Spelling pedantry, really

I thought that at first too and I wasn’t gonna say anything but I was thinking to myself “bro is definitely writing some really shitty code”

Oversaturated?!? Maybe if you’re a plebian bootcamp passionless 0.1x-er who hasn’t even contributed to multiple open source projects or founded at least 3 startups. Maybe you should try internalizing all PhD-worthy algorithms from the last 30 years to reproduce them on the spot from memory like I did, or else do you really even care about the craft??? You need to understand this industry is full of math olympiad prodigy coder geniuses who work 80 hours a week like me so yeah it’s competitive. Nothing oversaturated about that

/s

Yeah, well-written stuff. I think Anubis will come and go. This beautifully demonstrates and, best of all, quantifies the negligence of Anubis.

It’s very interesting to try to think of what would work, even conceptually. Some sort of purely client-side captcha type of thing perhaps. I keep thinking about it in half-assed ways for minutes at a time.

Maybe something that scrambles the characters of the site according to some random “offset” of some sort, e.g maybe randomly selecting a modulus size and an offset to cycle them, or even just a good ol’ cipher. And the “captcha” consists of a slider that adjusts the offset. You as the viewer know it’s solved when the text becomes something sensical - so there’s no need for the client code to store a readable key that could be used to auto-undo the scrambling. You could maybe even have some values of the slider randomly chosen to produce English text if the scrapers got smart enough to check for legibility (not sure how to hide which slider positions would be these red herring ones though) - which could maybe be enough to trick the scraper into picking up junk text sometimes.

Yeah you’re right, I was using AI in the colloquial modern sense. My mistake. It actually drives me nuts when people do that. I should have said “without compute-heavy AI”.

The crawlers are likely not AI though, but yes OCR could be done effectively without AI anyways. This idea ultimately boils down to the same hope Anubis had of making the processing costs large enough to not be worth it.

I wasn’t being totally serious, but also, I do think that while accessibility concerns come from a good place, there is some practical limitation that must be accepted when building fringe and counter-cultural things. Like, my hidden rebel base can’t have a wheelchair accessible ramp at the entrance, because then my base isn’t hidden anymore. It sucks that some solutions can’t work for everyone, but if we just throw them out because it won’t work for 5% of people, we end up with nothing. I’d rather have a solution that works for 95% of people than no solution at all. I’m not saying that people who use screen readers are second-class citizens. If crawlers were vision-based then I might suggest matching text to background colors so that only screen readers work to understand the site. Because something that works for 5% of people is also better than no solution at all. We need to tolerate having imperfect first attempts and understand that more sophisticated infrastructure comes later.

But yes my image map idea is pretty much a joke nonetheless

Okay what about…what about uhhh… Static site builders that render the whole page out as an image map, making it visible for humans but useless for crawlers 🤔🤔🤔

https://homestarrunner.com/toons/backtoawebsite

“Lemme get that hit counter!”