Fuck this is some sick shit. Decades of silicon valley brainworms and being surrounded by yes-men have genuinely turned the brains of these tech bros into soup. IMO, anyone whose greed facilitates real, tangible harms like this needs to be made an example of by the justice system. Not “fined” or “sanctioned” but put in custody and denied access to their system of enablers. Goddamn, Musk and his billionaire cohort make me see red.

Oy. Sadly, I suspect anybody who has worked in dev knows the outlines of this story: Management promising deliverables with unrealistic timelines and functionality; team leads with such poor internal product knowledge they don’t recognize catastrophic issues until it’s too late; poorly-trained devs squeezed to push out unscalable kludgy insecure nightmares “for now” that just never get addressed; systems gradually becoming a Jenga tower of manual workarounds and undocumented slapdash quick fixes… Ugh. Nightmare fuel.

I do hope this move results in more support for the IA/Wayback Machine and helps them to update some of their crawler tech — thanks to the rise of AI, some sites are effectively (thru captchas etc.) or actively (through straight-up greed [coughRedditcough]) blocked from being archived almost entirely, which is frustrating for legit archivists/contributors.

Funnier if it just funneled all requests to the GeoGuessr dude.