Re: Concerns about the evidence for the AI scraper problem and the resulting blocking

Kalamatee <[email protected]> writes:

> If a single request can consume gigabytes of RAM and an entire CPU
> core, then it seems to me that the underlying problem isn't just
> “bots”. It's that an unauthenticated request can trigger an extremely
> expensive operation. [...]

> [...] If the expensive operations are made difficult to abuse, it
> matters much less whether the requester is an AI scraper, CI, curl or
> a human. [...]

Well, yes, and as it's been explained, there are numerous asymmetrically
expensive operations involved in a public forge.  "git blame" is by no
means unique.  Standing them up anyway for developer convenience is the
cost of doing business.  It's fine as long it's developers and their
tools, not a DDoS network, triggering the expensive operations.  

The cost of the cost of doing business is that bad actors can also
trigger them.  <<< we are here

> And on the AI comment: whether I used an AI tool to help formulate the
> email doesn't really affect the technical argument. If I've got something
> technically wrong, I'm happy to be corrected on that basis.
> Thanks again for the additional information.

At least please try to make the thing less wordy.

- FChE