01284a7e

Cloudflare is slopped out these days. Tons of people uncoordinated, all flailing around. Vibe flailing, I suppose.

And at least a few poorly educated folks in positions of insignificance, like myself.

"What reason is there for the company to employ the meat proxy?" Maybe some form of liability, accountability...

New concept: the AI patsy

This is annoying but, can you point me to where to get started with local models? A repo, website, something?

Sidebar: Don't video games have ever growing competition with existing games?

I decided not to buy games until I beat the ones I already have. I am now stuck on NES games and will probably be stuck for the rest of my life.

I interpret it similarly, I think - in that you can't totally predict what's going to be the thing that really bites you in the ass.

"The problems with which the universe can confront any society are, for practical purposes, infinite in number and endless in variety." - Joseph Tainter

AI will really aid the universe in generating more problems. Maybe it's not a supervirus, but hell, maybe it is.

Just Klarna (or shall we say, "Apple Upgrade" [1] now) it. You need to consume. Not want, need.

1: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/07/apple-upgrade-launche...

AI is trained on Reddit stooges who run businesses like this.

"Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy,"

"Internet Archive could buy Storj"

Insanely convoluted solution that only someone with crypto-brain would ever come up with. You are really suggesting the Internet Archive should buy a bankrupted crypto company so they can store their data? What?

They are baked in to the libraries, frameworks, and services I have used throughout my 15 year career. In a practical sense, I can diagnose issues and point to them as potential solutions. I would not I really know them in the sense I could speak to a lot of them off the top of my head. I probably should be able to do so (if nothing else to impress the types of people who hire developers), but I do not find the inner workings of production-grade web development particularly interesting, at least not anymore.

They are the reason these companies exist. When it comes to the creation of large for-profit technology companies, they decide what comes about and what doesn't. The blame is on them.

If you can make it to Burning Man, then your life is what you make it. And if that's true, then it could be fun.

"This is frustrating to admit, because prediction markets can be societally useful: it is important to have good forecasts on federal government shutdowns, landfall of hurricanes in the Southeast, and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz"...

Prediction markets do not provide good forecasts, and are in no way "societally useful".

"There probably aren't infinite good ideas that can be successful at any one time. If you encourage more people to become founders then they aren't going to go into other places where their skills might be better suited."

Yes, exactly. I do not think you need to try so hard to get more founders. Most small businesses fail. And even most venture-backed startups fail. You are already throwing a ton of eggs at the wall, which is mostly a waste of eggs. Even one of YC's largest successes (DoorDash) is nothing but a middle man of fast food enabled by mobile technology, which it did nothing to invent.

Before you dump it, you have to pump it...

In other words, we are to see a media barrage leading up to the IPO to get retail investors to jump on the stock.

My university prepared me to be a founder by making me so unemployable that starting a business was my best option.

Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?

Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.

Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.

Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.

Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?

Ted: I would go for the 7.

Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.

Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?

Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".

Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?

[Hitchhiker convulses]

Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.

Ted: That - good point.

Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.

Ted: Why?

Hitchhiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!

"Healthcare reform is hard."

People tackle hard things for nothing, never mind billions in savings.

Don't tell Elon...

"Public Certificate Transparency logs"...

The scam of "everyone should have SSL" right here, ladies and gentlemen.

You should have been straightforward and told them to go fuck themselves. Laying people off by a brief call is for cowards.

Putnam's "Bowling Alone" (2000) is about this, and it is something that has been in decline since the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone.

"With most of them being VC or high-count angel investors, they can combined push whatever product is being built here into 200+ companies independent of whether it is good or not"

Ah, I see you have figured it out the thing that has always been the case.

Same - I wrote on the web for 25 years (2000 to 2025). I can attribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to it. I no longer have any websites, as nothing came out of it for a couple years. ~90% of all my traffic ended up bots.

And if you put up a website now (without existing backlinks, etc.) bots will be >99% of your traffic.

You will find your answer in DJ Shadow's "Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf40CLF9MU

It's so cheap that normal people could band together and re-buy democracy. It's the banding together part that is hard.

I see why someone hired you (prestige), I see why someone fired you (terrible communicator, egoistical, lack of professionalism/tactless).

The tactlessness is just awful. I would consider deleting that post.

What value does the 'keywords' meta tag even have these days? 77+ KB of crap added to the page weight. Web development is full of idiots.

With a race to win a multi-trillion dollar market, there could be, maybe perhaps, a little propaganda happening.