finally we have constructed a completely unsexy robot

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

it will explain its position with interpretive twerking

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 —”

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.

why is this robot not sexy soyweiser

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

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.

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

“it’s a tool” - a tool

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

this user has been escorted off the premises via the fourth floor window

you’ll be waiting a while. it turns out “i’m not saying it’s always programming.dev, but” was already in my previous ban reasons, and it was this time too.

you must understand

Sam promised me all the eyeballs I could eat

All the eyeballs

to get you into ahem vibe coding

“i’m a lawyer i will file a CoC complaint”

You say that, but as an operator->sysadmin->devops I’m increasingly disconcerted by the rise of “devops” who can’t actually find their way around a Unix command prompt.

but look how delighted they are!

why is no-one demanding to know why the robot is so sexay

I think the guy’s in Russia! It’s a pretty common style.