Notices by Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)

A funny side effect of the crackdown on "AI" scraping is that I keep getting banned from sites for browsing too quickly.

I barely use reddit anymore and I still managed to get IP banned for scraping while I was clicking on posts with no automation (I got an error page basically suggesting I contact reddit if I want a license to their data instead of scraping).

A former Apple engineer discusses their Google culture shock experience:

> My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone ... my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple ... several internal sites would ask you to file [a bug report] on why you switched to chrome [if you used chrome]. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices

Since discourse employees are now dropping in to inform me that the Bing thing is fixed, with the implication that Bing was at fault because Bing fixed the issue.

I know. The thing about the Bing issue is that, in response to Bing crawling at 0.5 QPS, leadership banned Bing and, in response to comments that this would cause problems, said things like "No, the nuclear option is what we want here."

The justifications were that 0.5 QPS of crawler traffic was causing discourse to lose customers

Why not just not charge people for a trivial amount of crawler traffic? If the backend is decently fast, it should basically be free to eat the load and not charge customers for it (and yes, I know the 0.5 QPS was for one site and it will add up; even so). My CDN doesn't charge me for getting DDoS'd because that traffic isn't really "my fault" and that could easily be orders of magnitude more traffic than all crawler traffic for all crawlers across every discourse instance.

because customers are charged so much for crawler traffic that they're leaving the platform.

And also that if anyone wants to change it, it's trivial to change the defaults and Discourse has a lot of weight to throw around because people usually don't change defaults.

Bing ended up fixing it because they were the adults in the room. When people pointed out that Discourse's change would cause problems for people, leadership responded with nonsensical angry comments: https://meta.discourse.org/t/handling-bingbot/84659/22.

Yeah, the Bing issue is fixed because Bing came from the Microsoft lineage/culture of fixing issues that impact end users even if the problem is obviously a technical or product issue that comes from outside of Microsoft.

But in other cases, the "vendor" being ranted at either can't or won't fix the issue and end user gets stuck with the problem, although they do get some nice rants about how Qualcomm engineers deserve to lose their jobs, so at least there's that.

I've repeatedly pushed back against Casey's rants on how the developers of X are bad because they don't produce code that's as fast his code. There are often reasonable reasons for slow code

But if you're ranting about how people who are 75%-95% keeping up with an all time great team should lose their jobs while you're making slowest-in-class software, maybe 0.0001% of optimal, come on dude

In response to customer issues, Discourse leadership has repeatedly written angry rants about a "vendor"

The Apple CPU org has, along with DEC in the StrongARM & Alpha era, one of the best executing CPU design teams ever assembled (and not coincidentally, they share a lineage via DEC->SiByte->PA Semi->Apple) and Qualcomm is at, what, maybe 75%-95% of the single-core performance?

If only managing to get to 75% to 95% of the performance of an all-time-great team makes you a clown you deserves to lose their job, man, I have news for you.

Of course I don't agree with this —

Anyway, the same thing that fundamentally concerns me about the Bing issue is what concerns me about the responses from the founder about Android performance where, in response to comments about performance being bad on many Android phones, the founder has numerous rants about how the real problem is that Qualcomm sucks. He sometimes says the engineers are terrible at their jobs and deserve to lose their jobs.

I did a quick Bing search to find some examples and he's still doing this in 2023.

For people who haven't been following this, a Crowdstrike update has caused Windows boxes to persistently BSoD on boot.

Some embedded devices don't have a nice remote recovery protocol and can't be recovered without basically sending the device to the factory or opening the device up and attempting to get some kind of unusual access that users aren't intended to have, which has caused problems for hospitals, factories, etc.

There are some reports that repeated reboots may get past the BSoD.

I feel like TeX is another example of https://x.com/danluu/status/1356056197963554816.

People praise it for its simplicity and elegance, but then you look for how to do something simple like print a "~", and you get this horrible hack (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/9372/327326) which has been replaced by a "canonical answer" which is also a horrible hack that many people report doesn't work for them (https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/312/327326).

This elegant canonical answer covers 3 cases (and doesn't work if you don't fall into one of the cases) and

State of the art anti-cheat techniques: Roblox detects if you have the string "x86dbg" in a window title (or window?), so kids are changing their display names and discord server names to x86dbg to get people kicked from Roblox.

If you do a search for this, links to big discussions on Roblox forums return "Sorry that page is private", so I guess that's their solution to the problem?

Wow, people really don't like iTerm2 adding an optional AI integration which requires you to enter your OpenAI key to use, calling it "no longer fit for purpose", etc.

Someone pointed out that this feature is optional and not only has to be enabled, but it requires you to enter a key to use. That user was, apparently, reported on gitlab and is now blocked.

https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/11470

It reminds me a bit of how some people don't like "algorithms", as in https://x.com/danluu/status/983466330320965632.

"STOP READING IMMEDIATELY"

https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/Coding-guidelines#null-and-undefined

Some kind of attack (ransomware?) has crippled London Drugs, a local Canadian pharmacy chain (moderate size, 78 stores) for the past week. Apparently their phone systems are tied in with their computer systems since their phones have been down for a week, but they'll fill prescriptions if you go to the store and bring your old prescription labels.

I'm curious if the business is going to be able to survive this or if the customer loss from being down for a week will end up being fatal.

I see these AI generated summaries are going great.

BTW, I mean this non-ironically. This is generating a huge amount of engagement, juicing user numbers, which companies generally care more about than accuracy.

For people not familiar with basketball, a bad miss is called a "brick" and Klay Thompson put up a lot of bricks against the Sacramento Kings. People talking about this resulted in Twitter creating this AI generated "trend" saying that Klay was vandalizing houses in Sacremento.

These sites that are gaming search ranking by generating nonsense pages that match any query are getting a bit ridiculous (the highlighted result is the 4th highest result for the query on DDG and Bing).

@andrewrk On the Tecno Spark 8C, this uses a fair amount of CPU up front (4.7s), but interaction is (relative to other sites using the same device) decently quick when you tap any target or scroll one of the pages if you scroll a page that has enough content to scroll.

I think that's really interesting. I'll add a bit about this in the post.

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices:

https://danluu.com/slow-device/

I was surprised to see that my car's payload rating is 650lbs considering that it has 5 seats (130 lbs per person!), but then I remembered that these Google knowledge card results are usually wrong.

But it turns out the correct answer is barely over 1000 lbs, or ~200 lbs per person, which still seems surprisingly low. For reference, in the U.S., this is roughly the median weight of a 40 y/o male and also the average weight of an adult (20+ y/o) adult male.