ugh.

@tmaher

I was thinking more about additional funding, over and above the regular contributions we make.

@jerry Is there any public info about this ?

@eingfoan They have a detailed page with the pricing changes here: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/

@renchap @jerry You might be on to something here. There are a vast number of smaller orgs whose websites are getting positively swamped by all kinds of content scraping activity, much of it to build out LLMs. There are real and direct costs, and this is an important and seldom highlighted one.

@briankrebs @renchap I can objectively say that AI scrapers are a massive problem for me and a drain on resources. Everyone and their dog is trying to scrape the internet continuously with badly designed/vibe coded crawlers that don’t seem to keep track of what they’ve already crawled, let alone the context of what they are attempting to crawl or honoring robots.txt etc

@jerry Maybe you already know this, but I heard Iocaine is pretty good blocking scrapers.
https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/
Don't know if it would work with mastodon.

@renchap Interesting trivia from the refurbished server market: more and more offerings are now bare-bone (meaning without RAM, SSD/NVME) at the same price. They are now removing those parts to sell separately. Capitalism at work. @jerry @glynmoody

@jerry Good luck.

I just replaced my old desktop with a new unit. Little mini HP PC. Bought w/ minimal RAM/disk, then bought new RAM separately. The RAM cost 1/2 the price of PC. About $230 for 2 @ 16 GB DDR4 SODIMMs.

Thanks, "AI."

I'm also trying my best to self-host what I can, because 99.9% of what I want to run is just for me/my wife, and I can absolutely get away with it on my limited hardware.

This is truly the worst timeline.