Making requests is inherently cheaper than delivering responses, even with caches. Efficiency improvements can buy a little time on a given resources but won't solve the problem of bot saturation now that everybody can spawn a custom bot in about 12 seconds and is being encouraged to do so.
Rate limits, blocking, and pay-per-use are the only roads out and even those might not last as models get better at hacking and masquerading.
The internet we want to use LLM's with is simply not one that can support LLM's, and with LLM's not going anywhere, the whole experience of the internet is going to be forced into some radically less open and more expensive paradigm.
Policies like this just represent the beginning of the transition.
We need a new non-commercial version of the internet. Free of bots, free of ads, ... you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting enough to be worth paying instead of addictive enough to keep you scrolling to show you more ads.
It may look impossible right now. But what is impossible for real is to continue as we are. The damage that internet does to society is increasing by the day while its value is reduced (economic value, social value).
You'd need a force strong enough to prevent it from falling prey to this tragedy of the commons, and that force would need to be stronger than the incentives to commercialize it. And that's where plenty of contemporary scraping-based salaries lay.
I'm not so certain. I used to buy a broadsheet newspaper, which was full of ads. Now I pay a few hundred a year, and get the same newspaper online, with no ads at all.
So, the precursor to online media has already gone through this paradigm shift.
I mean, what you're saying is "If I pay for a product ads go away"
Which is partially true, but it only shifts the distribution of the problem. Once your service gains enough popularity network effects cause it to gain value. You have to worry about high priced buyouts of the entire service (great for the site owner, terrible for the users).
It's not, it just requires creativity. One example I can think of is limiting connectivity by distance between nodes. Something like Meshtastic seems unlikely to ever be commercialized in the same way that the Internet has been. Sure, you would lose some useful applications of the Internet, but you would gain other things.
That's this internet. Nothing precludes you from dropping big tech and solely engaging with the "indie web"[0][1] if you so choose. You're free to build your own website with its own RSS feed, join webrings[2] of like-minded people, and engage organically.
[0] One of many similar initiatives, I'm sure. Not an endorsement.
Careful what you wish for. The ticket to entry will (have to) be a proof of identity, the ultimate nail in the coffin of privacy and anonymity on the web.Outside of that, chaos.
We need a new non-commercial version of the internet.
you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting...
So is it commercial or non commercial?
Nothing is stopping you from creating a social network that is pay gated. Go build it. If you can't get anyone to sign up perhaps you'll realize it's not so easy as scapegoating addictive social media.
There is a whole cottage industry of people who legitimately make their living criticizing Facebook. It's a consumer software product. Yet few of these people seem to have their conviction extend to building an alternative that ever catches an audience. Why is that? Because addiction? Any other excuses?
It only proves your point because it wasn't successful in the end, but I really enjoyed the experience on app.net (a paid version of Twitter) while it still existed. Personally I think they lost it where a lot of these alternative platforms lose it - they try to build an ecosystem that is always coming soon and ends up scattered instead of focusing on one product
Average, yes, but the way they phrase it, it could be a token bucket or similar, where you can do 60 quick requests and then be blocked for a bit while the bucket refills
I noticed that recently Github.com has some kind of weird bot detection on public repos. I have a browser extension for switching User Agents for a specific legacy site, sometimes i forget to turn it off and Github will require me to login to view public repos.
All of this is most likely due to mass scraping by LLMs. Welcome to the total shitification of the web.
The post is about gitlab but on the subject of GitHub, the rate limit I seem to have for viewing commit history seems to be 0 for logged out users and viewing source files seems to be about 5/hour.
I think it's because people are building agentic flows, reducing the amount of developer seats needed. It's the first step towards usage based pricing.
Providing kickbacks to the repos being scraped would be a good way to help fund open source projects and pay creators like streaming services do. Seems like they're headed in this direction - it would be a massive product differentiator over GH
Three minutes after kickbacks were announced there would be a flurry of new repos being created with bots repeatedly scraping them just to get those kickbacks.
My first reaction was that I really like this idea.
If we had a system where people who access projects pay and popular FOSS developers get paid for it we'd have much better alignment.
My second thought was that bots would immediately try to circumvent such a plan. They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.
The guidance given seems to hurt open source projects, not help.
Make the project private if the traffic is not coming from the audience you built it for, which stops anonymous callers reaching it at all. Or upgrade to Premium or Ultimate for much higher limits.
I would spend thousands of dollars for gitlab in terms of:
1) better UX for admin panel, I'm not sure what I've enabled and what not. Several buttons do not disable the rest of the settings, leaving me with some doubts (e.g. if I disabled grafana, why is there a setting that talks about where/how I store?)
2) a minimal version of gitlab without all the AI
Because that would go against MSFT's wishes on pushing LLM driven development if they started acknowledging that these tools are more damaging than helpful.
I put the text in to gptzero's AI checker and it came back with being Highly Confident it was 100% AI written. I don't think I've ever seen it that confident that the entire thing was AI before.
Getting that so I do not know exactly what they are doing. From the title I am guessing they are restricting or throttling if downloads exceeds some value.
If you are using LLMs to interact with sites like GitLab and GitHub, and you have the option to use a GraphQL API, you should jump on it immediately.
GraphQL is absolutely terrible for human developers to interact with, but it's like Facebook could see into the future back in 2012. I cannot imagine a more perfect API surface for agents. With the REST API on GitHub, you can consume maybe 10 issue JSON blobs before your context window is blown out. With GraphQL constraining the results you can easily read hundreds in the same token budget.
Additionally, the # of requests your agents need to make can be reduced in many cases since GraphQL can join across types whereas REST APIs cannot. You essentially get savings in two dimensions here. Quota and raw token volume per logical response.
CLI still has the possibility of being a little more token efficient, at worst it may use graphql behind the scenes.
For our company, we advertise the graphql schema to bots and they can one-shot whatever task they're trying to do. I've found that it's so good that I cancelled building an an MCP server and any skill. Just a well documented GQL schema. It's pretty remarkable.
no the advantage of graphql is that the caller can limit the response to only the information that they need. in a REST API the caller has to filter out the extraneous information. using LLMs to do the filtering uses up context window
Although that may be true, the quota at least on GitHub depends on what you're quering. We worked directly with GitHub and a complex enough organisation hit with a GraphQL query can actually hit your hourly app limit before you even get a response.
As for GitLab, having hosted it for medium size organisations (~200 devs) and seeing how monorepo's work (they don't, we had GitLab's team show us that one page view made 50K db queries on our setup), please consult with your local admin team before firing GraphQL at it.
I work closely with the team responsible for a large, self-hosted GitHub Enterprise instance. This is good advice for clients/consumers of GH data, but it can very easily lead to a lot of strain on the server-side. It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.
You could argue the rate limit guards should better reflect that, but that’s just not the reality of the system. Likely speaks to a lot of stability issues GitHub has been facing lately.
I assume this is because of LLM scraping.
Presumably but I wish they'd also focus on optimizing code/making pages fully cacheable instead of rate-limits and blocking
Making requests is inherently cheaper than delivering responses, even with caches. Efficiency improvements can buy a little time on a given resources but won't solve the problem of bot saturation now that everybody can spawn a custom bot in about 12 seconds and is being encouraged to do so.
Rate limits, blocking, and pay-per-use are the only roads out and even those might not last as models get better at hacking and masquerading.
The internet we want to use LLM's with is simply not one that can support LLM's, and with LLM's not going anywhere, the whole experience of the internet is going to be forced into some radically less open and more expensive paradigm.
Policies like this just represent the beginning of the transition.
The limits are for API requests, no? Or is this just an unrelated performance complaint?
We need a new non-commercial version of the internet. Free of bots, free of ads, ... you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting enough to be worth paying instead of addictive enough to keep you scrolling to show you more ads.
It may look impossible right now. But what is impossible for real is to continue as we are. The damage that internet does to society is increasing by the day while its value is reduced (economic value, social value).
Except it's non-commercial, therefore valuable, therefore commercialized, therefore commercial.
You'd need a force strong enough to prevent it from falling prey to this tragedy of the commons, and that force would need to be stronger than the incentives to commercialize it. And that's where plenty of contemporary scraping-based salaries lay.
Impossible to create
I'm not so certain. I used to buy a broadsheet newspaper, which was full of ads. Now I pay a few hundred a year, and get the same newspaper online, with no ads at all.
So, the precursor to online media has already gone through this paradigm shift.
I mean, what you're saying is "If I pay for a product ads go away"
Which is partially true, but it only shifts the distribution of the problem. Once your service gains enough popularity network effects cause it to gain value. You have to worry about high priced buyouts of the entire service (great for the site owner, terrible for the users).
It's not, it just requires creativity. One example I can think of is limiting connectivity by distance between nodes. Something like Meshtastic seems unlikely to ever be commercialized in the same way that the Internet has been. Sure, you would lose some useful applications of the Internet, but you would gain other things.
Also for better or for worse the ad-centric model to some extent has allowed more people to access information.
Gating everything behind paid (but with no ads) likely would hurt a significant amount of lower income users.
That's this internet. Nothing precludes you from dropping big tech and solely engaging with the "indie web"[0][1] if you so choose. You're free to build your own website with its own RSS feed, join webrings[2] of like-minded people, and engage organically.
[0] One of many similar initiatives, I'm sure. Not an endorsement.
[1] https://indieweb.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
This is fine when you hide in the dark forest, small and unassuming, but the moment something discovers you, then you get ate by a predator.
Your human engagement will attract said predators because it's a unique information signal.
Careful what you wish for. The ticket to entry will (have to) be a proof of identity, the ultimate nail in the coffin of privacy and anonymity on the web.Outside of that, chaos.
So is it commercial or non commercial?
Nothing is stopping you from creating a social network that is pay gated. Go build it. If you can't get anyone to sign up perhaps you'll realize it's not so easy as scapegoating addictive social media.
There is a whole cottage industry of people who legitimately make their living criticizing Facebook. It's a consumer software product. Yet few of these people seem to have their conviction extend to building an alternative that ever catches an audience. Why is that? Because addiction? Any other excuses?
It only proves your point because it wasn't successful in the end, but I really enjoyed the experience on app.net (a paid version of Twitter) while it still existed. Personally I think they lost it where a lot of these alternative platforms lose it - they try to build an ecosystem that is always coming soon and ends up scattered instead of focusing on one product
AT Protocol and PDS’. BitTorrent to share and distribute bundles of data.
One request per minute.
Average, yes, but the way they phrase it, it could be a token bucket or similar, where you can do 60 quick requests and then be blocked for a bit while the bucket refills
More like you have 60 requests, you can exhaust them in a single second or spread them differently as per your choice.
Doesn’t help with scrapers though. They use a unique IP for each query.
Hopefully they bump this up.
Browsing open issues or reviewing a few PRs will easily use more than one request per minute.
The limits are based on the average user but I wonder if the most common interaction is to view a readme and bounce.
I don’t know that putting a paywall up to learn from or even consider contributing to public projects is a good thing.
Or a lot more with IPv6.
Most connections or VPS have a shared 64bit prefix that acts similar to an IPv4 address in that it's easy to block.
Yes, you get 64 more bits to make whatever addresses you want, but the prefix is still your fingerprint.
I noticed that recently Github.com has some kind of weird bot detection on public repos. I have a browser extension for switching User Agents for a specific legacy site, sometimes i forget to turn it off and Github will require me to login to view public repos.
All of this is most likely due to mass scraping by LLMs. Welcome to the total shitification of the web.
The post is about gitlab but on the subject of GitHub, the rate limit I seem to have for viewing commit history seems to be 0 for logged out users and viewing source files seems to be about 5/hour.
Congrats on making the world worse with AI. All this performative data scraping and uploading and no progress at all.
No progress?!
what are you talking about? it's progressing a lot of money into specific people's pockets
Making the privileged money and giving them the power to manipulate the mass is progress to some.
I think it's because people are building agentic flows, reducing the amount of developer seats needed. It's the first step towards usage based pricing.
Providing kickbacks to the repos being scraped would be a good way to help fund open source projects and pay creators like streaming services do. Seems like they're headed in this direction - it would be a massive product differentiator over GH
Three minutes after kickbacks were announced there would be a flurry of new repos being created with bots repeatedly scraping them just to get those kickbacks.
Presumably whoever is doing the scraping would need to pay, to get rate limits conducive to scraping.
Also known as the Cobra effect
My first reaction was that I really like this idea.
If we had a system where people who access projects pay and popular FOSS developers get paid for it we'd have much better alignment.
My second thought was that bots would immediately try to circumvent such a plan. They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.
I like the idea, but that wasn’t my read.
The guidance given seems to hurt open source projects, not help.
I would spend thousands of dollars for gitlab in terms of: 1) better UX for admin panel, I'm not sure what I've enabled and what not. Several buttons do not disable the rest of the settings, leaving me with some doubts (e.g. if I disabled grafana, why is there a setting that talks about where/how I store?) 2) a minimal version of gitlab without all the AI
Github would hit four nines if they followed suit. no clue why the dont try
Doesn't GitHub already have rate limiting especially if you are not logged in?
Yes. A lot is not accessible if not logged in.
Because that would go against MSFT's wishes on pushing LLM driven development if they started acknowledging that these tools are more damaging than helpful.
I understand why they're doing this, but the anticausative title kinda rubs me the wrong way.
I am honestly surprised they aren't going lower at this point.
Gitlab must pay a fortune to bot traffic, most of which is malicious or garbage at best.
Damn, we’re even having Claude write important press releases now
sad days
"Write a post about decreasing limits so that this information is as obfuscated as possible."
I put the text in to gptzero's AI checker and it came back with being Highly Confident it was 100% AI written. I don't think I've ever seen it that confident that the entire thing was AI before.
Claude's style is obvious enough I don't think you really need the checker.
Getting that so I do not know exactly what they are doing. From the title I am guessing they are restricting or throttling if downloads exceeds some value.
If you are using LLMs to interact with sites like GitLab and GitHub, and you have the option to use a GraphQL API, you should jump on it immediately.
GraphQL is absolutely terrible for human developers to interact with, but it's like Facebook could see into the future back in 2012. I cannot imagine a more perfect API surface for agents. With the REST API on GitHub, you can consume maybe 10 issue JSON blobs before your context window is blown out. With GraphQL constraining the results you can easily read hundreds in the same token budget.
Additionally, the # of requests your agents need to make can be reduced in many cases since GraphQL can join across types whereas REST APIs cannot. You essentially get savings in two dimensions here. Quota and raw token volume per logical response.
mine just is the gh cli. is the advantage of graphql that they can compose a query that would take multiple cli invocations?
CLI still has the possibility of being a little more token efficient, at worst it may use graphql behind the scenes.
For our company, we advertise the graphql schema to bots and they can one-shot whatever task they're trying to do. I've found that it's so good that I cancelled building an an MCP server and any skill. Just a well documented GQL schema. It's pretty remarkable.
no the advantage of graphql is that the caller can limit the response to only the information that they need. in a REST API the caller has to filter out the extraneous information. using LLMs to do the filtering uses up context window
This is not fully true.
Most agents will use curl | jq to slice what they need (assuming a known API)
Although that may be true, the quota at least on GitHub depends on what you're quering. We worked directly with GitHub and a complex enough organisation hit with a GraphQL query can actually hit your hourly app limit before you even get a response.
As for GitLab, having hosted it for medium size organisations (~200 devs) and seeing how monorepo's work (they don't, we had GitLab's team show us that one page view made 50K db queries on our setup), please consult with your local admin team before firing GraphQL at it.
I work closely with the team responsible for a large, self-hosted GitHub Enterprise instance. This is good advice for clients/consumers of GH data, but it can very easily lead to a lot of strain on the server-side. It’s not obvious what fields that you request are simple reads from tables or actually end up invoking git under the hood.
You could argue the rate limit guards should better reflect that, but that’s just not the reality of the system. Likely speaks to a lot of stability issues GitHub has been facing lately.
Worst case, this could be the start of a paywall to learn from, contribute to, or host open source projects.
Hopefully they find some kind of carve out for OSS projects while still blocking the egregious offenders.
60 requests per hour per IP if you haven't signed in... well that's unfortunately low.
60 requests an hour per IP seems low for a school or office network. A few people browsing issues and source files could use that up quite fast.
Walk back in 10...9...