Why poison text? [LWN.net]

Why poison text?

Posted Feb 17, 2026 10:15 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Why poison text? by rgmoore
Parent article: Poisoning scraperbots with iocaine

Yeah, only just noticed the LWN article on the same thing after I made that comment. ;) IIUC they used the code (inc. the very comprehensive test-suite) as a blackbox to functionally replicate its workings.

I remain sceptical. Probing a very functional (i.e., leaves no side-effects on the world) bit of code and writing code that replicates the discovered mappings of inputs to outputs, thus replicating the programme, I mean... you could do that with other algorithms, and probably much more efficiently. E.g., some kind of AFL-fuzz derivative searcher. They used an LLM to basically search the state space instead, transforming the knowledge _of the original source_ encoded into into another language, and using the _original code (inc. test-suite)_ to validate the transforms.

And now the AI-fanboys are touting this as some massive advance and how AI will be writing all the code soon.

I watch the AI-fanboys produce mountains of buggy slop, that they do not understand, and which is atrophying their own coding skills, and I sigh. I give them answers to things they ask me, which they will ignore and instead spend a week with their AI producing half-arsed crap before they come back to me all triumphant with the poor approximation of the answer it has produced. Sigh.

Your last paragraph describing the result of this latest, greatest, amazing advance in AI sounds like it fits that pattern!

The AI-fanboys want to turn coding into something that produces the same buggy results (perhaps worse) as before, except now requiring several racks worth of expensive silicon and kWs of power per "vibe dev".

Sigh, sigh sigh.

to post comments

Why poison text?

Posted Feb 17, 2026 10:19 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

Sorry, that should be "100+ kW".

Why poison text?

Posted Feb 17, 2026 12:56 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Shouldn't that be "100+ kWh"?

Cheers,
Wol

Why poison text?

Posted Feb 17, 2026 13:23 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

No. If people are coding, over whatever amount of time, they're using energy at whatever rate these massively wasteful racks of GPUs consume. kWh is a (slightly odd) unit of energy, the integral of W over a specified period of time. Over unspecified, whatever amounts of time, we can't give an amount of energy used, but we can talk about a rate.

If you wanted to use kWh, you'd have to change my comment to something like "requiring several racks worth of expensive silicon and 800+ kWhs of power per "vibe dev" per day". But... why do that? Just divide the terms in that sentence by 'day', and the "per day" disappears, as does the 'h' in kWh. Or another way: Why pick 'per day'? Why not per week? Or per month? Or per hour? or ....

Better still, instead of doing "X energy per second per hour for each vibe dev per day" - which is just obviously silly in terms of all the units of time being multiplied and divided - just get rid of the extra, redundant additions of time and just say "X energy per second", i.e. W. ;)