I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.

Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.

I’ve heard of all sorts of issues with my fiber ISP (Verizon Fios) rolling out IPv6. It’s been years that they’ve been slowly rolling it out for testing in a few places. There’s virtually no useful documentation on their website about it. And it’s still not available where I am.

That would surprise me. Companies like Akamai maintain very up-to-date lists of Tor exit nodes, commercial VPN exit nodes, etc. My employer uses Akamai and blocks all traffic from Tor given the huge volume of malicious traffic coming from it. It would be trivial for us to block VPN traffic as well if we wanted to. Those blocks occur on Akamai’s systems before it ever makes it to ours. No browser-based tool is going to get around an IP based block like that.

No idea if Reddit is doing something similar here, but my guess is they are.

robots.txt is 100% honor based. Well known bots like Googlebot, Bingbot, etc. definitely honor them. But there are also plenty of bots that completely ignore them.

I would hope the bots used to collect LLM training data honors them, but there’s no way to know for certain. And all it really takes is one bot ignoring it for the content of your website to end up in a random set of training data…

Try using “curl -A” to specify a User-Agent string that matches Chrome or Firefox.

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I’d consider a friend of mine a victim. His wife was murdered in a home invasion gone terribly wrong. My friend was half way across the country when the murder occurred, and yet since lots of murders involve spouses the cops focused on him at first. Eventually it was discovered a handyman they had hired was the true killer and my friend had nothing to do with it.

Yet another example of why you never talk to the police without your lawyer present…

My employer has a pretty large presence in AWS. We finished migrating to Amazon’s Corretto (based on openjdk) months ago. It was pretty painless given we already use Amazon’s Linux distros.

I hope you realize that virtually every CDN provider does the exact same thing in similar ways. Sites that use Akamai, AWS, Google cloud, Fastly, etc. all give those companies access to unencrypted content. It’s just how CDNs work…

Getting rear ended on the highway by a drunk driver. Had all of about 1 second of warning when she slammed on her brakes and started skidding.

Doesn’t prevent Amazon from occasionally sticking smaller packages in our mailbox…

My only problem is our driveway is 700 feet long, uphill & through trees. I seriously doubt my WiFi reaches it…

My favorite when debugging some code for a memory manager, written in the days of DOS extended memory, was shit_cookie_corrupt.

The original author called blocks of memory “cookies”. If too many cookies were corrupted then eventually the function ohShitOhShitOhShit was called, which shut everything down.

We use Akamai where I work for security, CDN, etc. Their services make it largely trivial to identify traffic from bots. They can classify requests in real time as coming from known bots like Googlebot to programming frameworks like python & java to bots that impersonate Googlebot, to virtually any other automated traffic from unknown bots.

If Reddit was smart they’d leverage something like that to allow Google, Bing, etc. to crawl their data and block all others, or poison others with bogus data. But we’re talking about Reddit here…

Quick! Change all the textbooks to “clay tablet theorem”!

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‘21 Model Y long range. Overall it drives well, and the supercharger network is really nice. We took it on a trip up & down a good portion of the east coast last year and never had any issues charging it. We have a couple 30 lb dogs that love going for rides, so things like dog mode are really nice as well.

Things I really do not like:

• The reliance on cameras for all sorts of features like auto high beams and auto wipers on top of traffic aware cruise control (aka autopilot) (and full self driving, if you have it). I regularly have the wipers go off on clear, sunny days. The auto high beams are so unreliable I don’t use them, and that means no autopilot at night. I have no faith in even trying out FSD because of how glitchy everything else is.
• The minimal use of physical controls. I have to take my eyes off the road just to switch wiper speed/mode.
• Software updates have, more than once, changed my settings for things like autopilot without warning, and I’ve only discovered it when driving and turning autopilot on.
• The maps have lots of routing issues. It shows roads in my neighborhood that don’t yet exist (new development under construction), regularly routes me wrong ways (there’s a left turn near my home that it thinks it can’t take so it tries to route me two sides if a triangle as a result), and on our road trip we found a stretch of highway that it thought it couldn’t drive on and kept trying to route us along side streets. And there’s no way I know to report these issues so they can be fixed. Apps like Waze make that trivial.

Pretty much all of these are reasons why I refuse to even try FSD and discourage others from using it. About the only way I’ll give it another chance is if a truly independent third party tests it and says all these issues have been resolved.

I admit I own a Tesla. Given all the recent erratic behavior:

• Not only will I not recommend Teslas to anybody who might ask about it, I will warn them to look at company & CEO behavior over the years, and actively discourage others from buying one.
• When the time comes, I will not be replacing my current car with another Tesla. I will still likely go with an EV, but by then there should be significantly more good (better) options available.

About the only way I’ll change either of these will be for Elon to step down and completely remove himself from any control over Tesla. But I don’t see that happening and I certainly won’t be holding my breath.

Our house has 5 heating & 2 AC zones that I installed Ecobee thermostats on. Three rooms also have skylights that can be opened. When we open the skylights the thermostats all turn off, and when closed they turn them back on to the mode they were previously set to.

Our house is set back in the woods on a long driveway. When either me or my wife arrives home after dark all the driveway / walkway lights turn on. And when we’re both away they all turn off.

I also have a “bedtime” button on my phone that turns off all the lights, locks the doors, turns off our WiFi speakers, puts all the Ecobees into sleep mode, etc.