Sadly, that’s not code Linus wrote. Nor one he merged. (It’s from git, copied from rsync, committed by Junio)

That would result in those fediverse servers theoretically requesting 333333 * 114MB = ~38Gigabyte/s.

On the other hand, if the site linked would not serve garbage, and would fit like 1Mb like a normal site, then this would be only ~325mb/s, and while that’s still high, it’s not the end of the world. If it’s a site that actually puts effort into being optimized, and a request fits in ~300kb (still a lot, in my book, for what is essentially a preview, with only tiny parts of the actual content loaded), then we’re looking at 95mb/s.

If said site puts effort into making their previews reasonable, and serve ~30kb, then that’s 9mb/s. It’s 3190 in the Year of Our Lady Discord. A potato can serve that.

I only serve bloat to AI crawlers.

map $http_user_agent $badagent {
  default     0;
  # list of AI crawler user agents in "~crawler 1" format
}

if ($badagent) {
   rewrite ^ /gpt;
}

location /gpt {
  proxy_pass https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse163/20wi/files/lectures/L04/bee-movie.txt;
}

…is a wonderful thing to put in my nginx config. (you can try curl -Is -H "User-Agent: GPTBot" https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/robots.txt | grep content-length: to see it in action ;))

…and here I am, running a blog that if it gets 15k hits a second, it won’t even bat an eye, and I could run it on a potato. Probably because I don’t serve hundreds of megabytes of garbage to visitors. (The preview image is also controllable iirc, so just, like, set it to something reasonably sized.)

There are no bugs. Just happy little accidental features.

There’s a very easy solution that lets you rest easy that your instance is how you want it to be: don’t do open registration. Vet the people you invite, and job done. If you want to be even safer, don’t post publicly - followers only. If you require follower approval, you can do some basic checks to see that whoever sends a follow request is someone you’re okay interacting with. This works on the microblogging side of the Fediverse quite well, today.

What I’m trying to say is that with registrations requiring admin approval gets you 99% of the way there, without needing anything more complex than that.

…and you think 14-17 year olds won’t circumvent this in mere seconds? Like, they’d just sign up at an instance that doesn’t implement these labels, or doesn’t care about them, or use their parents accounts, or ask them, or an older friend to sign them up, and so on. Even if age verification would be widespread and legally mandated, I highly doubt any sufficiently determined 14-17 year old would have any trouble getting past it.

The single best thing I like about Zed is how they unironically put up a video on their homepage where they take a perfectly fine function, and butcher it with irrelevant features using CoPilot, and in the process:

• Make the function’s name not match what it is actually doing.
• Hardcode three special cases for no good reason.
• Write no tests at all.
• Update the documentation, but make the short version of it misleading, suggesting it accepts all named colors, rather than just three. (The long description clarifies that, so it’s not completely bad.)
• Show how engineering the prompt to do what they want takes more time than just writing the code in the first place.

And that’s supposed to be a feature. I wonder how they’d feel if someone sent them a pull request done in a similar manner, resulting in similarly bad code.

I think I’ll remain firmly in the “if FPS is an important metric in your editor, you’re doing something wrong” camp, and will also steer clear of anything that hypes up the plagiarism parrots as something that’d be a net win.