Aatube avatar

Aatube

@Aatube@kbin.social

[He/Him, Nosist, Touch typist, Enthusiast, Superuser impostorist, keen-eyed humorist, endeavourOS shillist, kotlin useist, wonderful bastard, professinal pedant miser]
Stuped person says stuped things, people boom
Maybe migrating to kbin.melroy.org

Aatube,
Aatube avatar

At press time, Israel had announced a new set of restrictions on the rubble it would allow into Gaza, limiting shipments to mud and sand.

ajsadauskas, (edited ) to tech
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle

Aatube,
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@TheOctonaut What do you mean by aquarium?

@degoogle @ajsadauskas @Johannab

Aatube,
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TIL The Japanese call Yuzu what we (the Chinese) call the Pomelo

Aatube,
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And in Chinese

Aatube,
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Way too old news, buddy

RE: Is Ernest still here?

I check in here quite often, but for now, I'm just focusing on clearing spam and keeping the instance alive. In January, I was working on the AP module, and there has been significant progress in the work, which hasn't been publicly published yet. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the year, I developed a skin condition that...

Aatube,
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By AP do you mean API?

Aatube,
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To be more concrete, we have to see if nearly all of the released games on the list have been subject to "abnormal review activity", which steam automatically excludes from the percentage

Aatube,
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na na-na-na na na, na na, na na na na nana!

Aatube,
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Credit: DALL-E 3 / Microsoft Designer

Aatube,
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Are you sure that's not just because mbin was syncing changes from kbin? https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/pull/231 seems to be the only commit ernest has actually made to mbin directly

Aatube,
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Last words, circa 29 Jan:

Today, I'm going for a minor procedure at the hospital, and I won't be available for the next 2-4 days. When I return, I'll push all the corrections and fixes I've been working on and present plans for the near future. In the meantime, I'm making sure that the instance operates smoothly.

Aatube,
Aatube avatar

Dunno about you, but "Starknet" sounds like that comic arc where Iron Man gets a venomous suit and enshittifies life.

Aatube,
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Too close to centigrade, plus centi- actually means 1/100th in the metric system.

Aatube,
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centi- actually means 1/100th in the metric system

Aatube,
Aatube avatar

“After looking into this, it seems you have a hit song on your site,” the email from Netlify customer support reads. “Maan Bou Jan Sang Lou by Teresa Tang. I was not aware of her, but she seems to be a popular Taiwanese singer. This song is 99% of your bandwidth usage over the past 30 days.”

The letter further explained that a lot of bandwidth was generated from user agents that “are quite ancient using Google Cloud addresses”.

“This would include devices such as circa 2010 iPads, Windows 98 & Windows 6 computers. So either you have a fanbase with a passion for older technology, or this was likely a DDoS attack. To me, this seems to be the latter,” the email continued and suggested hosting such files on third-party platforms, such as YouTube or SoundCloud.

After explaining the standard practice of reducing the bill to 20% after such attacks, which would be $20,900 in this case, the Netlify support team offered a better deal.

“I've currently reduced it to about 5%, which is $5,225. I know this is still a lot of money, and I apologize for the inconvenience. If you like, I can raise this internally to see what else can be done.”

The user wasn’t happy with that and decided not to pay but post their story on Reddit and Hacker News instead.

Aatube,
Aatube avatar

“After looking into this, it seems you have a hit song on your site,” the email from Netlify customer support reads. “Maan Bou Jan Sang Lou by Teresa Tang. I was not aware of her, but she seems to be a popular Taiwanese singer. This song is 99% of your bandwidth usage over the past 30 days.”

The letter further explained that a lot of bandwidth was generated from user agents that “are quite ancient using Google Cloud addresses”.

“This would include devices such as circa 2010 iPads, Windows 98 & Windows 6 computers. So either you have a fanbase with a passion for older technology, or this was likely a DDoS attack. To me, this seems to be the latter,” the email continued and suggested hosting such files on third-party platforms, such as YouTube or SoundCloud.

After explaining the standard practice of reducing the bill to 20% after such attacks, which would be $20,900 in this case, the Netlify support team offered a better deal.

“I've currently reduced it to about 5%, which is $5,225. I know this is still a lot of money, and I apologize for the inconvenience. If you like, I can raise this internally to see what else can be done.”

The user wasn’t happy with that and decided not to pay but post their story on Reddit and Hacker News instead.

One user on Hacker News with the alias ‘bobfunk’ introduced himself as the Netlify CEO and assured users that the bill would be forgiven. Cybernews was unable to verify the CEO’s identity independently. However, many previous posts from the same user and his bio support the claim of him being Matt Biilmann, the founder of Netlify.

In another twist, the DDoS attack version of the story is being ruled out

“Since the user opened a ticket with us this past Sunday, we’ve been actively researching this situation. Initially, we thought it might have resulted from a DDoS attack, which we stated in our first response. After some investigating, it looks as though the spike in traffic was not caused by a DDoS after all,” Dorian Kendal, CMO at Netlify, told Cybernews.

Instead, now they believe that this was a sustained download event of an mp3 file over a stretch of multiple days.

“We’re working directly with the user to better understand what’s happening on their end, so we can uncover what caused the dramatic increase in downloads,” Kendal said.

“We’ve confirmed that the user was notified multiple times about the additional bandwidth that was being consumed on their site, but given their lack of response to these notifications, we believe that we should revisit and improve the messaging and urgency that’s being communicated.”

Aatube,
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Basically, it was a giant uptick in use that was likely made by human beings instead of a DDoS botnet, and they're still investigating where it came from

Aatube,
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...is that seriously your reason? Do you know about how Codeberg displayed something about a javascript error on top of that website for months? Mistakes happen, and as long as they have backup plans I don't see how that is an issue.

Aatube,
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To combine the comments would probably require a revision to the lemmy protocol, plus an even bigger one to the backend software to keep backwards compatibility

Aatube,
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SourceHut actually had a really nice UI! I'll consider it. I currently don't have problems with GitLab save for the UI learning curve (and their EE is source-available) but I'll consider what you've said.

Aatube,
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In June? JUNE?

Aatube,
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It's not just torrenting. Every user chooses what files they share, and these would be visible in search (and ranked by an internet speed transfer estimate), which makes discoverability a whole lot easier. If you want to download it, a direct transfer is initiated between that user and you computer only. You can also browse all files that a user has shared and chat with them about problems and whatnot (there also are chat rooms). Plus, since it's not really torrenting apart from the concept, your download history isn't targeted by popular tools that check out your activity on public trackers.

Aatube,
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Why not mbin?

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