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Collateral damage

Collateral damage

Posted Aug 29, 2026 15:46 UTC (Sat) by hDF (subscriber, #121224)
In reply to: Collateral damage by snajpa
Parent article: Ryabitsev: Creepy crawlies

Agreed. My clanker does a great job of automating the tedious work of scouting forums, mailing lists, and GitHub issues for patches and workarounds for my specific hardware. It saves literal hours of research and it's not the type of work that most humans want to spend their time on. It's pretty upsetting when it gets blocked, especially when I'm developing a fix that everybody can benefit from.

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Collateral damage

Posted Aug 29, 2026 15:53 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

If you agreed not to externalize the costs of the scraping, I don't think people would have as much of a problem with it as they do now.

Collateral damage

Posted Aug 29, 2026 17:00 UTC (Sat) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

It's pretty upsetting when it gets blocked

It's equally upsetting, though, if my infrastructure that I pay money for is being DDoSed. Therefore, I (try to) block people who misuse my services. It's as simple as that.

And yes, an AI agent scraping cgit (or similar interfaces) is a misuse, exactly like an AI crawler scraping cgit is a misuse. This is nothing new. It dates back to the 90s that heavy and scripted use of web APIs is considered misuse and such people have always been blocked.

If you don't like being blocked, tell your AI agent to be a polite "citizen", slow down and behave like a human reading the page.

Collateral damage

Posted Aug 29, 2026 23:02 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940) [Link]

Or use the API instead of crawling a zillion of different re-representations of the same info on the web.


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