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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Yeah, it’s not technically impossible to stop web scrapers, but it’s difficult to have a lasting, effective solution. One easy way is to block their user-agent assuming the scraper uses an identifiable user-agent, but that can be easily circumvented. The also easy and somewhat more effective way is to block scrapers’ and caching services’ IP addresses, but that turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You could also have a paywall or login to view content and not approve a certain org, but that only will work for certain use cases, and that also is easy to circumvent. If stopping a single org’s scraping is the hill to die on, good luck.

    That said, I’m all for fighting ICE, even if it’s futile. Just slowing them down and frustrating them is useful.


  • I’ve been doing some thinking about this recently, and I think it comes from two places. One is the easily spotted malice toward workers and stepping on them (à la Elon). The other for managers and the like who are not straight up sociopaths is that a lot of these people have no meaning in their lives and have never really done anything they really believe in (or bleed for that matter). So, they try to derive meaning from their relatively boring, unimportant job, and try to get others into it like they are. They’re starved for camaraderie by the very job they’ve invested their entire lives in. It’s sad really.






  • But there are different types of temporary. Temporary because the code got updated/upgraded or new and better software got implemented feels fine. It feels like your work was part of the never ending march of technical progress. Temporary because it gets ripped out if favor of a different, inferior suite hits hard.

    If my code gets superseded by someone else’s complete rewrite that is better, then I’m all for it. If my code gets thrown out because we’re switching to a different, inferior system that is completely incompatible with my work, then that just hits like a ton of bricks.










  • The thing I’m heartened by is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of LLMs among the MBA/“leadership” group. They actually think these models are intelligent. I’ve heard people say, “Well, just ask the AI,” meaning asking ChatGPT. Anyone who actually does that and thinks they have a leg up are insane and kidding themselves. If they outsource their thinking and coding to an LLM, they might start getting ahead quickly, but they will then fall behind just as quickly because the quality will be middling at best. They don’t understand how to best use the technology, and they will end up hanging themselves with it.

    At the end of the day, all AI is just stupid number tricks. They’re very fancy, impressive number tricks, but it’s just a number trick that just happens to be useful. Solely relying on AI will lead to the downfall of an organization.