Is this where all that hardware for AI projects is going? To data centers that just uncritically hits the same URL over and over without checking if the content of a site or page has chanced since the last visit then and calculate a proper retry interval. Search engine crawlers 25 - 30 years ago could do this.
Hit the URL once per day, if it chances daily, try twice a day. If it hasn't chanced in a week, maybe only retry twice per week.
And it's quite a trivial feature at that.
If you've been in any big company you'll know things perpetually run in a degraded, somewhat broken mode. They've even made up the term "error budget" because they can't be bothered to fix the broken shit so now there's an acceptable level of brokenness.
Surely it's more likely that it's just cheaper to pay for the errors than to pay to fix the errors.
Why fix 10k worth of errors if it'll cost me 100k to fix it?
Add some % if person who gets more work from the problem is not the same as the person who needs to fix it. People will happily leave things in a broken state if no one calls them out on it.
How does one learn these skills, I can see them being useful in the future
Turns out all of the major AI slop companies had been hounding our wiki constantly for months, and this had resulted in Apache spawning hundreds of instances, bringing the whole machine to a halt.
Millions upon millions of requests, hundreds of GB's of bandwidth. Thankfully we're using Cloudflare so could block all of them except real search engine crawlers and now we don't have any problems at all. I also made sure to constrain Apache's limits a bit too.
From what I've read, forums, wikis, git repos are the primary targets of harassment by these companies for some reason. The worst part is these bots could just download a git repo or a wiki dump and do whatever it wants with it, but instead they are designed to push maximum load onto their victims.
Our wiki, in total, is a few gigabytes. They crawled it thousands of times over.
I've been monitoring server logs across ~150 sites and the pattern is striking: AI crawler traffic increased roughly 8x in the last 12 months, but most site owners have no idea because it doesn't show up in analytics. The bots read everything, respect robots.txt maybe 60% of the time, and the content they index directly shapes what ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends to users.
The irony is that robots.txt was designed for a world where crawling meant indexing for search results. Now crawling means training data and real-time retrieval for AI answers. Completely different power dynamic and most robots.txt files haven't adapted.
Ndymium•3h ago
antonyh•1h ago
mghackerlady•54m ago