Bwbach, My Guardian Goblin | Hacker News Reader

Bwbach, My Guardian Goblin

robertmay.photography

25 pointsrobotmay16 comments

Just as an apology in advance for people reading the article on Linux: er, sorry. I've had a few people point out that Firefox on Linux renders the font particularly shitly (it somehow seems to get both the aliasing and colour wrong, wat). I'll fix it soon, but in the meantime using reader mode might save your eyes.

For me (on Linux) the font is much prettier and much easier to read in Firefox. Firefox also seems to render it lighter than Chromium-based browsers.

Edit: I looks so different that I really thought it was falling back to a different font, but the Google Fonts page produces the same effect.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cormorant+Garamond

On my Android (Chromium based browser) it renders very thin and dark as well. On Firefox on Android, it renders the same, but much lighter.

How odd! I did some research into why people have been finding it looks odd and it appears to be tied to Mac doing something called font dilation to slightly fatten up thin fonts when displayed as light text on dark backgrounds, whereas Linux/Windows don't tend to have such a feature enabled by default. Shows how long it's been since I made any attempt at good typography, I've never heard of this before!

I've bumped the brightness of the text on Linux/Windows to hopefully make it a bit easier to read/overpower the anti-aliasing thinning it out. I'll have to go fish out an old ThinkPad to test it properly as I ditched most of my machines outside of my Mac when I quit programming full time (I don't really like any OS but Mac is still the easiest for photo/video I find).

This is somewhat off-topic, but the colour contrast on this site absolutely sucks. Dark gray on what presumably is darker gray, in a thin font to boot, is a pain to read.

Are you on Linux perchance? I've had a couple of people mention this in the last day. On Mac the font is pretty close to white, but I was sent a screenshot of it in Firefox on Linux and it looked rubbish, and notably greyer for some reason.

Firefox on Android, so you kinda guessed right!

Nicely done! And yes, I'd love to see it open sourced.

Are there any other existing edge proxies written in Erlang or Elixir out there? It’s not an area I’m very familiar with

Must admit I'd not even looked about. I don't know of any off the top of my head but I'd be very curious if anyone else knows of any. It wouldn't surprise me if there's a number of closed-source ones in use at scale - it seems to be well-suited to it, in my opinion.

It seems to be used by many large companies but with less open source projects of size. I would be interested in trying this proxy in the future if you do opensource it. I use coolify myself but I’ve not had trouble with the default traefik proxy so far.

There's the option of trying something like iocaine (https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/) behind your current proxy too, which I mentioned in my previous article. It's not quite the same as it doesn't chuck the bots into tarpit requests, which is obviously the most fun bit, but because of that it probably won't kill Traefik like my system did.

> Whilst Elixir, Erlang, and the BEAM (the holy trinity) can handle a ridiculous number of concurrent slow requests, Traefik could not.

Have you tried nginx?

I've never liked configuring nginx I must admit, but I would be curious to see how it would handle this sorta workload. If anyone's experienced in configuring it or running it with lots of slow streamed responses I'd be curious to know your thoughts.

You’re using the robot to help you anyways with this project. It’s seen a lot of configuration examples and could make it easy to test changing over.

One step away from an attack barrier

Glorious.

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