Category: Computers/Internet

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I host most of my websites on a DreamHost VPS*. This morning I discovered that a new file had been added, agents.txt, to the root of each site, on May 7.

It was easy to confirm that this is a new default file similar to the default robots.txt and favicon.ico DreamHost puts in every new site to get you started. Apparently they retroactively added it to sites that don’t already have one. So it’s a host action, not a hack. That’s good at least.

The contents are simple, and sensible for a new website: Discourage LLM training and actions, allow on-the-fly “AI”-generated summaries, disallow access to some common folders that shouldn’t be used for any of the above.

Though I am annoyed that they added it retroactively, particularly since it includes what looks like an explicit opt-in to retrieval-augmented generation, even if it’s something that’s happening already and less of a problem than a model vacuuming up your entire website for regurgitation. (Guess who’s already in Common Crawl!)

# Data use policy
Allow-Training: no
Allow-RAG: yes
Allow-Actions: no

# Default rules for all agents
[Agent: *]
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /config/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /.env
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Harder to find was what else goes in this file. The first agents.txt spec I found used a completely different syntax and a completely different purpose. I had to search for the policy directives (in quotation marks) to find the proposal it’s implementing, which turns out to have been renamed as agent-manifest.txt shortly after it was proposed in March. Apparently whoever DreamHost didn’t get the memo before it rolled out. Update: As Patryk points out below, it’s changed again to agents-brief.txt, just one day after the blog post was updated with the second name. .

Good: sensible defaults for new sites.
Bad: rolled out to existing sites without notice, half-baked implementation.

*Update: To clarify, this is on DreamHost’s managed VPS service, where they handle the OS and the webserver, but you have a flexible userspace all to yourself. It’s a middle ground between shared hosting (where other sites are on the same virtual machine and webserver) and fully run-your-own-OS cloud hosting, and the balance generally works for me (YMMV).

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Amazon is shutting down their Drive service. “What Drive service?” you may ask? So did I. It’s a cloud drive like Dropbox or Google Drive, and I’d completely forgotten about it until I read that headline.

According to the FAQ, it was being used by apps for photo and video storage (I assume on Fire tablets) and those have all been moved to Amazon Photos (which I’ve definitely never used).

But something jogged my memory…not just of when Google moved all their Google Plus photo features over to Google Photos, but something else involving music.

So I looked. And it turns out I actually have some files on there after all:

Two folders.

One was “Archived Music”, all albums from 2011 that I’d imported from my CD collection. I’m not sure, but I think the service might have been integrated with Amazon’s online music player way back when, and when they disconnected them, I didn’t have anything else I wanted to use it for.

The other was “My Send To Kindle Docs,” and it was full of ebooks and PDFs from 2015-2016, most of which I recognize from Humble Bundles.

I guess I should look through and see if there’s anything I don’t have a local copy of anymore. That I want to keep, anyway.

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This looks cool: Mozilla has released a translation tool as an add-on for Firefox that can do web page translation locally instead of sending data to the cloud! It’s based on Project Bergamot and implemented in WebAssembly.

IMO translation is one of those things like speech recognition that ideally should have always have been local (for obvious privacy reasons), but the processing and data just wasn’t there yet when Google Translate and similar services launched.

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Two hot takes (so to speak):

Auto-updaters shouldn’t run when the system is really busy.

And installers that check to see the whether the same or newer version is “already installed” should either be really thorough about what they’re checking, or offer to do a repair install anyway.

Overheat!

I’d fired up a game of No Man’s Sky, which even after redoing the thermal paste and adding another case fan still pushes the limits of my system’s cooling, especially if I forget to wait for all the background processes to finish loading on Windows startup. I left a space station, landed on a planet, started mucking around with the structure I had found, and hit a waypoint pole to save again—

And the system shut down.

I turned it back on to get the fans running again and help cool off. Which worked. But when I logged in, I had a bunch of errors with Google Drive. Apparently its auto-update launched during my GPU-intensive game and overheated it enough to reach the shutdown threshold.

Fortunately, I’d just saved my game — or so I thought.

I spent about half an hour trying to fix Google Drive before I decided to just go back to the game for now.

No Man’s Sky picked up seamlessly…at the previous save. Maybe the write cache hadn’t been flushed yet or something. I’m glad I only lost about a minute of gameplay, though… I’ve got several hundred hours on this save file, and I’d hate for it to get lost or corrupted!

Anyway, back to Google Drive. I couldn’t reinstall it because I couldn’t uninstall it, and despite my efforts I couldn’t remove enough traces of it for the installer to be willing to run. You can read the whole reinstalling Drive saga on my troubleshooting site, along with the taskbar that lost its icons halfway through.

I eventually fixed it by copying the installed program files from another system and running the uninstaller manually. That resolved both the taskbar icons and the Drive installer being willing to run.

Then I dragged myself into bed.

Yeah, it was a fun Saturday night. 🙄

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A few weeks ago, Szczezuja asked the GeminiSpace community: How you were using the Internet in 1991-1995 and 1995-2005?

This may be a bit longer than asked for, and I thought about breaking it into smaller pieces, but I decided it would be more appropriate for a Gemini post to be one single unit.

1991-1995: Discovery

By 1990 my family had moved on from Atari’s home computer line to what was then known as an “IBM Compatible” PC. I missed out on the BBS era, except for one time we had to download a software patch. My first taste of being online came through walled gardens during my last year of high school:

Prodigy, which I seem to remember having a GUI frame around a mostly text interface (except for banner ads in the frame). I think it even ran under DOS. I remember looking at some message boards about theater, but that’s about it.

AOL, which at the time was much friendlier to use, ran on Windows, and had its own system of message boards, email, etc. But again I don’t remember much about what I did with it until later on.

September

Then I got to college and discovered “Mosaic” at the computer labs. This web thing was really cool! There was a database of movies that I could search, I could find all kinds of sites on this collection of categorized links called Yahoo!, and people were posting things like fan pages collecting all of the Animaniacs cultural references!

Egad! Keeper’s Cartoon Files is still online!

There was a campus-wide Unix network that you could connect to through a dial-up terminal app, or the WYSE terminals scattered around campus. Windows and/or Mac computer labs at major departments. The engineering, computer science, etc. labs also had bullpens full of graphical UNIX terminals (I think they were the classic Sparc “pizza boxes” running SunOS and later Solaris), which was how I first encountered Mosaic and Netscape.

Back at my dorm, though, I had to dial up to a terminal. I could use text-based applications like Lynx for web browsing, or PINE for email. Sometimes I’d check my email (a string of auto-generated letters and numbers based on my major at a fourth-level domain based on the department that handled student email) at a text-based terminal in one of the computer labs or scattered around campus.

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I finally got around to trying out No Man’s Sky a few weeks ago. I started on a super-hot planet, where you need to find shelter and/or resources to recharge your suit’s hazard protection system to keep cool. Got killed a few times trying to figure out what I was doing. And after about 20 minutes, my computer spontaneously shut itself down.

I waited a few minutes to let it cool down, then tried again. Managed to figure out a bit more of what I needed to do in the game, and then the same thing happened.

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