figure it's part of a scheme to force out anything that isn't a centralized monetized corporate service.

@jpoesen in olden times scrapers were polite and clever enough to respect robots.txt files. Now they just don't care and scrape your whole site. Repeatedly. Don't even care about programmed hierarchies that go infinitely deep?

Maybe http servers should get new ways to slow down scrapers with superspeed requests .. by just adding a delay for quickly repeated requests from the same origin? Is that workable?

@jpoesen I run a small home web server, and I see the same thing. Bots, scans, attempts at logins, etc. it sucks.

@jpoesen

They should be found and prosecuted for their in-fact Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.

And it's not even a sane, reasonable, or effective use of their resources! Destroying their sources of training data just because they can't be bothered to cache the stolen intellectual property is a waste of their own resources, and self-harm to themseles.

@jpoesen and then there’s this advice from @mastohost https://mastodon.social/@mastohost/117361644335860123

@jpoesen there’s a Git issue at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/37359

@robmckenna @jpoesen Yes, blocking countries used to work. Now that Residential-Proxies-as-a-Service are a thing, the requests are coming from everywhere.

@dltj @jpoesen we had to block America from some of our servers a couple of years ago.
Got lots of emails from nice American scholars/librarians asking for PDFs. Delighted to send them of course.

@jpoesen I work for a company that hosts public-facing library catalogs. There is now an increasing tax just to put something on the web: bandwidth, web application firewalls, engineering time squashing rude scrapers…

The Internet used to be a nice place to be.

My mastodon instance of 1 user is getting hammered to its limits by AI scrapers.

Gigabytes of cached data and bandwidth for absolutely nothing.

Low disk space. Energy spikes. Memory spikes. CPU spikes. Human labor...

The cost is truly staggering, and this is for a single instance belonging to a single, otherwise insignificant individual.

Imagine the scale of resource abuse, theft, and climate destruction across the internet.

Just so people can use a shitty #AI prompt on their shitty site.

Streets.mn is Seeking New Board Members: https://streets.mn/2026/10/14/streets-mn-is-seeking-new-board-members/

We here at Streets.mn are looking for passionate people to join our Board of Directors! Join us and keep our non-profit organization running. Do you want to help plan events, record a podcast episode, or grow the broader Twin Cities urbanist community? This is your chance to do just that!

The first two-thirds of “Whalefall” are genuinely compelling moviemaking. But the way it deals with the protagonist's history of childhood abuse left a bad taste in our reviewer's mouth. https://twincitiesgeek.com/2026/10/whalefall-is-swallowed-whole-by-bad-messaging/

"Say it's only a paper moon"

@lindamciver @Su_G Thank you Linda. I would appreciate any support getting the word out about my book because today I found out that Geoff Hinton's publisher is moving up his book's publication date and I'm pretty sure its because of my book. And his book is all about the cults' prophecies so now I not only have to counteract these bozos but a book by a so-called Nobel Prize winning chief bozo coming out 2 weeks before mine 🙄

I'm so exhausted by the constant struggle to debunk the AI cult hype. I find myself turning to the work of @timnitGebru @ketan, @emilymbender and @pluralistic to try to break the cycle and boost my determination. Who else do you seek out that is making sense?

@lindamciver @Su_G

Adam Becker wrote the book More Everything Forever. www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/9781541619593/

Gil Duran wrote The Nerd Reich: bookshop.org/p/books/the-nerd-reich-silicon-valley-fascism-and-the-war-on-democracy-gil-dur-n/a6f6f0dce1150339

And you can also preorder my own upcoming book https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Deep-Unlearning/Timnit-Gebru/9781668093078. Honestly I hadn't realized how long I've had to deal with these people for until I wrote my book 😡

@Rye Yes. There are many. None have near the number of people that monsterdon does. Are a little easier to keep up with. #westwed #fridaythrillerclub #sundayfunnies #mondayactionmovie #kungfusat are all movie watch parties.

Send in any questions for #BikeNite for this Friday! See below.
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Next #BikeNite is this Friday at 4pm Pacific standard time (UTC-8)!

This is our weekly call for questions. Reply with any you'd like me to add to the discussion on Friday. Please add the BikeNitePQ hashtag so it's easier to find a Proposed Question. There is room for more!

(BikeNite is a Q&A type discussion on the Fediverse.) #BikeTooter cc @bikenite