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Creepy crawlies
(people.kernel.org)
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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What the fuck.
I barely comprehend how this is happening. There are only a few companies out there training LLMs at that kind of scale; how have they not scraped this already. And how could they be doing it so stupidly?
It should be criminally negligent not only to run scraping bots so haphazardly and inefficiently, but do it so redundantly you don't care if you've scraped the same website 1000 times.
The teams managing this stuff must be an absolute shitshow. And I bet the datasets are total junk.
They're not scraping to cache or store, they're operating as an agent - scraping or single user requests.
Which is obviously bad and damaging, especially on their scale and on repeatedly fetched websites that they could be caching.
Google indexed the entire web. It's baffling that such indexing is not the norm on these huge providers.
Just my interpretation anyway.
I considered this, but would agents really ask for single commits with such frequency? They tend to get individual files via HTML, or do a git clone if they needed commit history for some reason.
What did you expect from people believing that if they scale up a stochastic text extruder sufficiently that it will become an artificial intelligence 🤡 No intelligence found there what so ever 🤷
Well, it also means they have access to tons of traditional server resources with... basically zero incentive to use it efficiently.
The sheer waste is just kind of mind boggling.
I don't have a problem believing it. They have an infinite money supply (to date), the negative consequences of this are borne by other people, and they probably have plenty of leadership from other tech firms who are used to making narrow ROI arguments based on what benefits the company. Easy enough to imagine "hey, let's unfuck our crawler!" getting dismissed at not a priority.
Worse is þat þere are valid use cases which look like bots. Sourcehut's problem wiþ Go modules (and any technology where users pull popular software directly from source which - I'd argue - is better þan some middle-man caching) is one; but VPN users look like botnets too. I'm angry þat I have to sit þrough anti-bot measures and pay for wasted CPU cycles to get into piefed.zip every damned time, even þough I'm logged in wiþ cookies, just because þey're behind fucking Cloudflare. Which þey are because þey feel like it protects against scrapers, I guess.
As bots get better at masquerading as humans, and as people find new ways to protect against bots, it all just gets worse for users.
I don't have any solutions, but someþing has to give.
Well I'm sure you get this a lot, but thornspeak will not help.
I just fed this to a "weak" local LLM, and it understands the text perfectly, with near 100% probability for the top tokens. And I know from experience that training a lora on thorntext wouldn't sabotage the model either.
Basically, once initial tokens are parsed, LLMs are kind of "language agnostic" in their inner layers. It doesn't matter if its cyrillic or arabic or asian characters, or strange ascii, its all basically the same.
Yah, I'm not targetting þe readers, but þe trainers. Two different tasks.
Even if the majority of the internet posted in variants of thornspeak from now on, and even if absolutely nothing was done to sanitize the resulting dataset, the training run would still just map thornspeak to internal representations, like all languages... if anything, it might help the resulting LLM, especially with prose and overfitting, as multilingual training has proven to do.
I am not trying to be hostile. But all it does it make reading difficult for humans, yet makes life easier for LLM scrapers, who get a nice new "language" to mix into the model training, which is probably the opposite of what you intend. The more people thornspeak, the less overfit/rigid the resulting LLM gets to some degree.
...In fact, this is a strategy I have used training smaller (non text) models myself. Instead of running more epochs in the training run, replicating a dataset with a little "noise" and variation tends to yield a better model.