One of the many pressing issues with Large Language Models (LLMs) is they are trained on content that isn’t theirs to consume.

Since most of what they consume is on the open web, it’s difficult for authors to withhold consent without also depriving legitimate agents (AKA humans or “meat bags”) of information.

Some well-meaning but naive developers have implored authors to instate robots.txt rules, intended to block LLM-associated crawlers.

Related from my bookmarks:

• iocaine, which I’ve been following for quite a while since @algernon does a great job of developing in the open.

  This is deliberately malicious software, intended to cause harm. Do not deploy if you aren’t fully comfortable with what you are doing. LLM scrapers are relentless and brutal, they will place additional burden on your server, even if you only serve static content.

• tobi of gotosocial about related fediverse stats poisoning

• Quixotic is a program that will feed fake content to bots and robots.txt-ignoring LLM scrapers.

• Nepenthes […] is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it’s targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLMs - but really, like the plants it is named after, it’ll eat just about anything that finds it’s way inside.

• Anubis - Weigh the soul of incoming HTTP requests using proof-of-work to stop AI crawlers.

• The Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group (ASRG) is an ongoing, conspiratorial, aesthetico-political, practice-led research framework focused on the intersection of digital culture and information technology.
  They maintain a good list of selected tools and frameworks.

goto.muhh.lol is a self-hosted single-user fediverse instance server for me.

The only profile over there is called @muhh@goto.muhh.lol. I don’t have a final opinion on the many muhhs in there yet. It kinda annoys me, I guess.

Since it isn’t Mastodon, but can talk with it, it might look unfamiliar when you view this on its website. Your replies and some interactions will show up here. It’s supposed to just work.

I don’t have any blocks or bans in place right now - I just started, but plan to apply them freely, even switch to exclusive allow lists. Reading about the concept of federated islands got me curious about how to apply that.

Sigh.

I need to go now. Make at least a short round. Otherwise the whole day might be lost.

I’m furious how my brain works against me.

And I’m still failing some more. It’s ok to fail.

I learned to stand up and walk on. Finally.

So I want to write down how I run this blog and how I post, to make next identify what I’m want to improve and what is missing.

This HTML (with some CSS and one image right now) get’s served from an OpenBSD mini VM located at Hetzner. It uses the included relayd and httpd to deliver the statically generated files.
The files get pushed to a folder on this server using rsync over ssh.
Before that they get generated by Jekyll, my static site generator of choice (<3 Ruby!). This is happening on my main workstation that also serves as a home server and always running. This means I can add and create new posts or notes by SSH’ing into that machine and typing things into my terminal window.

A new note gets created by typing rake note which opens neovim and I can type away and thing a bit. If I’m extra easy going I can directly add the note text by using rake note[$NOTETEXT].
Blog posts are set up using jekyll compose -l default "$TITLE" which generates a file I can open and edit like before.

A rake deploy builds the site and does the rsync magic to deliver the build to the web server.

You can see the jekyll “code” in my forge.

It’s a mess. I love it :)

I’m going to try again though. Where’s the fun otherwise?

So, here’s my plan: write a short post (not a note, it at least needs a title…) every day. I have a few ideas queued, but I’ll try to focus on moving this site forward. There are so many ideas and hopes I want to bring into manifestation and if I can write about it and improve my still clunky english, there’s nothing to loose.

Have a great International Workers Day!

Just write. Then share.

Blogging is a conversation. It’s a conversation with yourself and it’s a conversation with others.

– Barry Hess - You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist

And it’s mine. My precious.

Danke, Mu-An! So much of this site is based on hers.