I got curious and looked up both IPs associated with the domain name and it is in fact just CloudFlare
also, their DNS-over-HTTPS (this is new to me but I stay the fuck away from cloudflare and it looks like a standard they’ve pushed for) endpoint is just the 1.1.1.1 one with the domain name changed, but the AdGuard and Accelerator ones basically confirm they’re analyzing traffic before passing it off to cloudflare
the only other thing on there is also confusing as fuck:
”Mirrors” is one of our services that developers and non-developers could use on their websites or in their favorite web browsers. It can reduce server load by acting as an extra caching layer for every direct link available on your website.
All data will be cached for 86400 seconds or 1.00 day(s), and distributed globally, effectively increasing performance and reliability, which will lead to an improved user experience.
so, ah, essentially a demo web app supposedly running at CDN scale, and supposedly powered by AI (to do what? this is not answered, of course). this is almost definitely just some basic cloud shit someone spun up, but like, why? there’s money in it if all this shit is logging DNS queries and web site accesses to sell to advertisers or for other much more nefarious purposes (or they’re doing injection on high value targets), but surely people who change their DNS settings and developers aren’t stupid enough to fall for this just cause it says it’s AI… right?
Q: Is this really free?
A: If it's not, you should already see a Pricing page.
this really is the slimiest way to avoid saying “it’s free until we say it isn’t”
holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesn’t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because they’re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yud’s nonsense ever will be
so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:
They live, in perfect health, for generally around four hundred years before choosing to die (I don't quite understand why they would, but this is low-grade transhumanism we're talking about).
yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. it’s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yud’s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.
there’s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always don’t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just aren’t bored enough yet.
yud omits this (probably, I’m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isn’t gonna end your existence (they don’t do murder, and there’s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient being’s mind) but they’re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.
welcome!
there’s something weirdly cozy about systems development, especially coming from modern web stack work. it might be that there’s no sandbox so you can do what you want, the toolchains are usually a lot lighter, and the APIs usually aren’t designed by the least honest people you know (my rant on the fuckery surrounding the Web Components spec is still incoming)
lately I’ve been working on the rewrite for our instance’s archives, and I’ve been getting very good results from a custom static templating engine and unpoly as a progressive enhancement library. after years of dealing with react’s bullshit, it’s surprising how much functionality you can get out of carefully structured markup and CSS, with a tiny amount of strictly optional JavaScript that mostly enables partial repaints (maybe the only good bit of SPAs? I still need to benchmark it to see if that’s even faster than native rendering) and a controlled, predictable amount of markup enhancement that seems to stay the fuck out of the browser’s way
so far it’s definitely a distinct improvement on what I’ve come to expect from SPAs, which is a world of loading spinners, crawling elements, and jank so severe and universal they’ve taken to naming all its varieties
presenting a DM from someone who absolutely doesn’t have internalized transphobia, never heard of it:
So I’m gonna reach out and say that you hastily misunderstood “and that shit about trans people”. I’m talking about the hate speech from the right wing. Keep me banned though that community is full of people who really have a low level reading ability.
when a libertarian-presenting shithead with not particularly deep political takes posts “it’s a distraction just like the bullshit about trans people” with no other qualifiers, it’s absolutely understood as a dogwhistle for “people need to shut up about trans issues”
and if I’m wrong about that? using trans folks to make your bullshit points is still fucking transphobia. don’t do this shit. it’s fucking concerning you can’t understand that.
e: also, and this is important: the republicans are planning a fucking genocide of trans folks and you’re calling it a distraction. what the fuck is wrong with you.
yeah don’t come back on an alt you fucking moron
I don’t give a shit about trans people
that much is clear, you use trans folks like a fucking cudgel to make a shitty point. but I also don’t believe this:
I was talking about the right wings nonsense.
given you seem to be a bitcoin right-libertarian at best. it’s time for you to fuck off, again
holy shit we didn’t even have to dig to find out you’re garbage
thank you for making this the easiest ban ever
they named themselves Syrus hashtag Blog? like, on purpose?
In March, Google said it was altering its algorithms to tackle spammy AI content after 404 Media reported that Google News was still boosting spam sites. Just removing the spam sites from Google News is too much work or something.
now now David, having a small team maintain a blocklist wouldn’t be very Google scale. instead they have to deploy a myopic fucking algorithm designed by the same software powerhouse that decided we don’t want to see an article if the author’s name looks too foreign
god, that orange site thread immediately crawls up its own ass pretending that anti-spam LLMs will fix this and it’ll somehow be a better world (and absolutely not, you know, boiling) and also fucking e-commerce is better than the moon landing and the “collective FAANG” could go to mars tomorrow if only they applied themselves
seriously, if you want to know what a concussion feels like, read the first couple screenfuls of that thread
I don’t think any of the reply guys I’m talking about work for the government, but I am pretty fucking angry that a lack of regulation and government oversight allows the companies I mentioned to flood the market with worthless, polluting grifttech they say needs dedicated power plants to scale to meet a fictional level of demand
it’d be nice if anyone was seriously considering regulation that’d stop these companies from doing stupid harmful shit. unfortunately they’re not (and the ability of the US government to effectively regulate any industry at all has just been effectively ended), so I don’t really have anything to write about in that area.
see I don’t have a smoking gun on this, but if it is a garden variety adblocker and whatever the accelerator does (it’s extremely unclear) running on cloudflare workers, they at least have the ability to MiTM and modify DNS queries, and open proxies are always a security nightmare. my impression is the filter list they link is either what that endpoint uses to filter, or it’s LLM vomit they kept in because it felt more legitimate.
this might be worth poking at more in a controlled setting — a command line DNS-over-HTTP client using their endpoints and some exploration of the open proxy with curl (especially with sites that utilize credentials, with great care taken to use disposable accounts for this) might be illuminating