Speaking from the scraper’s perspective, I like proof of work; a ten year old 96-core server will cost a couple of quid to run for a few hours and will grab an absurd number of pages thanks to the access granted by repeatedly solving proofs of work. Small slick codebases too!

There's also the Anubis idea where your PoW is persistent until your IP address or session cookie changes, so you get to skip PoW in exchange for making yourself identifiable, which means the PoW can then be ramped up to take a couple of minutes.

I don't use Anubis though. I just make my site not take five seconds to render a page so bots can overload it easily? It's not actually that hard?

It would be more profitable to mine bitcoin.

Exactly. I’m constantly amazed at how little you actually need to bypass CF, Amazon, Azure WAFs and so on (Incapsula springs to mind too). When you look at the code you’ve come up with, it’s actually quite small and compact.

More to the point, these systems actually help scraping because proof of work unlocks essentially unlimited scraping, in my experience.

That said - from my experience on the other side, sure you can’t stop people like me or you, but you can stop 99% of the others. That’s more than worth it operationally.

What do you mean by ~"PoW unlocks unlimited scraping"?

Usually after you solve the POW challenge, sites let you make a lot of requests before asking you to complete another.

I suspect that introducing the calibration concept might be a case of too much too soon for some people.

As far as I understand it, the various probability matrices boil down to: what token has the highest likelihood of coming next, given this set of input tokens. Which then all gets chucked away and rebuilt when the most likely token is appended to the input set.

Objective assessment of internal state - again, to my non-expert eye - doesn’t appear to have any way to surface to me.

Big-if my rough working understand is more or less correct - your calibration point makes a lot of sense to me. I’m not sure that it would make sense to someone who eg considers some form of active thinking process that is intellectualising about whether to output this or that token.

The irony for me being that when I was first learning Polish and looking for any and all mnemonics - “ah, that word is the number nine, and that one is ten because it has an s in the middle and that’s next to t for ten in the alphabet”-levels of desperate - the false etymology helped me set word, słowo, in my head, and the rather delightful dosłownie, literally / to the word, has remained ever since.

(tho while on the subject, it’s hard to beat wieloryb as a wonder that I don’t want to know the true etymology of ever because if there’s even a chance that the word for whale derived from the words great as-in-size + fish, I want to hang on to it forever)

No, GP is saying that Russian uses the Latin root for Germans, I'm saying it doesn't. (it does for Germany though: "Germaniya").

If you can find a way to combine this with local population to end up at pence per litre per thousand population, I bet you’d uncover some fun trends. Bet it’d also get interesting if combined with population within an X min drive too.

Tho really need some car population per road segment stats to drive the most out of it IMO.

Might have a play with that thank you.

> what is Avon?

Welsh for river.

Hah TIL. So it's the river Welsh river on the English side of the Bristol channel.

I often feel like I would understand a lot more names if I bothered learning Welsh. It's pretty popular for made up climbing route names too, because Wales is so good for it I guess. Allegedly some of the classics in the Avon gorge are Welsh derived but I could never figure them out to be sure.

They're more likely Celtic words that live on in Welsh.

It’s lovely isn’t it? There’re a good few of these things around: notably Torpenhow Hill (which killjoys dispute); and ones like Pendle Hill (which they don’t).

There is also a nebulous region within England that might be called Avon, depending on the moon's phase and the price of loons.

There is a river Avon in England. Welsh at least (inst. celtae) has a noun for "river" which is "afon".

Recommend looking up the pronunciation of that there afon :)

The Welsh "afon" derives from the earlier Celtic "abona" meaning "river". Also related to the Celtic "afanc" which was some kind of aquatic monster.

Makes sense given Welsh’s evolution from Britannic. Much to my shame, I only started visiting Wales in later life, and there’s really something in the language that grabs me quite deeply. Once I’ve got my Polish down to pat, I tell myself.

You avon a chwerthin?

> With Maplibre or any modern map SDK this this is standard…

In practise, this doesn’t work out as visually pleasing as you’d like; labels repeat, or render partially or not at all, or become interfered with by other labels, or only work well at one given zoom. It’s easy to end up in a visually dissatisfying place that’s taking an unfathomable number of magic rules to get to.

The secret sauce to fixing this is creating separate label layers of perfect point locations or lines for labels to follow in advance. Added bonus is faster render and interaction times due to fewer rules.

For what it’s worth, I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription, and every time I try debugging a Linux system issue, I feel sad that Claude is sooooooo confidently bad at it.

Claude is noticeably poor for my use case on this particular issue. That said, I imagine I’m not alone in refusing to continue paying OpenAI. We’re in for a wild ride.

Do you know game theory? If you look at it through this perspective this doesn't sound like a good strategy.

Basically the classical prisoner dilemma. The other devs with less moral can then outperform you.

It could be a valid strategy if you can increase your crediblity with this relinquishment.

Life is more than just empty status games and money hoarding at (almost) all cost. In fact, a good life lived well (TM) is anything but that.

But I write this on mostly US forum full of faangs and similar so i dont expect strong agreement.

A lot of folks here will be startup types though, and while there is the idea that you'll make it big, I think day to day people work at startups for the satisfaction.

I am on this very forum as an explicit effort to counterbalance that very view. You have my strong agreement.

Someone who is never rational is equally bad as someone who claims there is nothing else in humans.

> Do you know game theory?

Never heard of it. The food there good?

> The other devs with less moral can then outperform you.

I long for the days where it’s only my moral compass holding me back.

Completely by accident, I have a setup that sends a pdf invoice to customers a couple of days after the sale. I’m pretty sure it’s a stripe option I must’ve misclicked.

Anyway- turns out that on the rare occasion someone’s had an issue, this gives them a really easy mechanism to write to me and tell me about it. They let off their steam in the email and then we make things good together. (Yet another reason why I always oppose noreply email addresses)

I still don’t know what or where the setting is, mind.

That's a great idea, thanks! I've found and enabled a few emails, though I think the actual invoice email is a checkout parameter. This should help, thanks!

Thanks for your thanks! Let me know how you get on, I’d love to know if this is a secret knowledge thing that turns out to work for other people too.