floof.org
One of the downstream effects of the AI boom that I hadn't really thought about is that sites are starting to introduce anti-crawling tech as standard, because they don't want all their bandwidth going to training chatgpt7.
This is going to make life harder for people who run benevolent scrapers. How many sites are going to be blocking the wayback machine now, just because it looks too much like an AI scraperbot?
I'm blocking those AI bots but intentionally exempt the wayback machine.
To me, the issue is not the crawlers themselves, nor bandwidth nor content. The issue I have with GPTBot and Facebook's bots is they come as a flock, to the extent that my server can't handle. They are rude and never care to learn how search bots behave.
"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."
We bring up the Atwood quote all the time to explain why women are careful when rejecting men, but we seem to have forgotten the first part
*This* is why the right aren't bothered when we use adjectives that suggest we fear them, but are melting down over being called 'weird'
The thought of being laughed it is a fascist's kryptonite
Memories from a very bouncy evening in Reno, Nevada, at the beginning of November 2023
Tigon Kitty, Mikey, Lucky, Mokie Mutt, Jayke and Yoru (nop, that's not me, probably a distant relative)
Partyin', partyin', yeah. Fun, fun, fun, fun.
Digital. Procreate
You can see the short time-lapse process video on the first comment of this submission on my Telegram channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
You can see the full time-lapse video at supporting me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco
Random fursuit photos from the archives.
Sauna & rooftop furs, NordicFuzzcon 2017.
I cannot believe I’m still having to say this five years into this pandemic, but COVID doesn’t make an exception when you take a mask off inside to eat or drink.
Like what exactly do people think this is?
There isn’t like a hydration / nourishment transmission exception field.
Chap at FWA24!
🐕: @chaparralcoyote
📌: FurryWeekend
#Furry #Furries #Fursuit #FursuitFriday #Photography #Anthro #FurryArt #FurryArtist #FWA #FWA24
Just realised that on Mastodon, boosting *is* the algorithm.
There's no code trying to cleverly show me stuff it reckons I'd be into, based on what my contacts are into, instead my contacts are saying "I like this, I bet my contacts would like it too" and that is way smarter than any algorithm.
Thank you, boosters!
It's jarring to think that we've only had homosexuality be fully legal in most of the UK since about 2003, and the first gay marriage in 2014.
To underscore that, it's only been about 10 years since you could say gay people have had comparable rights to straight couples.
And we're still fighting for the right to be who we are, and for our trans friends to do the same.
My pc-keyboard-oriented brain finally figured out that "eepy" as "sleepy" makes sense it you realize that for the mobile generation(s), "L" is right next to backspace.
It sounds like baby talk, but it's a typo:
"S⌫eepy"
Time for a new profile picture on this #FursuitFriday
I fell in love with this picture 🥰
Anyone wanna join me here? It’s comfy
#furry #fursuiteveryday #furryfandom #fursona #furries #fursuit #furrycommunity #oc #artist #cute #furryoc #anthro #husky #fursuiter #furrypride #originalcharacter #fursuiting #furrys
📸 by @DuskPanda
🪡 by @/nightless.creations
📅 13.07.2024
🌍 Stuttgart
⛓️ linktr.ee/akithepup
We are 2 months away from having coal free (UK based generation sources) electricity in the UK. Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station closes on 30 September, the last train load of coal has already been delivered.
#coal #energy #UK #climatechange
(edited)
"Wealth taxes could raise £10bn to help plug Tory budget hole, say economists"
Reforms to inheritance and capital gains taxes could reduce £20bn shortfall and combat UK’s widening wealth gapToby Helm (The Guardian)
"UK ‘desperately exposed’ to cyber-threats and pandemics, says minister"
Science secretary Peter Kyle says national resilience suffered ‘catastrophically’ under ToriesIan Sample (The Guardian)
someone on cohost said "i literally still think vrchat should implement a feature where someone's nameplate actively tells you when they can't see your avatar for performance reasons" and man I agree with this so hard.
like the implicit social pressure created by realizing just how many people have your avatar disabled and consequently aren't seeing you for YOU would actually cause people to care about optimization
That was a weekend. I got to meet many wonderful beans who I've only known online, and I got to wear my fursuit in public for the first time! I think you can tell I was nervous even through the suit. 
I had this silly idea that we could do multiple rounds through the zoo that evening, but we ended up only going a tiny fraction of the way because everyone wanted photos and hugs and high-fives.
I also learned that fursuiting at home for two hours is not the same as fursuiting outside at 27 °C (duh) and had to go back to our "fursuit lounge" much earlier than I wanted, because I didn't want to risk an accident with all the kids around. Still, seeing how much fun all the guests and my friends had, it was so worth it, and I'm definitely going to try this again.
Thank you to everyone who was there, especially @karb, @Polarie_Fox, @Deepseacreatur3, and @livi_wusky! We basically had a little Fediverse meetup. :3
It was also amazing to watch my fellow fursuiters Charlie Blufur, Mick, and Taro - it made me realize how much skill goes into fursuiting and bringing your character to life, especially at a public event like that.
I can't wait to try this again! 
If you haven't yet, check out the other pictures from the event on Furtrack:
https://www.furtrack.com/index/event:jungle_night_augsburg_2024
📷 @keeya
Fursuit photo/video sharing & searching for the furry fandomwww.furtrack.com
Been a while since I posted something on here showing progress of the project I've been working on.
So here it is! All neonly now! I'm quite happy going with this theming cuz it's easy to maintain and I need to shift my focus on making a small mission driven singleplayer "campaign" like in Shellshock Live as well as improve the online experience and a tutorial. Those are the last really important parts I should get done (Improve Online as in figure out how to best cover my ass legally and have some sort of lobbies with simple settings and private option)
When we say “billionaires should not exist,” what we mean is:
Everyone should have healthcare.
Everyone should have housing.
Everyone should have access to good food and clean water.
Billionaires are a policy failure.
Everything catastrophically wrong with the world was done to make some billionaire even richer.
Every town that had to evacuate due to a chemical spill, strip mining, or a never-ending underground fire was done to make some billionaire even richer
Every news article that pits white people against minorities and immigrants is written to distract us from billionaires destroying democracy, human rights and the planet to make themselves even richer.
The billionaires are the problem.
protip: when referring to your favourite programming language’s features, call them spells instead to sound more mysterious and cool.
“memory safety feature”
“memory safety spell”
Today is the last day to bid on Sunset Coyote! Is this gorgeous fursuit coming home with you?? 💛🧡🩷💜
https://www.thedealersden.com/listing/sunset-coyote-fullsuit/286480
#fursuit #fullsuit #forsale #auction #coyote
This fursuit features:-Head built on a 3d printed flexible foam headbase (printing done by Dattas), following eyes, hair poof, a USB powered muzzle fan, lined with a balaclava.www.thedealersden.com
Random fursuit photo from the archives.
Ed Poodle on stage during the ConFuzzled 2022 poodle party dance.
(albeit even more so that the current dismal state of sites - have you tried navigating any websites with a keyboard recently, or screenreading a page that's just images and content that doesn't even exist until you scroll)
I've scrapped random fanfics off forums to convert into epub, just because it's easier on my eyes than a forum's weird color scheme (looking at you spacebattles[dot]net with your neon green text on black)
@foone
Scraping already "died" when everyone and their mother started using the mess that is Cloudflare's proxy and their anti-"bot" services.
("Died" because people just developed tools to bypass that. Scraping ant counter measures to it hale always been in an arms race)
Content warning: data collection, capitalism
What is a "benevolent scraper"? I don't think there is such a thing. If we're assuming the definition of a scraper is a bot that crawls links autonomously and archives any and all data it's able to come across, even those that so generously respect robots.txt (yes even Wayback Machine) or other "opt-out" mechanisms, they are still opt-out in nature and opt-out is not a moral configuration for data collection of any kind. one should have the right to be forgotten by default and the choice to be preserved being opt-in.
this is of course excluding commercial digital media - the act of making something available for purchase, intentionally, a discrete act of opting-in just as any other, should waive "right to be forgotten". and even moreso opting in to commercial sale should come with strict regulations about media preservation and archival, to ensure those who purchase media are always able to access it for the purchasers' lifetime. in such a fantasy utopia, where we didn't live in a global plutocracy that lets corps get away with all the shit they do, there would be no non-malicious use case for any opt-out data collection/preservation.
the issue with the ermerging scrapers is that the partially ignoren robots.txt and get lost in the dungeons of API endpoints gobbling up CPU and io.
The only way to get rid of them is blocking via useragent which we tried to avoid by establishing robots.txt
Its so back to the stone ages.
yeah I gave this some thought-- like there's a Wordpress plugin I use on my site that adds a bunch of specific "User-agent: ai-hooverbot-v69
Disallow: /"
to robots.txt, which at least keeps the well behaved training crawlers from beating it to death.
Of course I have seen evidence of non well behaving ones still coming through as well as desirable things like search spiders and archive bots. I don't want to block those inadvertently or create any user annoyance