I've made a lot of progress finishing the last missing piece of the #iocaine3 documentation: the scripting environment reference guide.

It's not complete yet, but it's taking shape. It will be in a reasonable shape tomorrow, and #iocaine 3.0.0 will be released tomorrow¹ night.

With this out of the way, I "only" have to finish the request handler docs, and I can release #iocaine 3.0.

Naturally, I'm looking at the calendar to see what would be the best day. The next Discordian holiday is the Afflux on The Aftermath 50 (December 8), but I'd like to release sooner, maybe even next week.

Maybe I'll just release on the 15th, because Friday releases are fun.

Wanna know the best part?

❯ git diff --cached --stat
 src/sex_dungeon/elegant_weapons.rs | 19 +++++++------------
 tests/config.kdl                   |  3 +--
 tests/test_request_handler.sh      | 11 +----------
 3 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-)

Embedding the fennel compiler results in 15 lines less code! And it's nicer, more user friendly, too.

Yes, it does mean I have a few hundred kilobytes of vendored fennel.lua in the repo, but that's not all that much, all things considered. When embedding into the binary, it also gets compressed, and only weighs some ~86KiB or so. In a ~28MiB binary, that doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

Except it makes using Fennel a lot more convenient. I added Lua support to #iocaine first and foremost to support Fennel, so this feels very satisfying right now.

Today, my mind wandered off, and started thinking about a reverse proxy with first class support for #iocaine again.

This has been on my mind a lot lately, in various shapes and forms, especially since I redesigned #iocaine3's configuration, and it can spawn any number of server processes.

But I don't want to put this into iocaine itself, that'd pull in a lot of otherwise unnecessary dependencies. I could do without any, if I made it incredibly simple and limited, but... that doesn't feel right.

Today's train of thought led to an idea that I'd build it as a separate project, which would depend on iocaine, and use it as a library. It wouldn't communicate with an external iocaine like the traefik/haproxy/nginx/caddy/apache modules do (or will) - it would embed it.

OK here's a theory: #ChatGPT's #Atlas browser is not a really browser but fact a way for OpenAI to circumvent scrape blockers. It's more a distributed human-based scraper rather than anything else.

Given how widely loathed AI and how damaging AI scrapers have become #OpenAI's IP ranges ended up in quite a lot of block lists, many servers outright terminate any connection to them. Then there are things like #Anubis or #Iocaine that further frustrate #LLM scraping.

But what if you DIDN'T neeed to bother about all that? What if you could use civilian IP addresses with "organic" traffic patterns, and have humans solve Captchas, provide proof of work for Anubis, or get around Iocaine? All this for free -- you don't even need to pay people for it?

I would be REALLY interested to see what telemetry Atlas sends back. 100% certain it will send back things like URL and rendered HTML output, possibly user interaction patterns ("a normal human on this website moves their mouse first to the 'I am not a bot' captcha then clicks it). They do not have to respect robots.txt because, well, it comes from organic visitors...

Am I crazy?

OK here's a theory: #ChatGPT's #Atlas browser is not a really browser but fact a way for OpenAI to circumvent scrape blockers. It's more a distributed human-based scraper rather than anything else.

Given how widely loathed AI and how damaging AI scrapers have become #OpenAI's IP ranges ended up in quite a lot of block lists, many servers outright terminate any connection to them. Then there are things like #Anubis or #Iocaine that further frustrate #LLM scraping.

But what if you DIDN'T neeed to bother about all that? What if you could use civilian IP addresses with "organic" traffic patterns, and have humans solve Captchas, provide proof of work for Anubis, or get around Iocaine? All this for free -- you don't even need to pay people for it?

I would be REALLY interested to see what telemetry Atlas sends back. 100% certain it will send back things like URL and rendered HTML output, possibly user interaction patterns ("a normal human on this website moves their mouse first to the 'I am not a bot' captcha then clicks it). They do not have to respect robots.txt because, well, it comes from organic visitors...

Am I crazy?

#iocaine has been up for 11days 15h 5m 24s, and spent 3days 8h 21m 41s dealing with - gestures hands wildly - everything.

In the past 24 hours, it served 27.94M requests, 99.46% of which were garbage, 0.53% passed through unscathed, and 0.007% were fed to the Cookie Monster. This required about 79.41MiB of memory on average, and 64.72GiB of absolute trash was generated for the nastiest visitors.

Top garbage consumers were:

1. Disguised bots - 22.85M
2. Claude - 1.52M
3. Facebook - 976.18K
4. Huawei - 871.42K
5. OpenAI - 811.89K
6. Amazon - 332.62K
7. Commercial scrapers - 260.51K
8. Alibaba - 62.96K
9. Google - 27.44K
10. Enthusiastic guestbook visitors - 1.34K
11. Perplexity - 45.03

Various other agents slurped through 50.20K pages of unhinged junk, bless their little hearts.

In these trying times, 0.04% of all requests were likely of human origin: I hope you enjoyed your stay, and will visit again! Of all requests iocaine let into the garden, 68.51% were from Fediverse software. Thank you! #FediHug

#AIStatsPorn

Previously, I set a date for the #iocaine 3.0 release, October 23rd, that's about 1.5 weeks. I may have to push it back a little again, so I can write the necessary documentation.

Already started on it, but a lot has to be written still, and even more reviewed - and this endeavour includes a redesign of the iocaine homepage, so that I can host docs both for the stable and the in-development branch too.