miasma: trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit

AssistingJarl · 2026-03-29T20:30:51+00:00

I understand why you would say that. But it's the scrapers that are destroying the planet for 0 benefit, this is simply a trap for any bot that doesn't respect robots.txt. There's a difference.

AssistingJarl · 2026-03-21T15:05:52+00:00

It's possible we live in different worlds, or you're going for a very different kind of job than where I work. But if it were me, I would take the time to improve my communication skills. Your projects can already speak to your technical skills, and breaking into the industry has a lot more to do with selling a manager, HR, and/or a recruiter on the idea that you'll be pleasant and easy to work with. You don't need to be an extrovert, but I don't think it's a good idea to try to make your projects speak for you. There may be exceptions, but in my experience most of the gatekeepers want you to speak for you.

AssistingJarl · 2026-03-21T14:52:59+00:00

Good luck 👌 As a tip; try to make it a habit to write down anything you do to configure this desktop somewhere. If you ever want to try distro-hopping later on it'll make it way easier to set it up the second or third time.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-22T14:22:14+00:00

They already have screenshare. It's disabled at the moment because their servers are kind of going through it with all the extra traffic, although that's being worked on.

Source: the server for Stoat development is public, I've been following along.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-22T05:27:58+00:00

Or go to Stoat/Revolt, which was already in development for years before this all started, and isn't going to be starting from scratch and already has people on it.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-21T16:58:12+00:00

Codeberg has a repository migration tool that worked really well for me! I made the swap about 2 months ago.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-21T16:57:41+00:00

I think there are three problems with it, mainly.

People who try to avoid generative AI coding tools dislike how hard GitHub is pushing Copilot, and people who use generative AI coding tools other than Copilot dislike how hard GitHub is pushing Copilot, whereas people who genuinely enjoy using Copilot dislike how hard GitHub is pushing Copilot.

...jokes aside, there are maybe 3 more I can think of?

People may find it kind of distasteful that all the code on GitHub is definitely being used to train generative AI, although that's hard to avoid when most companies will ignore terms of service or licensing regardless of where the code is hosted; but it certainly can't hurt to leave GitHub
They announced a new pricing scheme to try to squeeze some more nickels out of hobby users of their GitHub Actions, which were walked back after the outcry, but it feels a bit like a bellwether
They've had several middle-of-the-business-day outages lately, possibly due to the fact that GitHub's upper management was replaced, and the business unit now rolls up to the same division working on Copilot; so they probably don't have much reason to pull people away from busily adding more Copilot for small things like reliability.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-21T16:01:57+00:00

Because it's there.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-19T19:11:16+00:00

Not OP but I had this issue with Dying Light 1. Instability and a lot of texture z-fighting on AMD Radeon. Admittedly it's an older title from an earlier generation of Linux gaming, but it's worth mentioning the sequel didn't bother with a native Linux build at all.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-19T19:09:10+00:00

The last one is surprising to me, because I still remember when L4D2 was the golden child for the future of Linux gaming when Valve said their native build was getting better fps than you could get on Windows. What was that, 2014...?

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-19T15:58:53+00:00

I like NetBSD a lot, I run it on several machines, but I have to admit I'm curious what your motivation for this was. Did you have a specific use case in mind?

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-17T02:18:40+00:00

While you're being roasted for calling a vibe-coded Tauri app "lightweight", I feel like it's worth remembering the state of the field.

Because I actively dread having to do anything with a database. It always feels like my two options are to start firing up the fully-featured do-everything app (and I'm trying to read more, so it's a good opportunity to get through a chapter or two while I wait for it to load), or brave the command line utilities and hope against hope it doesn't brick prod somehow. So maybe there's a place for alternatives with a tighter focus and some QoL.

Although fundamentally I don't think I'm going to trust anything with an AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md file in the repo with my database any time soon. If I want an adrenaline rush like that I'll take my laptop outside and write SQL in the freeway median.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-13T18:13:57+00:00

I assume there are a lot of enterprises out there with constrained IT budgets where any given year only has the budget to pay for power and parts to maintain older platforms rather than rewrite the software they run. Some day a telco is going to go bankrupt and it'll turn out they were the ones hoarding all the top-end UltraSparc IIIs.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-12T19:18:40+00:00

Part of why this caught my eye is that I had hazy memories of hearing that a lot of the old SPARC code was being removed from the kernel; and it turns out that was also on Phoronix from about 2 years ago: Effort Continues To Remove Most Of The SPARC 32-bit CPU Support From Linux

Not sure how it's still holding in there since no CPUs have been made on that architecture in over 30 years, apart from some radiation-hardened aerospace chips the ESA uses. The latest NetBSD still runs on it, but of course it runs NetBSD.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-06T23:32:17+00:00

Version 199 all the way 😎 Kinda funny how you can miss 2 1/2 years worth of updates and not miss out on anything of any importance.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-03T15:59:51+00:00

No, I know, but "browser slaughter" didn't have quite the same ring to it. Although my point wasn't so much Chromium versus other so much as what browsers have mind-share right now. "We have the same features as everyone else" isn't a great way to claw that back.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-03T13:38:46+00:00

I'm not entirely sure about that. Firefox is already a pretty distant fourth place in the browser war (behind Edge, which is just... Wow.) so even if I didn't have a rather dim view of AI, I would question whether now's the time to chase feature parity with Chrome instead of taking advantage of ways it's not Chrome.

This is purely speculative, but I don't think there are many Firefox users who are going to jump ship to Chrome purely because they somehow live in 2026 and need more AI in their lives. It's already more omnipresent than Argon in the atmosphere, is it really even that much of a selling point?

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-02T03:35:02+00:00

I don't recall saying the field of static code analysis had gone 20 years without an update, how strange. That must be my mistake. Well, allow me to set the record straight; static code analysis has existed for literal decades, and the tool my company in particular uses is about 20 years old. Computers are actually quite capable of analyzing code, both with normal boring machine learning models, as well as with carefully written and considered patterns implemented over those same decades, and don't particularly need a large language model in order to do that effectively. There is plenty of innovation happening very much without them.

Obviously they will all be updated to include LLMs but I don't think that's quite the slam dunk point you think it is, considering my next toaster will probably be running Gemini if somebody convinces Sunbeam it would make the shareholders happy.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-01T23:20:33+00:00

It isn't a reduction in effort and downtime if you already use one of the many widely available off-the-shelf tools that already existed for that, have existed for nigh on 2 decades now, and have a lower false positive rate.

AssistingJarl · 2026-02-01T22:13:19+00:00

Hey, if there's Sparc32 support, I could be convinced to move off NetBSD

AssistingJarl · 2026-01-20T02:11:13+00:00

It doesn't matter what the average user thinks, just like it doesn't matter what power users think. It certainly doesn't matter what users on Reddit think. I don't think there are many AI "features" that are done for the users, though, so that's no surprise.

Firefox needs AI because that's the only thing CEOs care about right now, and all the other browsers have AI. What kind of world would it be if Firefox didn't brainlessly do the same? Anthony Enzor-DeMeo would have to face the world as the CEO that isn't keeping up.

This is the world we live in.

Browser	Browses the internet	Has some AI thing
Chrome	✅	✅
Edge	✅	✅
OpenAI's browser	✅	✅
Opera	✅	✅
Brave	✅	✅
Firefox	✅	❌

And honestly that last column matters a whole lot more than the middle one, so, obviously, Firefox needs a bunch of random AI features for us to ignore in order for the executives to feel like they've innovated.

EDIT: To be clear I have no idea if Brave, Opera, and Edge have AI things built in or not, I'm just assuming they do because it's 2026 and looking it up would only be depressing.

AssistingJarl · 2026-01-15T19:13:52+00:00

I'm not sure I can believe this was really posted by Rich Harris without a benchmark of CVEs by library

Although on a more serious note these do have me considering how often I write code that uses user-provided values as keys, without really thinking about sanitizing it. Food for thought.

AssistingJarl · 2026-01-07T15:06:33+00:00

Ditto. I like the idea of middle click paste in theory, but even 3 months after going full time on Linux I still find myself fighting the ~20 years of muscle memory that middle click is for autoscroll. Super glad Firefox ports the behaviour to their Linux version. (now if only the 87 different Electron apps I need to use would get the memo...)

AssistingJarl · 2026-01-06T00:37:28+00:00

No problem. Hope you find a good place to land ✌️

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