2026-02-04 The AI-bro curse
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As my Butlerian Jihad continues for another year, and as my employer
is really into selling agentic AI to our customers, I keep thinking of
the curse.

> "If you use these large language models, I hope your skills atrophy,
> your market value drops and your careers ends as you are replaced by
> the very tools you use. Before you quit, I hope you are trapped in a
> downward spiral where the AI companies leech all the value out of
> you as you pay and pay in order to keep up, I hope your investments
> fail as the next AI winter ruins the stocks you bought and you'll
> realize that you fell for grifters and liars. And when you're poor
> and broke and at the end of the line, I hope you'll realize before
> the end that you sacrificed the rest of us in the name of getting
> the job done quickly and effortlessly, no matter the costs to the
> environment, to your coworkers, to those that came after you, to web
> admins everywhere, to artists and translators, authors and actors.
> You did not care because you felt no empathy and I hope that the
> people that bring each other joy will spit at you and laugh at you
> and cast you out as a destroyer of things for your did that and to
> so many of us. You are a taker not a giver, a looter not a lover,
> and that is why I hope your family leaves you and your kids disown
> you because you have made a mockery of human relations. You replaced
> the people who loved you with the machine you loved because it got
> the job done with a little less effort on your part and I hope you
> suffer all the consequences for it."

I really have to sharpen this knive of the AI-bro curse.

The situation is much better today. The graph below shows the 1-minute
load average and the 5-minute load average. The green blobs at the
bottom are the times when my sites close the gate and ask for a
username and password. (If you fail to answer correctly, the error
message has the necessary information for humans.) In the last few
hours, there have been just two spikes where my sites locked up.

The sites thus protected are served by a traditional wiki. It has a
gazillion URLs you can visit. Not just all the pages, but the page
history, and all the older page versions, and the diffs between the
page versions, and the changes to these pages over time, and these are
paginated so you can keep on following links, and the pagination
window can be different, so whatever you click, there are more links,
more links, always the same stuff, presented slightly differently. As
such, it is very similar to the web app that serves a source code
repository.

Not only are there a gazillion links but the HTML you see is generated
dynamically, based on path, query parameters, preferences stored in
cookies, language preferences sent along by your browser. And caching
doesn't help because the scrapers want all the links. They don't often
ask for something twice, so the cache is a waste of time.

In order to survive in this new AI scraper world, I would have to
rewrite these apps; hide most functionality behind a login, expose
only static files. But even static files, when served from a virtual
machine, are not as fast as a dedicated web server that can memory map
files to RAM to network buffers.

I foresee a future where most websites need logins again. I mean, I
remember the days of modems, bulletin board systems, FTP servers. They
often required people to sign up before showing you anything. For a
while, the web was revolutionary because it was so open. I fear this
period might be ending, soon.

Unless… unless we manage to accelerate the arrival of the AI winter.
Make sure prices have to go up before the grifters can trick the state
into financing them for reasons of national security or some other
made-up idea. Make sure we legislate against the waste of water, the
waste of energy, the waste of raw materials. Make sure we prohibit the
cross-financing of data-centres with money dedicated to space
exploration. And to honour and respect the skills humans have instead
of the mockery presented to us by the AI bros. To read, to write, to
paint, to make music, to write programs.

In the last few hours, there have been just two spikes where my sites
locked up.

#ButlerianJihad