griomnib

Ohhhh, just lots and lots of code with subtle bugs!

A simpler approach I’m considering is just sending 100 garbage HTTP requests for each garbage HTTP request they send me. You could just have a cron job parse the user agents from access logs once an hour and blast the bastards.

There are many companies that charge “x” per weight of “y” to go from “a” to “b”. How they get “y” from “a” to “b” is complex, but the actual pricing is quite simple compared to bespoke business solutions. It’s just freight.

This sort of cuts both ways, I’m on the small business selling side.

Sometimes somebody will want a call, I’ll do my dance, tell them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower price - which isn’t on offer. That blows a lot of my time.

On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I’ve built I really do need a call to figure out if there’s a missing feature or similar I’d need to build out, or if there’s some implementation detail that’s highly specialized to a given situation.

By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing with offer to have a call for complex situations.

Napster had a moment too, but then they got steamrolled in court.

Courts are slow, so it seems like nothing is happening, but there’s tons of cases in the pipeline.

The media industry has forced many tech firms to bend the knee, OpenAI will follow suit. Nobody rips off Disney IP and lives to tell the tale.

I think it’s safe to assume anything Sam A says is an outright lie by now.

An iot botnet + command and control infra cooks this entire idea.

April 20th as you’d have to be high as hell to think this was a good idea.

Clearly there are more than a few of us.

I think this is a bit of a warped view as this is true for the biggest channels, but the medium and long tail on YouTube has a lot of substance in computer science, engineering, geology, climate science, and much more.

When I was a kid there was Mr Wizard, and then Bill Nye, but it was far more limited than what I watch with my kid.

The land of videos with <1M views is full of gems - and many of the top notch science channels (eg Mark Rober), still give their creators a handsome income. And many of the channels, like Rober, do regularly crack 1M and the recommended list.

I use Linux all day on the server, but I’ve never liked it on desktop. I do think I’ll be forced into it within a few years.

Usually when they shamelessly copy from Android they made some improvements, this isn’t even close to material on Pixel, which is pretty nice.

(Not a fanboy of either; use both.)

Hey, just pay extortion prices for more storage!

Because they made it a worse product, they made it my job to fix it. That’s the point.

Yes I had to do that, which is my entire point - everything worked, and they made it worse.

If I wanted to type in commands to install my OS I’d use Linux desktop.

Mail is dogshit. Photos is dogshit. Image playground is streaming hot dog shit. Etc etc.

I’m sure they have some “magical” Cupertino world for infighting assholes putting their careers before users, whatever that may be.

Yeah pretty sure the aliens are going to struggle more with there, they’re, and their.

I have experienced this most acutely with the most recent round of macOS and iOS updates.

Nothing Apple is shipping seems to be for me, the user. Rather it’s a grab bag of crap “AI” for Wall Street, ways to make it harder to run software of my choosing, and wholesale trashing of perfectly fine UX to cram in whatever useless feature some PM landed for their promotion.

I could say a few hundred things much worse about the direction of windows 11, which is even more obnoxious than Apple, but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS.

Day by day I feel the devices I’ve spent a huge sum of money on no longer belong to me. I’m getting really fucking tired of it, and something has to give.

Yeah but it’s just shit engineering. They re-crawl entire sites basically continuously absent any updates or changes. How hard is it to cache a fucking sitemap for a week?

It’s a waste of bandwidth and CPU on their end as well, “the bitter lesson” isn’t “keep duplicating the same training data”.

I’m glad DeepSeek is showing how inefficient and dogshit most of the frontier model engineer is - how much VC is getting burned literally redownloading a copy of the entire web daily when like <1% of it is new data.

I get they have no shame economically, that they are deluded and greedy. But bad engineering is another class of sin!

I really wonder if these dogshit scrapers are wholly built by LLM. Nobody competent codes like this.

I’ve been a web developer for decades as well as doing scraping, indexing, and analyzing million of sites.

Just follow the golden rule: don’t ever load any site more aggressively than you would want yours to be.

This isn’t hard stuff, and these AI companies have grossly inefficient and obnoxious scrapers.

As a site owner those pisses me off as a matter of decency on the web, but as an engineer doing distributed data collection I’m offended by how shitty and inefficient their crawlers are.

Believing you are smarter than 90% of people is the “data”.

You do realize there are other reasons to need service than tech support right? Like having to fight an insurance company to get the life saving medical care you pay them thousands of dollars for?

Not until it can take you out for steaks, booze, and strippers.

The funny thing is you can’t hide how bad this shit is because at some point everybody who doesn’t have a personal assistant has to deal with customer support of some sort.

And holy fucking shit has AI made every single interaction with a company ten times more painful and time consuming. It’s the worlds most boring video game where you had to trigger the right sequence of words with some dumb robot, only then to get placed into a queue of one of five remaining humans who themselves are just reading a script.

The other day I had to beat the first barricade of AI chat to get in the human queue, and then it took them literally five hours to reply. I got a text at 1am.

There is nobody who when connected to some AI agent thinks “great this will solve my problems quickly!” It’s just “wow they figured out a new way to screw us”.

Shows that having H1Bs you can hold hostage lets you get away with anything. If it weren’t for their captive workforce they would have had far bigger problems than an unreliable service, rapidly declining user base, and imploding revenue.

Dreamforce is basically a cult gathering.

“Over the past years, EFF has taken millions in funds from Google and Facebook via straight donations and controversial court payouts that many see as under-the-radar contributions. Hell, Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s foundation gave EFF at least $1.2 million.”

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine

It seems to hurt a lot of people’s feelings in SV, but no, you wearing an EFF tshirt and making yearly corporate-matches donations doesn’t remove your culpability for working for big tech. Likewise, the EFF knows how many of the “small” donation come from SV tech employees.

It’s a sham organization that was premised on a faulty understanding of regulatory frameworks that does very, very little of value in the past 15 years.