my friends and i can never get past one or two quotas before we’re eliminated. we end up drowning on the way back to the ship or not finding enough scrap in time ;-; still fun though

To be fair, heading off implications of racism first and then saying “Russians” still reads poorly to me. I see now that wasn’t OPs intent, and we agree

You think Red Hat & friends are just all bad sysadmins? Source hut maybe…

I think there’s a bit of both: poorly optimized/antiquated sites and a gigantic spike in unexpected and persistent bot traffic. The typical mitigations do not work anymore.

Not every site is and not every site should have to be optimized for hundreds of thousands of requests every day or more. Just because they can be doesn’t mean that it’s worth the time effort or cost.

Im sorry for assuming! You said “Russians” and I’ve seen lots of people not differentiate between the despots in power and the people who live under their fist, and it makes me sad.

Without doubt or racism? Every man, woman and child in Russia? Would it be racist to hate all Afghans because of the Taliban? A portion of the population supports this, but they live in a dictatorship, a kleptocracy. If you do not feel sadness for the loss of Russian life then you’re missing part of your humanity. They’re conscripting innocent and ignorant people and throwing them into a blender. The whole thing is disgusting.

You don’t have to be racist to call Putin a war criminal, or indeed those Russian soldiers who commit those crimes. You can support Ukraine 100% without hating every last Russian. I invite everyone to remember that the true enemy is Putin and oligarchs everywhere

e: this is not directed at op as they have clarified they r talking about the russian oligarchy

AI scrapers illegally harvesting data are destroying smaller and open source projects. Copyright law is not the only victim

https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/

I have a small site that mirrors hacker news but with dark mode and stuff, and it is getting blasted by bot traffic. All the data is freely available from the official api but they’re scraping my piddling site which runs on an anemic VPS because it looks like user generated content. Bot protection does little to help from my provider. Gonna have to rethink my whole architecture now. Very annoying

if I was talking about Elon I’d have you ready the guillotine instead of putting away torches

For real… we are dealing with an edgy teenager here. Put away the torches people