Since yesterday a lot of users in Europe found their workflows failing due to Github seemingly randomly throwing HTTP/401 on git clone/git pull when interacting with public repos without authentication.
It was now confirmed by staff member that this indeed is intentional and no further steps are planned at this point.


The word is “scrapers,” as in to scrape.
no disassemble!
Well given the waves of “buy book, scan, scrap” scrappers might become an acceptable version as well soon.
We’re talking about AI bots scraping GitHub in this post. Nothing to do with books.
Yes, and I was talking about the practice of some AI companies buying books in bulk to feed to their LLMs en masse which sometimes/often destroys the book in the process.
I was trying to build a bridge between those two related topics to “justify” the mistake and make it an intentional remark instead.
Wooooooooosh
Are you claiming that “AI scrappers” is a valid term and not just an (all too common) misspelling? If so, I’ll need to see a source on that, please.
Hah. No. I’m claiming there’s a joke that went over your head. And apparently over the heads of quite a few more readers. That’s OK.
I made a typo, so no joke was intended 🤷
otoh bots scrapping the internet infra with massive traffic… 🤔
Thanks for clarifying! cc @aev_software@programming.dev
What was the joke?
That the misspelling is amusing because if you look at it in a certain way it would still apply to AI/LLM companies. Whether it was intended or not.
Do we always have to be so tight and literal about everything?
Yeah except in the context of the post/article, it seems pretty far fetched for someone to be referring to the “scrapping” of books (assuming that’s what you meant; it’s strange that neither you nor the person who posted “whoosh” was willing to clearly state what the supposed joke was).
Misspellings annoy me, especially when they’re common like this one. Trying to explain away the misspelling as some kind of “joke” annoys me even more.
Misspellings are misspellings. They happen, nothing to get worked up about as long as you can decode what was said. But whatever, if it annoys you, it annoys you.
It’s been a couple of days now, and I’m replying through the response reply so I’m lacking rereading the context. But my memory here, was someone was explaining it as a potential joke in a typical social fashion, where you’d expect people to have a bit of chuckle but know that’s not really the case.
Instead a bunch of people are getting so literal and piling on them for not being correct, I suspect they already knew they were unlikely to be correct.
It’s the kind of response that sucks the fun out the internet. It just teaches people, no-one will appreciate a bit of playing around and everything becomes a little more sterile.