SaaS & Software·May 21, 2026

AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

Axel's blog Home Blog Now 20 May, 2026 AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning", and then the AI companies sell these learned result to humans, without compensating the original a

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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
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Axel's blog Home Blog Now 20 May, 2026 AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning", and then the AI companies sell these learned result to humans, without compensating the original a

  • Axel's blog Home Blog Now 20 May, 2026 AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning", and then the AI companies sell these learned result to humans, without compensating the original authors.
  • Worse, the customer of these AI companies (AI tools bro) sell the prompted / processed result to other customers, profitting off things AI has copied from all over the internet.
  • I research and write e-commerce related tutorials on my own, and a few other lazy website authors just ask ChatGPT to copy a few well performing tutorial online, and then they published it as their own.
  • Fuck Google for ranking some copycat website higher than mine, even though they copied my article
In this article

Axel's blog Home Blog Now 20 May, 2026 AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning", and then the AI companies sell these learned result to humans, without compensating the original authors. Worse, the customer of these AI companies (AI tools bro) sell the prompted / processed result to other customers, profitting off things AI has copied from all over the internet. Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy? I research and write e-commerce related tutorials on my own, and a few other lazy website authors just ask ChatGPT to copy a few well performing tutorial online, and then they published it as their own. I found out this because they ranked higher than me in Google search result, and then when I read their article, their article contains links to my actual website, with the exact link text (?!), which means they didnt bother to check and remove, and thats how I found out. Fuck Google for ranking some copycat website higher than mine, even though they copied my article

Integrity note  ·  Xela does not rewrite or paraphrase article content. The excerpt above is the source publication's own words, sanitized for display. For the full piece — including any quotes, charts, or images — read it at Hacker News. Xela's rewritten version is off for this story, so there's no editorial angle attached — you're getting the source's reporting unfiltered. When the rewrite is on, we add a What this means block underneath with the operator/trader takeaway.

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Show HN: Draco – A single-binary, self-hostable Firecrawl alternative in Rust
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Show HN: Draco – A single-binary, self-hostable Firecrawl alternative in Rust

Scraping modern websites has become a massive headache. You basically have two choices: pay for an expensive API like Firecrawl/Browserbase, or run a fleet of headless Chrome instances that eat 1GB of RAM per page and still get blocked by Cloudflare. I built Draco to fix this. It’s a fast, single-binary web scraper written in Rust. You point it at a URL, and it spits out perfectly clean Markdown or structured JSON for LLMs. The secret sauce is that it doesn't just boot a browser for every request. It uses a tiered escalation engine: Tier 1 (Stealth Fetch): Draco uses a custom TLS/JA4 fingerprint to perfectly mimic a real browser's network signature at the packet level. It turns out a lot of anti-bot walls will let you right through if your handshake looks correct. In my benchmarks against sites like Cloudflare and Target, Playwright ate ~500MB of RAM and timed out. Draco bypassed them in under a second using just 20MB of RAM. Tier 2 (V8 Isolate): If it hits a React/Next.js SPA that needs rendering, Draco boots an in-process V8 engine in single-digit milliseconds. It hydrates the DOM and intercepts the hidden JSON APIs the page is calling—giving you the raw data without the overhead of a graphical browser. Tier 3 (Real Browser): If it hits an absolute wall, it seamlessly falls back to detecting and driving a real browser on your machine. I also built in all the tooling to make it a complete drop-in replacement for the hosted services: Daemon Mode: Run draco serve and you get a persistent HTTP server with a Firecrawl-compatible REST API. You can swap out your API keys and self-host immediately. Built-in MCP Server: It natively exposes a Model Context Protocol server so you can plug it directly into Claude Desktop or your AI agents. Web Search: Built-in parallel multi-engine web search (bypassing the need for a Google Search API key). Interact Mode: Drive a page statefully like a devtools console, persisting cookies across navigations(for LLM's mainly). It’s completely open source (MIT/Apache-2.0). I just wanted to put this out there for anyone tired of fighting headless Chromium or paying per-page scraping costs. Grab the binary and throw a difficult URL at it. Note that it's still a WIP so there might be some unexpected breakages of uncommon sites but for the most part its quite capable, it can handle cf-protected sites and heavy SPA's while everything else fails partially or completely while taking longer or more resources. (tested on example.com, hackernews, cloudflare, glassdoor, bluff.com, target.com, stake.com and thrill.com) ┏━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Rank ┃ Tool ┃ Score ┃ Pass ┃ Avg Time ┃ Avg RAM ┃ ┡━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━┩ │ #1 │ Draco │ 769.7 │ 8/8 │ 3.45 │ 216.50 │ │ #2 │ Obscura │ 384.5 │ 4/8 │ 2.68 │ 87.59 │ │ #3 │ BrowserOxide │ 373.4 │ 4/8 │ 6.42 │ 105.95 │ │ #4 │ Playwright │ 342.2 │ 4/8 │ 1.71 │ 535.07 │ │ #5 │ Bouncy │ 196.6 │ 2/8 │ 0.59 │ 19.38 │ └──────┴────────────────┴───────┴──────┴──────────┴─────────┘ Repo: Comments URL: Points: 8 # Comments: 1

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