Poisoning the Well (with Heydon Pickering)
05/13/25 • 37 min
In this episode of Dead Code, Jared interviews Heydon Pickering about his satirical strategy to sabotage AI web crawlers by generating nonsense versions of his blog posts. Using Eleventy and JS DOM, Heydon replaces keywords in his content with absurd alternatives from a static lexicon, creating grammatically broken, jargon-filled text that wastes crawler resources without harming his SEO. Frustrated by how LLMs scrape web content without consent, he frames his approach as both a protest and a creative, Dadaist rebellion against exploitative tech norms. While the method won’t cripple AI models, it reflects a broader resistance to the unchecked harvesting of human-created content.
Links:
“Poisoning the Well” (Heydon’s article)
“Please Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly In My Face” – The article that partly inspired Heydon’s efforts to push back against LLM scraping.
Webbed Briefs (Heydon’s video series)
Dead Code Podcast Links:
Jared’s Links:
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode of Dead Code, Jared interviews Heydon Pickering about his satirical strategy to sabotage AI web crawlers by generating nonsense versions of his blog posts. Using Eleventy and JS DOM, Heydon replaces keywords in his content with absurd alternatives from a static lexicon, creating grammatically broken, jargon-filled text that wastes crawler resources without harming his SEO. Frustrated by how LLMs scrape web content without consent, he frames his approach as both a protest and a creative, Dadaist rebellion against exploitative tech norms. While the method won’t cripple AI models, it reflects a broader resistance to the unchecked harvesting of human-created content.
Links:
“Poisoning the Well” (Heydon’s article)
“Please Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly In My Face” – The article that partly inspired Heydon’s efforts to push back against LLM scraping.
Webbed Briefs (Heydon’s video series)
Dead Code Podcast Links:
Jared’s Links:
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Previous Episode
Deterministic Simulation (with Stevan)
In this episode of Dead Code, Jared talks with Stevan about building reliable distributed systems using Erlang-inspired design patterns. Stevan shares how his background in functional programming and formal verification led him to simulation testing—a deterministic approach to testing distributed systems that avoids the flakiness of traditional CI environments. He emphasizes that Erlang’s true innovation lies not in lightweight processes, but in its structured behaviors (like gen_server and supervisor), which make systems easier to reason about, test, and verify. These behaviors support a more disciplined approach to concurrency, enabling reproducible fault injection and better simulation frameworks. Stevan advocates for programming languages that natively support deterministic testing and model checking, suggesting that the future of distributed systems lies in building on these structured, verifiable foundations.
Links:
Dead Code Podcast Links:
Jared’s Links:
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Next Episode
Undefined and Unforgiven (with Joel Drapper and Lucian Ghinda)
In this episode of Dead Code, Jared is joined by Lucian and returning guest Joel to debate a classic Ruby dilemma: whether to access instance variables directly or use getter methods. Lucian advocates for getters, especially in large, fast-changing codebases, arguing they help catch subtle bugs and improve maintainability, as well as insights drawn from his time at Cookpad and the Short Ruby newsletter. Joel, while appreciating the clarity and performance of direct access, introduces his gem strict_ivars, which raises runtime errors for undefined variables, offering a hybrid solution that improves safety without sacrificing flexibility. The conversation expands into the future of Ruby developer experience, discussing AST-based tooling, the role of testing, and how small, intentional coding choices can add up to more resilient and readable software.
Links:
Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (POODR) by Sandi Metz
ruby-require-hooks by Vladimir Dementyev
Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MCDC) – advanced testing technique
Dead Code Podcast Links:
Jared’s Links:
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
If you like this episode you’ll love
Episode Comments
Generate a badge
Get a badge for your website that links back to this episode
<a href="https://goodpods.com/podcasts/dead-code-543080/poisoning-the-well-with-heydon-pickering-91157333"> <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/goodpods-images-bucket/badges/generic-badge-1.svg" alt="listen to poisoning the well (with heydon pickering) on goodpods" style="width: 225px" /> </a>
Copy