Top all-time · #9222
Marcus Butler
Personal blog · marcusb.org · on HN as marcusbprogramminghardware
Marcus Butler's personal blog at marcusb.org covers programming and hardware. Since 2024, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 24 times, most often “Show HN: Quixotic – a tool for wasting bot and LLM scraper time”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Marcus Butler's hack posts: quixotic, which feeds AI crawlers spurious Markov-chain content, and tinyblog, a lightweight-website idea. Commenters mostly cite them as examples.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This is the personal blog of Marcus Butler. I write mostly about software I've written, technology, but also sometimes gardening, and metal working.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: Quixotic – a tool for wasting bot and LLM scraper time6 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2024-12-26
What Hacker News says?
Self plug, but I made this to deal with bots on my site: https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html . It is a simple markov generator to obfuscate content (static-site friendly, no server-side dynamic generation required) and an optional link-maze to send incorrigible bots to 100% markov-generated non-sense (requires a server-side component.)
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “AI companies cause most of traffic on forums”Submitted A Tricycle of the Mind as a story · 53 points
HN discussionAuthor of a similar tool here[0]. There are a few implementations of this sort of thing that I know of. Mine is different in that the primary purpose is to slightly alter content statically using a Markov generator, mainly to make it useless for content reposters, secondarily to make it useless to LLM crawlers that ignore my robots.txt file[1]. I assume the generated text is bad enough that the LLM crawlers just thr…
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers”Submitted Show HN: Quixotic – a tool for wasting bot and LLM scraper time as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIf with damaging content you mean incorrect content, another comment in this thread has a user doing what you said https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable”Submitted Quixotic: Bot and LLM Content Obfuscator as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable”Indeed: https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html try not to block LLM bot traffic and start injecting spurious content for ""improving"" their data. Markov chain at its finest!
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable”Quixotic[0] (my content obfuscator) includes a tarpit component, but for something like this, I think the main quixotic tool would be better - you run it against your content once, and it generates a pre-obfuscated version of it. It takes a lot less of your resources to serve than dynamically generating the tarpit links and content. 0 - https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable”I had enough problems with new Seagate Exos drives (actually new, not remanufactured or whatever these folks ended up with,) that I've taken to buying used Western Digital Ultrastar drives on Amazon for my NAS. They're cheaper, and so far, reliable enough. I wrote a little more about my rationale[0], but, basically: 1. With RAID-6, I can take two drive failures, and it is quicker to get a replacement off Amazon than…
Comment linking /posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech-on-tech/
on “Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours”I use both to try to mitigate the risk of losing data due to a backup format/program bug[1]. If I wasn't worried about that, I'd probably go with Borg but only because my offsite backup provider can be made to enforce append-only backups with Borg, but not Restic, at least not that I could find.[2] Otherwise, I have not found one to be substantially better than the other in practice. 1 - some of my first experiences…
Comment linking /posts/ransomware-resistant-backups/
on “Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux”The drive enters the cycle again. I use the drives until they show signs of failure (SMART monitoring/testing), or until I need to upgrade for capacity reasons. I'm using "recertified" (really, used) drives that I've written about here: https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech... . They are inexpensive and, so far, have been very reliable. (And, yes, I've done restores from the backup sets.)
Comment linking /posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech-on-tech/
on “Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts”> Ransomware is really clever these days and if you PUSH your backups, it can also encrypt or delete all your backups, because it has access to everything That depends on how you have access to your backup servers configured. I'm comfortable with append-only backup enforcement for push backups[0] with Borg and Restic via SSH, although I do use offline backup drive rotation as a last line of defense for my local back…
Comment linking /posts/2024/07/ransomware-resistant-backups-with-borg-and-restic/
on “Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts”Most of my telecom experiences were pretty boring. It largely consisted of handling digital circuits for modem banks, then later setting up a very small CLEC and building small PBX systems out of open source software in the early 2000s, which at the time worked about as well as you might imagine[0]. The outside plant people for the local ILEC had the best war stories: * Someone tried to carjack a friend while he was…
Comment linking /posts/2023/11/a-real-life-disaster-recovery-event/
on “The insecurity of telecom stacks in the wake of Salt Typhoon”I ended up writing some pretty hacky elisp to automatically load my chezmoi templates if I try to edit a Chezmoi-managed file. It'll also handle applying and pushing saved changes to my git remote so I don't forget that either. https://marcusb.org/posts/2025/01/frictionless-dotfile-manag...
Comment linking /posts/2025/01/frictionless-dotfile-management-with-chezmoi/
on “Dotfiles feel too personal to share”For anyone curious about this, the tenting solution is available here[0]. I wrote about it in my review of the Moonlander[1]. In short, in addition to much more stable angle adjustment, you get an additional 46 degrees of adjustment (11 degrees with the tent legs vs 57 degrees with the platform kit.) It does tend to slide around a bit on a smooth desk, but I solved that with some rubber matting glued to the bottom.…
Comment linking /posts/2025/08/two-years-with-the-zsa-moonlander-mark-i-keyboard/
on “Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander”here's a nice project to automate this: https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html couple of lines in your nginx/apache config and off you go my content rich sites provide this "high quality" data to the parasites
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “OpenAI's bot crushed this seven-person company's web site 'like a DDoS attack'”Another happy rsync.net customer. I published my scripts[0] and notes[1] about doing append-only backups with Borg on rsync.net since at the time rclone studio wasn't supported. My strategy is to do Restic backups to a backup server at my house and Borg backups to rsync.net as my offsite backup, so the scripts handle both. The post I linked above also outlines how I handle expiring old backups (requires either manua…
Comment linking /posts/2024/07/ransomware-resistant-backups-with-borg-and-restic/
on “Rsync.net Technical Notes – Q4 2025”Recently discussed ... https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “Ask HN: AI bots everywhere – does anyone have a good whitelist for robots.txt?”As I said, Mastodon/ActivityPub has its issues. If the goal of "Free Our Feeds" was "let's build activity pub into a better mousetrap" or "let's design a protocol that fixes Activity Pub's flaws", I'd be all for it. As it stands, Free Our Feeds is engaged in a pointless exercise: they want to "free" Bluesky/AT-proto from control of Bluesky and build a "fire exit" for Bluesky users if Bluesky "turns evil". They are b…
Comment linking /posts/2025/01/your-feeds-are-already-free/
on “Free Our Feeds”Self plug, but I made this to deal with bots on my site: https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html . It is a simple markov generator to obfuscate content (static-site friendly, no server-side dynamic generation required) and an optional link-maze to send incorrigible bots to 100% markov-generated non-sense (requires a server-side component.) I do serve a legit robots.txt file to warn the scrapers I know about away.
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “403ing AI Crawlers”You have the right ideas, and there are protocols that do this, some more isolationist than others: https://yesterweb.org/zine/issue-05/08/ "The Web Outside the Net" and https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/SmolNet Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html
Comment linking /hacks/tinyblog.html
on “I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet”https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html more lightweight than this anvil
Comment linking /hacks/quixotic.html
on “Can't Stop the Signal. Poison It”