Comments for NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Blog

Comment on How (and why) we rewrote our production C++ frontend infrastructure in Rust by Tim McCormack

Tim McCormack — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:44:44 +0000

Last year I rewrote a small but excitingly dangerous web service and we did something similar to your proxy testing, although in our case the switch, comparison, and telemetry code was built directly into the client.

I can confirm that you can find some really weird bugs (including existing behavior) that way. 🙂 Can’t recommend it enough.

Comment on Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? by jdw

jdw — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:46:36 +0000

In reply to Onion. In theory, yes. I saw an article about someone in Russia doing exactly that. Still gotta source the DRAM chips, though. And I expect it requires some very steady hands! -jdw

Comment on Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? by Onion

Onion — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:43:25 +0000

I came for the AI discourse but now I’m just sitting here wondering if you could theoretically solder up a batch of your own RAM.

Comment on Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? by milkbadger

milkbadger — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:16:52 +0000

Amen!

Comment on Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? by Arjay

Arjay — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 23:59:41 +0000

I’m just glad to know that NFSN is protecting my sites against AI abuses. Personally, I’m mostly anti-AI, although I cannot make a real evaluation since I limit my use of AI to Google Search.

Comment on Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? by jdw

jdw — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 01:24:35 +0000

In reply to Aaron. But GenAI is special and does not need to pay compensation that any other commercial use would be entitled to! Special because... reasons, I guess? Maybe they're hoping it'll eventually get good enough to generate some plausible ones. -jdw

Comment on Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? by Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:55:10 +0000

As a musician, I’m concerned about GenAI being trained on art without approval from the artist and without compensation that any other commercial use of the art would be entitled to. I think LLMs have great potential but using them as overpowered autocomplete is a waste of that potential.

Comment on Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? by semiurgist

semiurgist — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 04:34:17 +0000

I’m not anti-AI so much as anti-calling-this-nonsense-AI. Generative LLMs are basically auto-complete on steroids, just a fancy probability trick (and incapable of agency and context).

Comment on Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? by jdw

jdw — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:47:00 +0000

In reply to Sentynel. Is it? The person whose signup reason provoked me to write it immediately ragequit, claiming it's proof that we are too pro-AI. -jdw

Comment on Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? by Sentynel

Sentynel — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:53:23 +0000

Eminently sensible and well put as ever.