detectiveships

[detectiveships]

Cats getting caught doing crimes

[detectiveships]

Before the computing era, ILM was the master of oil matte painting, making audiences believe that some of the sets in the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogy were real when they weren’t. They were the work of geniuses like Chris Evans, Michael Pangrazio, Frank Ordaz, Harrison Ellenshaw and Ralph McQuarrie ! Forever thank you, to their handmade art and the work of their colleagues, that made us dream of impossible worlds and fantastic places across Earth and the Universe.

There are more background paintings on this article, featuring comments by the masters/artists themselves ! 

Some of the following pieces were made by other artists 2:

[detectiveships]

Can’t wait for, like, 2025 when we look back on the 2018/2019 era and say “hey, remember when we were all really freaking depressed? That was a crazy time! Glad we aren’t like that anymore”

[detectiveships]

the thing about "i could do that" is that what people mean is that they can copy the finished product because the work of coming up with something and making it has already been done for them. every little creative decision has already been made and put into creating something, so "doing the same thing" is only doing the work of physically making something. but art doesn't just appear out of thin air. every little decision someone makes is part of the creative process. if you "can just do that" you would be doing it instead of just saying it. because the most essential part of making a piece of art is actually making it. you have to come up with it, decide to make it, and make it, for it to even exist. you can look at someone's works and think that on a technical level you can Do The Same Thing but that's not really true. because the work of unique creative choices for a particular piece you're looking at has already been done. some pieces are hard to make because they're very complex on a technical level, but every single piece that's created requires the essential work of coming up with it, making choices that are unique to you as an artist, and actually making the piece

[detectiveships]

Phenomenon I feel happens a lot

[detectiveships]

This.

[detectiveships]

Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures—adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic—Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies.

Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to."

Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.

Kevin Fenzi, a member of the Fedora Pagure project's sysadmin team, reported on his blog that the project had to block all traffic from Brazil after repeated attempts to mitigate bot traffic failed. GNOME GitLab implemented Iaso's "Anubis" system, requiring browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing content. GNOME sysadmin Bart Piotrowski shared on Mastodon that only about 3.2 percent of requests (2,690 out of 84,056) passed their challenge system, suggesting the vast majority of traffic was automated. KDE's GitLab infrastructure was temporarily knocked offline by crawler traffic originating from Alibaba IP ranges, according to LibreNews, citing a KDE Development chat. [...]

Tarpits and labyrinths: The growing resistance

In response to these attacks, new defensive tools have emerged to protect websites from unwanted AI crawlers. As Ars reported in January, an anonymous creator identified only as "Aaron" designed a tool called "Nepenthes" to trap crawlers in endless mazes of fake content. Aaron explicitly describes it as "aggressive malware" intended to waste AI companies' resources and potentially poison their training data.

"Any time one of these crawlers pulls from my tarpit, it's resources they've consumed and will have to pay hard cash for," Aaron explained to Ars. "It effectively raises their costs. And seeing how none of them have turned a profit yet, that's a big problem for them."

On Friday, Cloudflare announced "AI Labyrinth," a similar but more commercially polished approach. Unlike Nepenthes, which is designed as an offensive weapon against AI companies, Cloudflare positions its tool as a legitimate security feature to protect website owners from unauthorized scraping, as we reported at the time.

"When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them," Cloudflare explained in its announcement. The company reported that AI crawlers generate over 50 billion requests to their network daily, accounting for nearly 1 percent of all web traffic they process.

The community is also developing collaborative tools to help protect against these crawlers. The "ai.robots.txt" project offers an open list of web crawlers associated with AI companies and provides premade robots.txt files that implement the Robots Exclusion Protocol, as well as .htaccess files that return error pages when detecting AI crawler requests.

[detectiveships]

[detectiveships]

not being productive or relaxing but a secret third thing

[detectiveships]

"it's all in your head" correct! unfortunately I am also in there

[detectiveships]

“Some years ago, I was stuck on a crosstown bus in New York City during rush hour. Traffic was barely moving. The bus was filled with cold, tired people who were deeply irritated—with one another; with the rainy, sleety weather; with the world itself. Two men barked at each other about a shove that might or might not have been intentional. A pregnant woman got on, and nobody offered her a seat. Rage was in the air; no mercy would be found here.

But as the bus approached Seventh Avenue, the driver got on the intercom. “Folks,” he said, “I know you’ve had a rough day and you’re frustrated. I can’t do anything about the weather or traffic, but here’s what I can do. As each one of you gets off the bus, I will reach out my hand to you. As you walk by, drop your troubles into the palm of my hand, okay? Don’t take your problems home to your families tonight—just leave ‘em with me. My route goes right by the Hudson River, and when I drive by there later, I’ll open the window and throw your troubles in the water. Sound good?”

It was as if a spell had lifted. Everyone burst out laughing. Faces gleamed with surprised delight. People who’d been pretending for the past hour not to notice each other’s existence were suddenly grinning at each other like, is this guy serious?

Oh, he was serious.

At the next stop—just as promised—the driver reached out his hand, palm up, and waited. One by one, all the exiting commuters placed their hand just above his and mimed the gesture of dropping something into his palm. Some people laughed as they did this, some teared up—but everyone did it. The driver repeated the same lovely ritual at the next stop, too. And the next. All the way to the river.

We live in a hard world, my friends. Sometimes it’s extra difficult to be a human being. Sometimes you have a bad day. Sometimes you have a bad day that lasts for several years. You struggle and fail. You lose jobs, money, friends, faith, and love. You witness horrible events unfolding in the news, and you become fearful and withdrawn. There are times when everything seems cloaked in darkness. You long for the light but don’t know where to find it.

But what if you are the light? What if you’re the very agent of illumination that a dark situation begs for?

That’s what this bus driver taught me—that anyone can be the light, at any moment. This guy wasn’t some big power player. He wasn’t a spiritual leader. He wasn’t some media-savvy “influencer.” He was a bus driver—one of society’s most invisible workers. But he possessed real power, and he used it beautifully for our benefit.

When life feels especially grim, or when I feel particularly powerless in the face of the world’s troubles, I think of this man and ask myself, What can I do, right now, to be the light? Of course, I can’t personally end all wars, or solve global warming, or transform vexing people into entirely different creatures. I definitely can’t control traffic. But I do have some influence on everyone I brush up against, even if we never speak or learn each other’s name. How we behave matters because within human society everything is contagious—sadness and anger, yes, but also patience and generosity. Which means we all have more influence than we realize.

No matter who you are, or where you are, or how mundane or tough your situation may seem, I believe you can illuminate your world. In fact, I believe this is the only way the world will ever be illuminated—one bright act of grace at a time, all the way to the river.“

–Elizabeth Gilbert

[detectiveships]

[detectiveships]

when you start reading again and it's like oh. oh . the sun actually does still shine.

[detectiveships]

there should be more options than suffering via employment and suffering via unemployment

[detectiveships]

[detectiveships]

Jisbon: Seasons 1 to 6.

[detectiveships]

Me: I don't get it. I thought I was doing a lot better than I was a few years ago. I'm like 10 times more on top of things than I used to be. How does everything feel terrible now?

The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.

Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW.

Tiny OSHA Me: BOSS, THE FASCISM.