Go Static
Please don't Go(lang) or JavaScript or PHP or...
OpenBSD teaches us that keeping things very simple or atomic makes maintenance easier and significantly cheaper. It improves security too. Less is more. Programming is neat, but sometimes one must focus on text and structure of pages, not endless computation and back-end engines that needlessly do the same job over and over again. Things are becoming more expensive. So let's adapt. Let's strip stuff down.
Many people moan - more so this week - that LLMs are attacking their sites and other Internet services. Had they moved everything to static, the potential (for) damage would be vastly contained.
"The problem with the LLMs," an associate explains, "is not the moaning but that they are either programmed maliciously or incompetently to the point of maliciousness such that they burden the back end unduly. Several LLMs attacking a CMS at the same time can bring it to its knees."
To use analogies, think of iocane (anti-LLM software) and nepenthes (also anti-LLM software). There's a sustainability problem here.
"The bots [moreover] maliciously ignore robots.txt," the associate adds. "Also their abuse of and infringement upon copyright is a whole additional category of problem. LLMs don't summarize or synthesize knowledge, just shorten sentences, thus stealing." [sic] (Plagiarism or worse [1, 2], rendering them extremely undesirable).
This site used to be expensive and challenging to run due to rogue crawlers and hundreds of thousands of pages in our archive (mostly WordPress, plus Drupal and MediaWiki). We solved this by going static and the site became more than 10 times faster and hence more responsive.
In the case of Tux Machines, there was Gallery and Drupal, each with its own database (vast databases!). Some pages could take 5-10 seconds to load, even minutes when under exceptionally heavy loads. Large servers with many CPU cores and lots of RAM had to be provisioned, then constantly supervised with alerts and more. Now?
Much better:
Techrights has always been even faster:
We hope more sites will "go static". It's not "going backwards" or becoming "primitive". It's a truly pragmatic choice. █