Today, my VPS served over 51.5 million requests. Well over 99% of that was AI crawlers and other obnoxious shits.

This is not normal. This is complete and utter bullshit. This is also happening all over the place.

It can be caught, it's not even hard. But we shouldn't need to. This is about three orders of magnitude more requests I'd normally receive, and it's almost entirely useless garbage.

Every single one of you who use GenAI tools, you personally, are complicit in this. You are responsible for these bots hammering the entire internet, you are enabling it.

If you think this price is acceptable, that every single person who hosts anything outside of BigTech walled gardens deserves this relentless assault of thieving robots, then you are a garbage human being.

But it is not too late to change course. You too can look back at the carnage you enabled, and feel remorse. It's okay. We'll forgive you.

You don't need to look at the environment damage LLMs cause - we can have an educated guess (it's very bad). You don't need to look at the unsustainability of it all. All of those are things that we don't directly feel right now.

But look at the damage these things cause to everyone outside of the BigTech walled gardens. That is measurable. These attacks are fact. You can't debate it. You can't justify it.

You, dear enabler of GenAI bullshit, you are responsible for enabling this carnage. Think about that. Feel bad about it, and stop. Today is a great day to do that.

A Dictionary of Words Invented to Name Emotions We All Feel, But Don’t Yet Have a Name For: Vemödalen, Sonder, Chrysalism & Much More

https://www.openculture.com/2019/04/words-invented-to-name-emotions-we-all-feel-but-dont-yet-have-a-name-for.html

My 9 year old and his classmates have started using “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.”

Me: we’re having dinosaur meat for dinner

Kiddo: that’s AI

We had a couple of interesting ecology and conservation seminars this week at #LincolnUniversityNZ. The first, on Monday, was by Lou Sanson, ex-Director General of the NZ Department of Conservation.

Lou is now involved in the 30x30 initiative to protect 30% of Earth's land area and 30% of its marine area. 30x30 is an international effort, driven by 122 of the world's countries, which have all signed up to be part of the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People.

Lou gave a tour of some of the amazing projects happening around the world to protect the planet's wild places, as part of 30x30.

Is New Zealand part of this? No, of course not. We'd need a change of government for NZ to show leadership on conservation and environmental issues.

We do already have 30% of our land in reserves. Almost all of that is in the highest and wettest parts of the country, where English settlers couldn't farm. NZ hasn’t made a national park or a world heritage area in 25 years, and many of our reserves are struggling under pressure from pests and weeds. We have only 2% of our oceans protected.

We can do a lot better. As Lou concluded, “We’re seen as a world leader but we're not acting as a world leader at the moment.”

https://hacfornatureandpeople.org/

https://earthshotprize.org/winners-finalists/high-ambition-coalition-for-nature-and-people/

#nz #conservation #30x30 #nzpol #BiodiversityCrisis

There was lots of data to play with for #TidyTuesday this week where we're looking at the power of different passports! ✈️

I decided to try out the idea of using small multiples and highlighting to untangle a spaghetti chart with lots of lines 📊

#RStats #DataViz #ggplot2