IP+subnet based throttling on the other hand is a perfectly working solution, optionally with a proof-of-work or login requirement for intensive POST requests only. Why is it a problem if only a few requests per day are made per home IP? Just how bad and inefficient is the web server?

Bots are not a second class client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously.

Keep in mind that for the average person (and even the average techy), they will not even see the captcha, because they have enough tracking them across the web that it will 'autoresolve' them as a human. I only see captcha's nowadays when I am working on web scraping automation or browsing from my VPS.

Same with:

> it changed under them

I wonder if there's some blend of software and other interest that might rekindle that novelty for you?

Try solving a very hard problem or a very good game. Or at least publish some very good polished software, they all sucks! This really is a paradox, all this doomerism and AI that has solved “coding” and it’s “very good now” and we don’t mot only have not good software, but it’s getting worse! Good lord how the heck we get out of this situation?

This is only true if your definition of "hobby project" is limited to "initial prototype with basic functionality and a generic corporate-looking landing page".

Yeah, a lot of tools that would have made fun weekend projects can now be one-shot by Claude and aren't even worth sharing, because someone who needs that functionality can just use Claude too. But you can accomplish so much more now. Someone just did a hobby project to reverse engineer NVidia drivers and make them work on Windows XP. Dream bigger!

It depends what you're building, and why you're doing it.

For example I've always been interested in compilers and interpreters, and I've spent the past few months writing (by hand) a lisp compiler.

It's nothing special, nobody will use it, and existing solutions already exist. But I've had a lot of fun getting things working.

To highlight two examples, and bearing in mind my output binaries are statically linked with no libc, I wrote a garbage collector in amd64 assembly. Getting that working took a couple of weeks, as I kept finding random segfaults and issues. But now? Now I could write something similar in an afternoon. (And because it was for learning I chose stop&copy instead of mark&sweep. It seemed simpler and easier.)

Secondly I realized, belatedly, that I could implement the "(syscall N arg1 arg2 ..)" primitive in my lisp. Which meant that I could write wrappers like this:

     (defconst SYS_mkdir 83)

     (defun mkdir (path)
       "Create the given directory."
        (if (< (syscall SYS_mkdir path (octal "0o755")) 0)
           nil
        1))

Nobody will find it too interesting, I'll say again, but writing a compiler (in golang) that has it's own static runtime written in pure assembly? I'm sure some models will eventually one-shot that, but it won't teach anybody anything.

For me hobby projects are either a) to solve a need (which is what led to me writing a toy CP/M emulator), or they're for learning. And for learning the whole point is to type the code yourself, identify the inevitable bugs, and make iterative improvements.

Looking at what I have now? It feels good. Despite the existance of other lisp interpreters, compilers, or the random LLM stuff people do.

It's not a competition, I've not lost anything, and now I think I've internalized the SysV ABI convention, learned about the limits, and implemented trivial things like "print a floating point number in assembly". As well as learning about how to invoke linux syscalls to read the entries in a directory, & etc.

So there are some counterexamples.

I think the basic premise under there is still valid. Lots of online sites/communities/etc turn into rugpulls. Success leads to management change, then depersonalization, then monetization.

Whatsapp is harder, because people I actually care to talk to use it. I would rather not give facebook a dime of my money.

Enshittification takes so much from us

P.S. The response is non sequitur. I already noted that TFA is ridiculous, but that has nothing to do with the fact that Pangram produces a very high number of false positives.

The only growth is in fake bot accounts.

As I said, people are constantly arriving.