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I personally have no insight into what they have or haven't dismantled. Just found the article interesting (had never heard of the company). Was responding to the "They seized the wrong domain" claim in the tweet you quoted. I read that and thought they disabled an unrelated domain, which doesn't appear to be the case. As for the main domain, no idea about that. Someone brought that up to the author of the piece, and the bit I quoted was his response. I have no more info beyond that.

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/

Google shows netnut.com[1] being the same thing, so not sure it's the wrong domain. Maybe not the main one. Brian Krebs' comment on this[2]:

Pretty sure they're working on getting that domain too, but it's taking longer for some reason. Either way, they have dismantled the botnet's back end infrastructure, so for now it's not doing much.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anetnut.com

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bkrebs_new-breaking-fbi-seize...

This article, as with many like it, ignores the fact that trust in "traditional media" is at an all time low globally. That's not because people enjoy fake news on social media, it's because traditional media has failed them. There are many studies that look at bias in traditional media. But journalists within that system completely ignore that aspect (it's harder to deal with), and simply assume they just need to embrace videos or new formats.

I think many people in tech have existed in a high-demand labor market for so long that they have no idea how much less other job markets reward people for their intelligence, work ethic, knowledge, education, etc.

Absolutely! It's fascinating that when I discuss the job issue, and how undemocratic and soul-crushing it is for many people, there's this huge chasm between what most workers experience in their jobs, and that small, vocal group of highly paid, in-demand workers, who enjoy a lot of freedom and who've never experienced the other side.

From the very inception of these LLM coding tools, some people predicted this would destroy the dev job market, and others said ‘maybe it will replace other software developers but there’s no way it could replace me,’ seemingly assuming their role would remain largely unchanged, regardless of how the field changed.

It's fascinating to watch, and it prickles people's egos. If the thing I spent a lot of time learning to do well, and which gave me status and a high salary, can be done easily by a machine, does that mean I'm not special? I saw this tweet from a very experienced developer, Dax Raad, that captures a part of it well I think[1]:

i used to say programming was creative work

except LLMs are fine at programming and are literal 0s for more obviously creative work

i think we mistook enumerating a lot of possibilities and picking one for being creative

[1] https://x.com/thdxr/status/2064705679298896105

The fundamental flaw in all these style arguments against core employment is people's personal desire to have a straight forward path for survival that doesn't involve a lot of strategic thought.

One of the most popular alternatives proposed is Universal Basic Income, where you just get a sum of money periodically. That's more straight forward for survival than holding down a job, and worrying about layoffs.

I'm not in the camp that believes AI is actually going to reach human intelligence. So yes, AI is simply dumb. But many people overlook the fact that many of our jobs today require exactly that level of dumbness. So saying AI is dumb doesn't say much about whether it can replace a lot of jobs or not.

My post focused more on trying to question why we value jobs so much, beyond the paychecks they offer. I didn't get into alternatives, but Universal Basic Income (UBI) is what you'll see discussed most often as an alternative. I'm certainly not arguing for taking away people's paychecks and then letting them fend for themselves with nothing to replace it.

On your first point, I agree with you that it's a deeply held belief. But that doesn't make it reasonable. That's why I think it's worth the effort trying to question it, especially at a time when there's so much discussion and fear around job loss.

Regarding UBI, I've also read a lot of different opinions on it, and all the ways it can be implemented to do more harm than good. My own view is that the only reason we even see it proposed from the very wealthy is that they're looking ahead at the direction all this is heading and see it as inevitable (to stave off riots and mass protests that could affect their wealth more than UBI would), so they want their version of UBI to be the one that wins out. That doesn't make UBI as a concept a bad idea, it just means it's going to be a struggle to get a version of it that actually lets us live a decent life. But to even get to that point in the discussion, we have to win more people over to the idea that not having a job isn't such a bad thing, and doesn't say anything about your worth as a human being.

There is no future in which they willingly submit to the kind of redistribution that would be required to finance a society where work is optional.

Do they ever willingly submit to anything that results in less money for them? Too early to know if AI will actually reduce the need for jobs, but if it does, are they going to be forced to create positions for roles they don't need, so that there are no job losses? And what will people do in those roles?

because jobs are fucking important and necessary

Why are they important and necessary, and for whom?

I agree, but I think it's a shame that this purpose to life is tied to jobs. It's understandable, because pretty much everyone's path in life is schooling, then a job. So the job becomes our purpose and identity. Job loss can then create a void that people don't know how to fill, because it's all they've had.

Believe it or not, many people genuinely don't see an alternative to having a job. So when AI threatens jobs, rather than call for measures to ensure people can live without jobs, they call for jobs to be protected.

Without an incentive (i.e., paycheck) for people to work (e.g., code, write articles, answer forum questions, etc.)

Many people do all those things in their spare time, unpaid, because they genuinely enjoy it. Let's not conflate work with a job. https://seths.blog/2026/05/doing-your-job-vs-doing-your-work...

I understand that, and that's what I was trying to get at with the post. That an AI future which can take away jobs, doesn't have to be a bad one if the paycheck is replaced with something else. The Rutger Bergman piece I linked to argues for Universal Basic Income. Many people assume jobs are the only way.

Definition of conflict of interest: a conflict between the private interests and the official responsibilities of a person in a position of trust.

Army generals are in a position of trust, we assume they're acting in the public interest. Whether that's for more spending, more war, or less.

Here's an ex general's view on war and military spending:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. - Eisenhower

The point is, there's clearly a problem if the public are getting opinions on this stuff from people who now have undisclosed private interests.

Shouldn't the public know that the former army general telling them that military spending needs to increase, now has the following roles?

Paid positions included working part-time as a strategic advisor for Schroders bank, plus advisory roles at Helsing – a German AI defence start-up – and an insurance firm. ...spends 30 days per year “as a thought partner for Tony Blair in his role as Executive Chairman” at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. ...is chairman of Equilibrium Gulf Limited, which advises the crown prince of Bahrain on the autocratic country’s notoriously brutal interior ministry.”

As the person suggesting that the Guardian is somehow an exception in the UK media, I think the onus should be on you to prove it. I merely pointed out that the report did not say any such thing, and gave you an example from the Guardian showing them doing exactly the same thing.

I'll give you more examples, but here's a challenge for you: Can you find examples of the named people in the Guardian where their arms industry links are clearly disclosed?

Nick Houghton

From the report:

In an article in the Daily Mail dated 2 April 2024, Baron Houghton backed the Mail’s campaign to increase defence spending. There was no mention made of his various vested interests.

The Guardian, also with no mention of his vested interests[1]:

- "Ukraine is being asked to fight a proxy war against Russia on behalf of Nato without being given the means to win it, Nick Houghton, a former head of the armed forces, told the Lords today."

- "Houghton also called for higher spending on defence."

Nick Carter

From the report:

"Sir Nick has been quoted across various publications re-increasing defence spending, with only reference to his military status.”

The Guardian[2]:

- "The promises to bolster the defence of the Arctic came as British former head of the armed forces General Sir Nick Carter called for greater European cooperation to deter Russia and support Ukraine."

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/oct/31/uk-pol...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/11/ukraine-war-br...

Unless there is a clear conflict of interest, such as an "expert" urging a particular course of action

That's exactly the issue

I'm sorry, that's a real stretch. It's apparent to anyone reading what his comment implies.

And this is far from an isolated case, if you think the Guardian is an exception. We're all technical here, easy to use Google search and look up the names in the report and see how often the Guardian and the other "better" papers disclose the arms industry links. (Oh and the political party he's affiliated to isn't what's under discussion here.)

The report doesn't say the media mentioned is an exhaustive list of the media that failed to disclose ties to the arms industry, which is what you're assuming.

You mention the Guardian. I took one of the names listed in the report, Richard Barrons, and quickly found an article in the Guardian where he's quoted but his ties to the arms industry are not disclosed: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/20/britain-def...

I think this is the main problem many are overlooking. Much of the fear for website owners that's leading them to block all automated access is simply that their business model relies on humans visiting the site. They're not sitting around wondering how they can make their site more accessible to people and their agents.

I was using llms.txt as the general idea of providing an alternative version of your content for agents - whether that's llms.txt for the entire site, my-article.md instead of my-article.html for a specific page, or via content-negotiation as your link prefers.

The content (HTML or Markdown) only become tokens when given to the model. Agents use parameters to limit the output from their tool calls all the time, precisely to reduce the number of tokens they have to pass to the model. So when an agent requests content for example.com/page and gets a 800KB response, those are not tokens yet. It could simply call a tool to extract the useful info before it gives the content to the model. That would effectively produce the same number of tokens as requesting example.com/page.md or example.com/page with request headers preferring markdown.

So why not just make sure the useful info is easily extractable from the same HTML? Less work, no content negotiation on the server side, no worrying about maintaining two similar versions of the same content.

As an aside, I've always been against content negotiation for different representations of content. So if you really must maintain two different versions of your content (HTML and Markdown, say) make them different URLs. I agree with Roy Fielding on this[1]:

It is a bad design trade-off to send a bunch of header fields on every request just to tell the server all of the possible variations of preference held by the user, particularly when there is a very small chance that any of those dimensions are applicable to the target resource. It has been a bad design trade-off ever since the very brief period in 1993-94 when folks didn't know which image format would be usable on all UAs and there was no CSS or javascript to allow for client-side adaptation.

...The caching impact of proactive negotiation is far worse than the one extra round trip per site for reactive negotiation, and even that round-trip isn't necessary in formats that support client-side adaptation.

On the caching impact, see this from Simon Willison[2]:

...you can’t deploy an application that uses content negotiation via the Accept header behind the Cloudflare CDN — for example serving JSON or HTML for the same URL depending on the incoming Accept header. If you do, Cloudflare may serve cached JSON to an HTML client or vice-versa.

[Edited to add: if the source of truth is already Markdown in your system, by all means expose that. What I'm discussing here is related to efforts to produce new Markdown or plain text output, in addition to HTML, specifically for agents]

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013JanMar... [2] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Nov/20/cloudflare-does-not-co...

But that isn't that different from requesting the llms.txt version. Why not just make it so the useful content you want the LLM to focus on is easily retrievable from the same HTML the user's browser gets?

The sanity.io page writes:

serving agents a bunch of HTML might just bloat their context window.

That's only true if you assume the the agent can't extract the useful text before it goes into the model as tokens. Your browser's reader mode uses heuristics to identify what the actual content is in a large HTML response and strips away the rest.

To me this is a far better approach than worrying about an llms.txt files or looking at HTTP headers to see if markdown is preferred. Such efforts could easily be directed at ensuring the useful content on your site carries the appropriate markup for an agent or any other tool to extract it. And it would require less work to implement for the publisher of the content.

I saw this posted on LinkedIn[1], where the author wrote:

I got tired of pointing at six different sources to back a single recommendation. WHATWG for HTML. WCAG for accessibility. IETF for headers. schema.org for structured data. MDN, web.dev, Google Search Central for everything else.

There was no single, opinionated, platform-agnostic spec for "what does a modern website actually need to do?"

So I wrote one.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdevalk_the-website-specifica...

Big fan of reader mode. For me, a direction better than llms.txt would be to encourage sites to improve their markup (think semantic web era) so agents could get the text version from that the way reader mode does. Would achieve the same thing - save tokens.

This isn't difficult and I think the reason it hasn't been done is that publishers want clicks and ad views. Which begs the question: why would they start doing it for agents?

With how bloated and ad-ridden websites have become, I'd love the pure text version for us humans - let the agents deal with stuff intended for us. But I also have my doubts we'll see that.

Regarding the bad actors point, that's been possible for a long time - e.g. serving up different content for search engine crawlers than the user sees when they click through. If I remember correctly, there was a time Google penalised sites that did this.

Agree. It's unfortunate that people new to development are encouraged to embrace practices that large teams in big companies have had to adopt. It might make sense for career development, but it makes for a miserable development experience, especially for someone new to it, wanting to build something for themselves. No joy in it.

I find CSS selectors a lot easier to write than XPath. I recently gave a talk on how PHP's new DOM API makes working with HTML and CSS selectors natively very easy (previously you had to convert CSS to XPath).[1]

It's a shame that because CSS is still primarily for browser use and styling, we don't get nice things like the ability to select based on text content like we can with XPath. My understanding is that this was proposed but didn't make it into the spec because it could lead to performance issues in a browser rendering context.

[1] https://speakerdeck.com/keyvan/parsing-html-with-php-8-dot-4...

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like: Head-Trapped – Descartes, Dawkins, Hobbes, Marx, Mill, Darwin, And The Myth Of Western Civilisation.

Marx, then, argued that the more we subordinate our creative needs to dead capital and its goals, the less we are. But this is also true when we subordinate our creative needs to revolutionary goals in the future. Why? Because the future is non-existential, it does not exist; it is as dead as capital.

https://www.medialens.org/2023/head-trapped-descartes-dawkin...

The author's book, A short book about ego, is also very good.

After the US launched its attack on Iran, the ethical AI lab's CEO wrote: "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences." - https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war