3 ms·

2ality blog: temporarily offline due to AI stealing work

27 points by mmarian 5mo ago

mmarian 5mo ago
Not mine. Added to the actual site title the AI part, just because it makes the subject clearer.
stavros 5mo ago
I don't understand, how did AI cause the sales to drop to nothing?
- MForster 5mo ago
  He didn't say that.
  - stavros 5mo ago
    Then the title of this post desperately needs changing.
  - mmarian 5mo ago
    > I’m taking my blog and my books offline so that I can decide what to do next – especially w.r.t. AI companies stealing my work Why would he take down his content if it's not due to AI?
    - jostylr 5mo ago
      He said the crawlers were costing him money. Maybe stealing could be viewed as avoiding the ads? Don't know what license he had on his publicly available content, but if his site was not being crawled heavily, then it sounds like he might not have taken it all down. I wonder about hosting it on Github / GH-pages or something. Maybe at some volume it becomes a problem or maybe they disallow ads which he wants to profit from? I used to follow him years ago and liked his content but I drifted away long before AI. I wonder given his deep expertise how much he could get into teaching how to spot and fix bad AI JS code.
- zero_shift 5mo ago
  Axel thinks that scrapers have aggregated his content, and now, potential readers doing searches or queries on AI assisted systems, see the scraped content rather than his website.
pogue 5mo ago
Maybe he should just get wordpress unlimited, like the guy who get's automatically flooded everytime someone uses archive[.]today
drooby 5mo ago
At what point will we create micro tolls that AI must pay?
- mmarian 5mo ago
  They won't, individual content just isn't that valuable and they have plenty of choice; I say this as a blog owner (albeit tiny). Cloudflare is trying something related to this; I wrote a post on why it won't work https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per-crawl https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per...
stefantalpalaru 5mo ago
[dead]
mmarian 5mo ago
Unfortunate outcome, don't see any way out though. Think we have to accept that discovery via Google/ LLMs is dead. Best way is to share blogs in forums/socials, and hope people sign up (RSS/newsletter). But there's going to be much lower demand as well, and you'll have to have a really good justification as to why people can't get similar content from an LLM.
lenkite 5mo ago
It pretty clear that the days of open-publishing are over. Your work merely goes into feeding Anthropic & OpenAI's bottomline. Priced & closed digital publication with a notice of "This reading license is for pure human consumption only - kindly contact the publisher for AI usage", is going to become more and more popular.
- cyanydeez 5mo ago
  every preface should be a prompt injectione RCE .
pixel_popping 5mo ago
> The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Unrelated to the rest of what's being said but I don't see how that could cost more than $2-5 a month to host?
- montag 5mo ago
  Why not put it behind Cloudflare protection - or is that not effective?
jazzypants 5mo ago
This is absolutely a tragedy. Dr. Rauschmayer's work is unparalleled in detail and accuracy, and the JavaScript community is worse without it freely available. I completely understand his reasoning. It just makes me sad.

27 points by mmarian 5mo ago

mmarian 5mo ago

Not mine. Added to the actual site title the AI part, just because it makes the subject clearer.

stavros 5mo ago

I don't understand, how did AI cause the sales to drop to nothing?

MForster 5mo ago
He didn't say that.
- stavros 5mo ago
  Then the title of this post desperately needs changing.
- mmarian 5mo ago
  > I’m taking my blog and my books offline so that I can decide what to do next – especially w.r.t. AI companies stealing my work Why would he take down his content if it's not due to AI?
  - jostylr 5mo ago
    He said the crawlers were costing him money. Maybe stealing could be viewed as avoiding the ads? Don't know what license he had on his publicly available content, but if his site was not being crawled heavily, then it sounds like he might not have taken it all down. I wonder about hosting it on Github / GH-pages or something. Maybe at some volume it becomes a problem or maybe they disallow ads which he wants to profit from? I used to follow him years ago and liked his content but I drifted away long before AI. I wonder given his deep expertise how much he could get into teaching how to spot and fix bad AI JS code.
zero_shift 5mo ago
Axel thinks that scrapers have aggregated his content, and now, potential readers doing searches or queries on AI assisted systems, see the scraped content rather than his website.

pogue 5mo ago

Maybe he should just get wordpress unlimited, like the guy who get's automatically flooded everytime someone uses archive[.]today

drooby 5mo ago

At what point will we create micro tolls that AI must pay?

mmarian 5mo ago
They won't, individual content just isn't that valuable and they have plenty of choice; I say this as a blog owner (albeit tiny). Cloudflare is trying something related to this; I wrote a post on why it won't work https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per-crawl https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per...

stefantalpalaru 5mo ago

[dead]

mmarian 5mo ago

Unfortunate outcome, don't see any way out though. Think we have to accept that discovery via Google/ LLMs is dead. Best way is to share blogs in forums/socials, and hope people sign up (RSS/newsletter). But there's going to be much lower demand as well, and you'll have to have a really good justification as to why people can't get similar content from an LLM.

lenkite 5mo ago

It pretty clear that the days of open-publishing are over. Your work merely goes into feeding Anthropic & OpenAI's bottomline. Priced & closed digital publication with a notice of "This reading license is for pure human consumption only - kindly contact the publisher for AI usage", is going to become more and more popular.

cyanydeez 5mo ago
every preface should be a prompt injectione RCE .

pixel_popping 5mo ago

> The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Unrelated to the rest of what's being said but I don't see how that could cost more than $2-5 a month to host?

montag 5mo ago
Why not put it behind Cloudflare protection - or is that not effective?

jazzypants 5mo ago

This is absolutely a tragedy. Dr. Rauschmayer's work is unparalleled in detail and accuracy, and the JavaScript community is worse without it freely available. I completely understand his reasoning. It just makes me sad.