Re^3: What's your view on AI coding assistants?

[hippo]

there is no problem.

There is an absolutely colossal problem. Have you not noticed the unresponsiveness and at times complete unavailability of this site over the past 18 months or so? If you are using generative AI for anything at all then you are contributing to this problem.

The sooner the AI bubble bursts the better. I will not be paying for AI usage directly and I will not be using any AI system which is funding itself through advertising. We all have a responsibility to cut off the revenue from the perpetrators of the LLM training bot catastrophe if we want our web back.

[NERDVANA]

Unfortunately I don't see that ever happening. The only way perlmonks is coming back is through optimization or more resources. Or, if AI training sets eventually become cheaper to download from aggregated collections than re-scraping them.

I've been meaning to offer to help with that, but haven't found time yet. But I think a good option would be if one of the host names (e.g. "perlmonks.org") was designated as the one to use when logged in, and the other aliases were directed to a second server which would serve cached anonymous-view content from a database which was a replication slave of the real one. If I could run that on a Digital Ocean droplet or Linode, I'd be happy to pay a few bucks a month to offload traffic from the real perlmonks.

[Anonymous Monk]

For the record, on a site I frequent there was a MediaWiki installation that consisted of maybe twenty pages. It was just one thing running on the domain -- there were far more important things hosted there. The wiki seldom had edits, it mostly just existed to serve some documentation.

Last May this wiki started getting hit by so many scrapers that the rest of the site had become unreachable. The admin mentioned over 60k accesses a day.

There was some effort done blocking IP ranges, but in the end, the MediaWiki installation got closed, converted to static pages. It was probably the only option available left to the admin.

The site was/is hosted on a VPS I believe. So, yeah. It's not just Perlmonks that is affected, nor is it Perlmonks' ageing hardware that is singly at fault. Unlike the neighbouring poster insinuated.

[LanX]

We are certainly not the only one suffering, it's taking its toll everywhere.

See The Internet Is Being Overrun by AI Bots — And Websites Are Paying the Price

Table of Contents

• AI Scraper Bots Are Breaking the Internet
• How the Bots Took Over
• The New AI Scraper Problem 
• Is It Possible to Defeat the Bots?
• Why Bad Bots Keep Slipping Through
• Is the "Dead Internet Theory" Coming True?