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Comment by hhthrowaway1230 | Hacker News Reader

so multiple of these browser wasm demos make me re-download the models, can someone make a cdn for it or some sort u uberfast downloader? just throw some claude credits against it ty!

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>can someone make a cdn for it or some sort u uberfast downloader? just throw some claude credits against it ty!

Okay, I did so. I realize that in your later followup comment you might want something different (like for Chrome itself to cache these downloads or something) but for now I made what you asked for, here you go:

https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/ephemeralcdn/

It's an ultrafast temporary CDN for one-off experiments like this. Should be lightning fast. By including the script, you can include any file this CDN serves.

haha this is awesome! this is fantastic.

CDN wouldn't help much. These days browsers partition caches by origin, so if two different tools (running on different domains) fetch the same model from the CDN, the browser would download it twice.

Did not know that. That sounds extraordinary wasteful, there must be a file hash based method that would allow sharing such files between domains.

It offers security.

Just like you wouldn't use same table in your system for all users in a multi tenant application.

If the file is hashed strongly enough then it can be no other file. I can see how information on previous sites visited can be leaked and how this could be bad but I think whitelisting by end users could still allow some files to be used. E.g. the code for react.

The fact that you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I make up a unique file, put it on site X and ask your browser to cache it. I try to load the same file on site Y and time how long it takes. If it's instant, site Y knows you visited site X.

Tadaaa! Tracking.

I said I ‘can see’ I already understand that. Hence the whitelisting on files that are not unique / created for this purpose.

Ah, my bad, sorry.

it's a security feature. otherwise my malicious site could check for cdn.sensitivephotoswebsite.com and blackmail you if it was cached already

It would be nice if there was a whitelist option for non-sensitive content. I stopped using cdn links due to the overhead of the extra domain lookups but I did think that my self hosted content would be cached across domains.

It would be nice if there was a whitelist option for non-sensitive content.

There's no such thing as non-sensitive content from a CDN though. Scripts are obviously sensitive, styles can be used to exfiltrate data through background-url directives, and anything like images has no benefit being cached across sites.

Fonts might be one exception, but I bet those are exploitable somehow.

Seem like a solvable problem. Per origin cache control. But actually just load the data locally

Adding a file input where users can upload files to the frontend directly from their file manager would probably work as a stop-gap measure, for the ones who want something quick that let people manage their own "cache" of model files.

Would you be okay with it using your upload at the same time, then a p2p model would work. (This is potentially a good match for p2p because edge connections are very fast, they don't have to go across the whole Internet). You could be downloading from uploaders in your region. Let me know if you would be okay with uploading at the same time, then this model works and I can build it for you for people to use this way.

What? downloaded for me at 2gbps

Ah let me clarify, many of the in the browser demos make me download certain models even if I already have them It would be great if there was a way that I don't have to redownload them across demos so that I just have a cache. or an in browser model manager. hope this makes sense.

Or indeed use some sort of huggingface model downloader (if that exist with XET)

I think this would sit best at the browser level. I’m not sure there’s a nice way for multiple websites to share a cache like that.

also maybe a good usecase to finally have P2P web torrents :)

Yeah that's great but I'm in a cafe outside burning my phone data. ty!

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