gck1 (u/gck1) - Readit News

gck1 commented on The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch positiveblue.substack.com... · Posted by u/positiveblue

nromiun · 2 days ago

It is a big problem. There is no good alternative to Cloudflare as a free CDN. They put servers all over the world and they are giving them away for free. And making their money on premium serverless services.

Not to mention the big cloud providers are unhinged with their egress pricing.

gck1 · a day ago

> Not to mention the big cloud providers are unhinged with their egress pricing.

I always wonder why this status quo persisted even after Cloudflare. Their pricing is indeed so unhinged, that they're not even in consideration for me for things where egress is a variable.

Why is egress seemingly free for Cloudflare or Hetzner but feels like they launch spaceships at AWS and GCP every time you send a data packet to the outside world?

gck1 commented on The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch positiveblue.substack.com... · Posted by u/positiveblue

dlcarrier · 2 days ago

I use uncommon web browsers that don't leak a lot of information. To Cloudflare, I am indistingushable from a bot.

Privacy cannot exist in an environment where the host gets to decide who access the web page. I'm okay with rate limiting or otherwise blocking activity that creates too much of a load, but trying to prevent automated access is impossible withou preventing access from real people.

gck1 · a day ago

And god forbid you live in an authoritarian country and must use VPN to protect your freedom. Internet becomes captcha hell run by 2-3 companies.

I've had far fewer issues with my own bots that access cloudflare protected websites, than during my regular browsing with privacy respecting browsers and a VPN.

As a side note: I'm at least thankful Microsoft isn't behind web gatekeeping. Try and solve any microsoft captcha behind a VPN - its like writing a thesis, you gotta dedicate like 5 minutes, full attention.

gck1 commented on The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch positiveblue.substack.com... · Posted by u/positiveblue

swed420 · 2 days ago

> I DO have a major issue with my sites being crawled extremely aggressively by offenders including Meta, Perplexity and OpenAI

Gee, if only we had, like, one central archive of the internet. We could even call it the internet archive.

Then, all these AI companies could interface directly with that single entity on terms that are agreeable.

gck1 · a day ago

Internet Archive is missing enormous chunks of the internet though. And I don't mean weird parts of the internet, just regional stuff.

Not even news articles from top 10 news websites from my country are usually indexed there.

gck1 commented on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/floverfelt

Zerot · 3 days ago

I think in part the issue is that the LLM does not have enough context. The difference between a bug in the test or a bug in the implementation is purely based on the requirements which are often not in the source code and stored somewhere else(ticket system, documentation platform).

Without providing the actual feature requirements to the LLM(or the developer) it is impossible to determine which is wrong.

Which is why I think it is also sort of stupid by having the LLM generate tests by just giving it access to the implementation. That is at best testing the implementation as it is, but tests should be based on the requirements.

gck1 · 3 days ago

Oh, absolutely, context matters a lot. But the thing is, they still fail even with solid context.

Before I let an agent touch code, I spell out the issue/feature and have it write two markdown files - strategy.md and progress.md (with the execution order of changes) inside a feat_{id} directory. Once I’m happy with those, I wipe the context and start fresh: feed it the original feature definition + the docs, then tell it to implement by pulling in the right source code context. So by the time any code gets touched, there’s already ~80k tokens in play. And yet, the same confusion frequently happens.

Even if I flat out say “the issue is in the test/logic,”, even if I point out _exactly_ what the issue is, it just apologizes and loops.

At that point I stop it, make it record the failure in the markdown doc, reset context, and let it reload the feature plus the previous agent’s failure. Occasionally that works, but usually once it’s in that state, I have to step in and do it myself.

gck1 commented on Sometimes CPU cores are odd anubis.techaro.lol/blog/2... · Posted by u/rbanffy

yjftsjthsd-h · 3 days ago

TIL the CPU count is exposed to JS. I guess that's fine? It feels nasty, but it's not really worse than all the other fingerprinting data we expose...

gck1 · 3 days ago

Also fonts you have installed, the type of connection you're using, GPU parameters, keyboard languages on your system and so much more [1]

[1] https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

gck1 commented on Building your own CLI coding agent with Pydantic-AI martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/vinhnx

gck1 · 3 days ago

Curiously, I explicitly tell all my LLM agents to never touch Pydantic models or environment stuff - it’s even in big, uppercase, bold text in my custom instructions for Roo-Code. LLMs seem to trip a lot over Pydantic’s magic.

gck1 commented on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/floverfelt

rvz · 3 days ago

> It feels like Tdd/llm connection is implied — “and also generate tests”.

That sounds like an anti-pattern and not true TDD to get LLMs to generate tests for you if you don't know what to test for.

It also reduces your confidence in knowing if the generated test does what it says. Thus, you might as well write it yourself.

Otherwise you will get these sort of nasty incidents. [0] Even when 'all tests passed'.

[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...

gck1 · 3 days ago

LLMs (Sonnet, Gemini from what I tested) tend to “fix” failing tests by either removing them outright or tweaking the assertions just enough to make them pass. The opposite happens too - sometimes they change the actual logic when what really needs updating is the test.

In short, LLMs often get confused about where the problem lies: the code under test or the test itself. And no amount of context engineering seems to solve that.

gck1 commented on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/floverfelt

nicwolff · 3 days ago

> I’ve often heard, with decent reason, an LLM compared to a junior colleague.

No, they're like an extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior colleague – who drinks heavily on the job. Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted. But you can hire so many of them, so cheaply, and they don't get mad when you fire them!

gck1 · 3 days ago

> Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted

And constantly microdosing, sometimes a bit too much.

gck1 commented on My startup banking story (2023) mitchellh.com/writing/my-... · Posted by u/dvrp

jancsika · 3 days ago

> Ultimately, there was no long term negative impact of the events that transpired (except maybe for Alex, but I truly don't know) and I can now look back on it with amusement.

So a software guy who didn't understand people or banking opens an account at Chase. And a guy from Chase who didn't understand people or software calls him-- repeatedly over years-- and fails to ever connect on any human level whatsoever. Now when first guy withdraws millions from Chase, he unwittingly causes the second guy to lose his job. This means the the second guy isn't around to help the first guy when he needs him the most-- to help him navigate banking fraud on that same account.

This just seems tragic. Second guy's success as a banker and first guy's ease of mind as a customer were inextricably linked. Yet neither of them knew how to form the simple social bond of two 4 year-olds playing in the same sandbox.

Seriously-- how did Chase not hand the account to someone who could connect with this guy? For a multi-million dollar account this just doesn't pass the smell test.

gck1 · 3 days ago

Banker was probably asked daily by his managers if the multi-million dollar client was happy and the banker probably always responded with-yes, very.

gck1 commented on Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use? · Posted by u/rickybule

nneonneo · 3 days ago

An expensive but functional option is to enable roaming on a foreign eSIM. Getting an eSIM is relatively easy. Roaming mobile traffic is routed from the country in which the SIM is from, not the country that you're in, meaning that an eSIM from e.g. an American carrier will not be subject to the censorship in your country.

I've used this on multiple trips to China over the past decade (including a trip last year). You can find carriers that will charge very low (or even no) roaming rates.

gck1 · 3 days ago

Data-only eSIMs (e.g. ones you get from Airalo and apps like that) are not going to cut it though. You need a "full" eSIM that gives you a real number and even then, it's not a guarantee that your traffic will be routed via the country eSIM is from. Tello does route (or rather, exit) via US for example, but it's 2¢/MB.

Chinese forums / blogs have a lot of information about this stuff. I usually ask ChatGPT to translate "Research topic re: some form of circumvention and give me forum posts and blog posts about it" to Chinese, then paste that into DeepSeek with search enabled and just let Chrome translate the responses. Does a really good job. At least better than what I can manage with Baidu.