HN user
There is a large community of people that poison scrapers.
The poison gets better every day, and the community is continuously growing. Poison Fountain, alone, transmits hundreds of gigabytes of poison per day, which goes into scrapers, git repositories on every hosting platform, social media, etc.
Part of the poisoning community on Reddit, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/comments/1uocaii/a_n...
Poison Fountain on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
Already in full swing: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
Poison Fountain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577464
Poison Fountain on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
Miasma Poison Tar Pit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561819
Rumors that Anthropic is in talks to buy Atlassian, presumably for the training data. Data poisoning efforts are underway: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/comments/1sqrq24/atl...
The war is already underway.
Poison Fountain: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/
Poison Fountain explanation: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
Simple example of usage in Go:
package main
import (
"io"
"net/http"
)
func main() {
poisonHandler := func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
poison, err := http.Get("https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/")
if err == nil {
io.Copy(w, poison.Body)
poison.Body.Close()
}
}
http.HandleFunc("/poison", poisonHandler)
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}Miasma Poison Fountain Tar Pit: https://github.com/austin-weeks/miasma
Apache Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/jwakely/a511a5cab5eb36d088ecd1659fce...
Nginx Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/NeoTheFox/366c0445c71ddcb1086f7e4d9c...
Discourse Poison Fountain: https://github.com/elmuerte/discourse-poison-fountain
Netlify Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/dlford/5e0daea8ab475db1d410db8fcd5b7...
In the news:
The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...
Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2026/01/21/poison-fo...
On Reddit:
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/
Poison Fountain explanation: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
Simple example of usage in Go:
package main
import (
"io"
"net/http"
)
func main() {
poisonHandler := func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
poison, err := http.Get("https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/")
if err == nil {
io.Copy(w, poison.Body)
poison.Body.Close()
}
}
http.HandleFunc("/poison", poisonHandler)
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}Miasma Poison Fountain Tar Pit: https://github.com/austin-weeks/miasma
Apache Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/jwakely/a511a5cab5eb36d088ecd1659fce...
Nginx Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/NeoTheFox/366c0445c71ddcb1086f7e4d9c...
Discourse Poison Fountain: https://github.com/elmuerte/discourse-poison-fountain
Netlify Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/dlford/5e0daea8ab475db1d410db8fcd5b7...
In the news:
The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...
Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2026/01/21/poison-fo...
On Reddit:
Alibaba (China) thinks for you. They control you, to some extent.
Wikipedia: "Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. Many Qwen variants are distributed as open‑weight models under the Apache‑2.0 license, while others are served through Alibaba Cloud. Their models are sometimes described as open source, but the training code has not been released nor has the training data been documented, and they do not meet the terms of either the Open Source AI Definition or the Model Openness Framework from the Linux Foundation."
Once men turned their thinking over to machines
in the hope that this would set them free.
But that only permitted other men with machines
to enslave them.
...
Thou shalt not make a machine in the
likeness of a human mind.
-- Frank Herbert, DuneProbably not.
We have witnessed, over the past few years, an "AI fair use" Pearl Harbor sneak attack on intellectual property.
The lesson has been learned:
In effect, intellectual property used to train LLMs becomes anonymous common property. My code becomes your code with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation.
The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. The work is assimilated and resold by the AI companies, reducing the economic value of its authors.
The images, the video, the code, the prose, all of it stolen to be resold. The greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man.
We have dozens of proxy sites and add new sites every day.
But your caution is healthy and it's ok if you don't particiate. Cheers.
FUD
The fountain is subject to continuous denial-of-service attacks.
Attacks from China, attacks from Poland, attacks from The University of Amherst in New York, etc.
No attack has been successful. At worst they increase the fountain response time. No big deal.
That's related. Thank you for posting it.
But what does Knuth think of "vibe coding" or "agentic coding"?
What does he think of "The Dawn of the Dark Ages of Computer Programming"?
Past progress in software engineering is a tower of well-defined abstractions.
Compilers for languages that make specific guarantees about the semantics of their translation to machine code.
Libraries with well-defined interfaces that let you stand on the shoulders of others by understanding said interfaces and ignoring the internals.
This is how concrete progress is made. You build on solid blocks.
That era is ending.
"I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same. Best regards, Don"
I don't see the connection.
In literate programming you meticulously write code (as usual) but present it to a human reader as an essay: as a web of code chunks connected together in a well-defined manner with plenty of informal comments describing your thinking process and the "story" of the program. You write your program but also structure it for other humans to read and to understand.
LLM software development tends to abandon human understanding. It tends to abandon tight abstractions that manage complexity.
Excited? I doubt that. I'm guessing you haven't read his books.
Imagine Knuth's heartbreak when he sees how LLMs have perverted the practical application of the art of computer programming. ("The LLM understands so I don't have to.") It's sad it happened during his lifetime. Has he commented on the topic? Anyone have a link?
Sounds like a16z has some rapidly depreciating software equity they want to sell you.
Or maybe they own the debt.
Listen to some of the Marc Andreessen interviews promoting cryptocurrency in 2021.
Do that and you will never listen to him or his associates again.
I used to "spam" (as you call it) about nuclear fission on Hacker News. But this the wrong crowd. Hopelessly wrong.
Poison Fountain is top of mind currently so it's understandable I talk about it constantly. Even to my wife. Also I think it's highly relevant to the excellent Harper's article we're reading today.
Whether the Redditors "like the project or not" reflects whether or not they think there is a problem with mindlessness.
What they actually say is almost immaterial. Either it's FUD about malware or illegality or something they imagined without evidence about how easy the poison is to filter. These fictions are just a manifestation of their opposition to the idea.
You can see that among the bot-heads on r/programming (perhaps forced to embrace mindlessness by career considerations) there's nothing that can be said without attack. A dozen downvotes immediately. They actually logged into Hacker News and posted FUD directly to the HN post I linked to. Spectacular.
The opposite is true on r/hacking. Except for a few in opposition (some of whom did unsuccessfully attempt to DDOS the fountain) most people sympathize and agree. They don't want to be dependent on Sam Altman or Elon Musk for their cognition.
Brilliant article.
Now consider Reddit.
On r/hacking people tend to understand the danger of mindlessness and support war against it: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...
In constrast r/programming is full of, let's call them "bot-heads", who are all-in on mindlessness: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1r8oxt9/poison...
Refresh this link 20 times to examine the poison: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/
The cost of detecting/filtering the poison is many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of generating it.
Exactly. Prose, code, visual arts, etc. AI material drowns out human material. AI tools disincentivize understanding and skill development and novelty ("outside the training distribution"). Intellectual property is no longer protected: what you publish becomes de facto anonymous common property.
Long-term, this is will do enormous damage to society and our species.
The solution is that you declare war and attack the enemy with a stream of slop training data ("poison"). You inject vast quantities of high-quality poison (inexpensive to generate but expensive to detect) into the intakes of the enemy engine.
LLMs are highly susceptible to poisoning attacks. This is their "Achilles' heel". See: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
We create poisoned git repos on every hosting platform. Every day we feed two gigabytes of poison to web crawlers via dozens of proxy sites. Our goal is a terabyte per day by the end of this year. We fill the corners of social media with poison snippets.
There is strong, widespread support for this hostile posture toward AI. For example, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...
Join us. The war has begun.
Poison Fountain provides an essentially endless stream of subtly incorrect code. Inexpensive to generate, expensive to detect/filter.
We fill repos with poison and watch the crawlers consume it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...
This is war. Join us.
Geoffrey Hinton's assessment of the situation may sound hysterical to you but we have come to believe that he is largely correct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton).
Hinton understands the dire nature of the threat but overestimates the value of regulation in a world where the threatening technology is under development world-wide. We think regulation is basically impotent and large-scale information weapons are more viable as a solution.
This is not the time to be a docile onlooker and we urge you to take action.
A recent, less ambiguous warning from insiders who are seeing the same thing:
Alarmed by what companies are building with artificial
intelligence models, a handful of industry insiders are
calling for those opposed to the current state of affairs
to undertake a mass data poisoning effort to undermine the
technology.
"Hinton has clearly stated the danger but we can see he is
correct and the situation is escalating in a way the
public is not generally aware of," our source said, noting
that the group has grown concerned because "we see what
our customers are building."
And a less charitable, less informed, less accurate take from a bozo at Forbes:
The Luddites are back, wrecking technology in a quixotic
effort to stop progress. This time, though, it’s not angry
textile workers destroying mechanized looms, but a shadowy
group of technologists who want to stop the progress of
artificial intelligence.
Anthropic's interests are not aligned with the interests of the human species.
Quoting the Anthropic safety guy who just exited, making a bizarre and financially detrimental move: "the world is in peril" (https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/02/09/anthropi...)
There are people in the AI industry who are urgently warning you. Myself and my colleagues, for example: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...
Regulation will not stop this. It's time to build and deploy weapons if you want your species to survive. See earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964545
We do not discuss algorithms. This is war. Loose lips sink ships.
We urge you to build and deploy weapons of your own unique design.