coldbrewed

I work at a CDN that provides bot detection services. I agree that there's baseline necessity in terms of fraud detection, and if not necessity then definitely financial motivation to fingerprint. But these days, abusive scraping is far and way the the main driver for fingerprinting.

We don't fingerprint for ad purposes, and we destroy PII for humans as fast as we can because PII should be treated as radioactive. But we see customers that are constantly burned by abusive scrapers and the scrapers aren't slowing down.

The current approach to scraping is strip mining the Internet and is having the corresponding pollution effects that you'd expect. I'm fine with individuals doing whatever weird automation they want, more power to you, but it's this industrial scale crawling and extraction that's degrading the Internet from all angles.

Addiction is an extremely complex public health crisis. Letting people starve on the street is bad, giving people benefits will result in some abuse, and real change would come from more comprehensive treatment plans but we're not ready for mandatory detox programs yet, and even if we had them we wouldn't set these people up for success after.

The abuse of benefits is bad but these people are the tail of a system. It's tragic and frustrating but we can't look at the tail and and assume that they bear the sole responsibility for their predicament.

The concern is that attestation turns into another mechanism to monitor and control people; see how age verification turns into surveillance.

Abusive crawlers use residential proxies to distribute crawl traffic between thousands of IPs, so that one agent that's making five requests blends in with the massive crawl. There is signal but there are ML inference engineers tuning their traffic to blend in, which requires that mitigations must get more sensitive.

At the end of the day, the defensive side has an obligation to protect customers and well behaved agents are the first thing that gets swept up along with the bad actors.

In 2011 Portlandia joked that Portland is where young people went to retire. Now Portland is where anyone that doesn't own a house will never retire.

Making people actually read content doesn't strike me as cruel. Tedious, sure, but not cruel. What is cruel is seeing all of our collective individuality and artistic expression jammed into an LLM, sold back to us by the token, and forced into our lives by an economy increasingly skewed towards holders of capital.

CDN security SWE here. I have functionally zero interest in what individual people do in terms of automation. I automated my gym's class signup forum during COVID so I get the validity of the use case. You want to work around the mitigations to do the same? Go with my blessings.

The killer is that everything that works for individuals trying to get through the day and make the web a bit smoother is immediately used by industrial crawlers strip mining the Internet, and you can't block one without blocking the other. A future where the web is only accessible via device attestation is extremely dystopian but so is an Internet where every drop of content goes into an LLM training set.

Things like this is why all of the worthwhile content is going to drain into balkanized spaces, and we're all the poorer for it.

The highway to hell is paved with selfishness and avarice and we are clearly on it; if we keep doing this "tragedy of the commons" bit and don't prioritize the well being of the species we are going to destroy what remains of the climate that sustains us. The idea that our current predicament is that disaffected elites are just looking to elevate themselves doesn't square with the climate reality; plenty of people want a more equitable distribution of resources because we're out of runway for naked capitalism.

The aversion to authoritarianism of any flavor is well grounded and we cannot cross that line, so your point on forced collectivism is valid. But when the current system is trying to burn 300 million years of fossil fuels in a cool 300 years without having a ramp towards a sustainable future during a period of wealth inequality greater than the gilded age, _something's going to give_. It's either going to be our economic system, our mechanism for ordering society, or 3C+ of warming.

We need more judges and prosecutors that are hungry to catch corruption and are willing to go after white collar crime.

Why not build skills and an MCP for markdown or obsidian? I'm using both at present and it's fine, bit would like to understand the differentiating factor here.

RIP. I respect the author for the effort but source CAD kernels are a tough nut to crack; the existing solvers are pretty old at this point and there's a floor on the effort to get a kernel that's roughly on par with opencascade without the architectural limitations. We're going to be waiting on an entity like CERN or other organized body to put in the effort to meet that floor.

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Remote device control allows for running and monitoring prints from another networks with zero effort, but more importantly local device control can't be monetized. It's just about the money.

Wait a minute, wasn't this effectively the business model of dotcloud before they became Docker Inc?

Yep, the fact that the safety merely blocks the trigger and doesn't block the striker in case of accidental sear disengagement is horrifying.

Browsers need to start displaying a count of em-dashes and en-dashes in articles so that we know what to expect from AI generated self-aggrandizing articles like this.

So, it's istio but with AI generated blog posts?

Coldbrew's law states that if an article is written in praise of AI and abstrusely written, then it's probably AI slop, written by someone who holds their own ideas in high enough regard to publish but holds their audience in low enough regard that they won't bother to edit it.

Edit: there it is. `vibe-coded and deployed with Claude Code`

> In fact in a fully optimized system, once consumers have all of their wants and needs met, they will have zero dollars left over.

What are your parameters for optimization here? If the point is to maximize extracted revenue then this is a reasonable outcome but we could optimize for any number of targets. We could optimize to make the best use of resources, we could optimize for best consumer reviews, we could optimize for the ideal buyer/seller price that makes both entities in the transaction walk away with the best deal for each of them.

But there's this persistent notion in the current business zeitgeist that the only metric worth optimizing is profit maximization and it's one that we should reject. Companies need to make a profit and workers need to take home a salary and that's fine, but we get to build the world that we live in. Living in a world where we care about quality of life and equity in transactions is much more interesting to me than living in one where all we care about is the velocity of extraction from anything that isn't nailed down.

Open source is a gift within a gift economy. The software may be freely used but the labor needs to come from somewhere, and donations of either direct labor or compensation help ensure that the overall gift economy can continue to function.

My guess is that the presence of lithium in the groundwater is in trace amounts if at all, while the dosing of lithium is in the domain of ~300mg. A casual search for the quantity of lithium in brine from a mine shows a max of 1400ppm for a rich mine in Chile[1] so drinking straight brine wouldn't get you anywhere near the therapeutic dose. Good question!

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...

Software engineer, or IFSAC Apparatus Operator engineer? On the west coast we absolutely refer to our pumping apparatuses as fire engines; when Engine 813 is dispatched from our station to a call we bring the whole vehicle and not just the engine block!

ICE vehicle fires take about 1000 gallons, and the average fire hydrant puts out about 500-1000 gallons per minute. Structural fire engines carry about 1000 gallons and the heavy duty nozzles and ground monitors/deck guns put out 500-1000gpm. This is a LOT of water for a vehicle.

The heat from vehicles isn't distributed spatially across rooftops/walls/trees where the heat might be dispersed; instead the heat from vehicles is concentrated and radiated adjacent to sidewalks (impacting pedestrians) and asphalt (which is effective at storing and re-radiating heat). Nor is it dispersed evenly throughout the day; congestion during rush hour will cause a spike of heat during the hottest part of the day with greater numbers of pedestrians experiencing that heat. Idling vehicles are also running air conditioning, and all of those idling/air conditioned vehicles will be creating an ambient atmosphere where their AC systems will have to run harder to create the same level of cooling.

As you note solar heating likely dominates the overall heating of the city but I would fully expect that idling vehicles contributes meaningfully to the pedestrian and driver perceptions of heat.

There's a difference between selling a multi-ton vehicle that has crumple zones and curved lines and selling a multi-ton vehicle that is designed to tenderize pedestrian rib cages. This comment also applies to today's pickups and SUVs; but while those vehicles are pretty nightmarish for the safety pedestrians and other drivers the CT is a further escalation of matters through both design and build quality.

Correct, the camera is built for an all sky survey. With the wide field of view it should be able to image the full night sky once every two or three days.

There's still a cap on growth. Apple is running into market saturation for phones and eventually will land in a situation where the only way it can sell more phones is by selling the same consumers newer/more expensive phones. To achieve this they either need to reduce quality so devices wear out or artificially prevent prolonged use; either scenario results increased production of e-waste.

Ecosystems have limits; you can't grow past the absolute maximums of supply and demand.

We only have so many minerals and so many humans which means that growth has hard caps. Even if we manage to colonize the solar system the same cap will still exist on humans and minerals. Eternal growth is demonstrably false and if we ignore these bounds then we encourage companies to grow through increased generation of negative externalities.

When it comes to the personal and intangibles, then grow all you want; read the books, develop the skills, and so on. But when it comes to consumption of resources and economic growth then cancer is the right word as unbounded growth fundamentally results in unbounded growth of waste products and overconsumption of inputs.

There is no system or ecology that can support infinite growth; as long as we're stuck in the "coasting is dying" mentality we'll see productive entities develop dysfunctions as they outgrow their ecosystems or kill themselves trying to expand. If coasting leads to gradual decline then over expansion leads to catastrophic failure.