This website is for humans

Human-Centric Site and “Old Web” Aesthetic

• Many commenters love the blog: fast, no ads, no trackers, thoughtful writing, playful theme switcher, lots of small details (e.g., theme-aware avatar, Netscape nostalgia).
• It’s held up as an example of how personal sites “should” feel, evoking early-web projects like CSS Zen Garden.
• A few practical critiques appear (color contrast, pagination, bundling/JS choices), but overall sentiment is strongly positive.

Recipes, SEO, and Why People Turn to AI

• Several argue recipe sites are “written for robots”: bloated WordPress, aggressive ads, long autobiographical preambles for SEO.
• That bloat is seen as what makes AI summaries attractive—LLMs strip away cruft and surface steps/ingredients.
• Others defend good human-run recipe blogs that are fast, clear, and tested; they argue the problem is large corporate content farms and Google’s ranking incentives, not recipe blogging itself.
• Some cooks explicitly prefer an “average” AI-generated recipe—the “Platonic ideal”—over idiosyncratic blogger twists.

Attitudes Toward AI and “Google Zero”

• Many share the author’s unease: LLMs are seen as productivity tools but not something to be excited about, mainly benefitting big companies, threatening jobs, and consuming large amounts of energy.
• “Google Zero” (search referrals going to zero as AI answers everything) is considered plausible and worrying for independent creators.
• Others counter that serious work will still require checking sources; AI search that links back may coexist with traditional search.

Copyright, Fairness, and the Commons

• Strong claims that LLMs “steal and resell” human work without consent or compensation, including code under copyleft licenses; some want training outputs bound by the original licenses.
• Opponents warn against massively expanding copyright power; note that recipes themselves aren’t copyrightable in many regimes and that knowledge has always been cumulative.
• There’s a recurring tension between rewarding creators vs. maximizing access to a “commons” of ideas.

Blocking, Poisoning, and Arms-Race Defenses

• Consensus that robots.txt is largely ignored by AI crawlers; some site owners have given up on it.
• Proposed defenses: Cloudflare’s AI-block toggle, proof-of-work gates (e.g., Anubis), IP blocking (including certain cloud regions), tar pits, scrambled or poisoned content, even compression bombs.
• Others stress these measures can hurt small sites, accessibility tools, or human users; several argue only legal/regulatory solutions can really work.

Two Webs: Infonet vs Personanet

• Some foresee or welcome a split: an AI-facing “infonet” for quick answers, and a human “personanet” of blogs, gemini/neocities-style spaces, and communities.
• Optimists think AI will siphon off low-effort traffic and free the web from ad/SEO incentives; pessimists fear loss of audience, attribution, and the economics that sustain high-effort human work.

User Autonomy and Time

• A recurring counterpoint to the author’s wish for human visitors: users are time-poor and will choose whatever is most convenient.
• Commenters emphasize that creators can want human readers, but readers aren’t obliged to participate in anyone’s “project” if an AI answer is “good enough” for their needs.