bdefore

Thanks. Appreciate your support, and very glad it brings you value.

I'd rather not involve Microsoft but I recognize there are other options. It is additional work/complexity I'll probably have to take on.

To clarify the math. Netlify bills $50 for each 100GB over the Pro plan limit of 1TB. Which is the barrel I'm looking down just this month before others get the same idea. So yes, I'm squeezed on both side unless I put the work in to rehost.

Please believe me that it is not a step I want to take.

I created and maintain ProtonDB, a popular Linux gaming resource. I don't do ads, just pay the bills from some Patreon donations.

It's a statically generated React site I deploy on Netlify. About ten days ago I started incurring 30GB of data per day from user agents indicating they're using Prerender. At this pace almost all of that will push me past the 1TB allotted for my plan, so I'm looking at an extra ~$500USD a month for the extra bandwdith boosters.

I'm gonna try the robots.txt options, but I'm doubtful this will be effective in the long run. Many other options aren't available if I want to continue using a SaaS like Netlify.

My initial thoughts are to either move to Cloudflare Pages/Workers where bandwidth is unlimited, or make an edge function that parses the user agent and hope it's effective enough. That'd be about $60 in edge function invocations.

I've got so many better things to do than play whack-a-mole on user agents and, when failing, pay this scraping ransom.

Can I just say fuck all y'all AI harvesters? This is a popular free service that helps get people off of their Microsoft dependency and live their lives on a libre operating system. You wanna leech on that? Fine, download the data dumps I already offer on an ODbL license instead of making me wonder why I fucking bother.

ProtonDB started with a lunchtime reddit post and a public Google Sheets link I seeded with three of my own tests. Came back from work with a thousand rows in it. In a few weeks I built a frontend around it. The 30k row data migration was brutal but in hindsight was absolutely worth it. AMA.

Not who you responded to, but I thought you described your case elegantly neutral to the God question. I suspected you were coming from that perspective, but your argument stood on its own.

Now that said, if we did find alien life, how would your feelings about God change?

Tried your beta out and enjoyed it for a while but then got hit with the auth wall after ~10 messages. Kind of irrational but I felt insulted that even after I did so my conversation was nowhere in chat history.

People get attached to bots quick I guess! I recommend: 1) communicate to the provisional user how many moore messages they get before having to login and 2) persisting those pre-auth chat histories.

I'd be curious to hear of your experience. Let me know how to reach you?

Fascinating he would choose to retire at 39, in a position of what sounds of great influence in the space program. Anyone know the context around this? Was it mandated?

That great innovation is at the root of the market's disregard for negative externalities such as climate change. I'm not in support of jailing shareholders, but say a tax on the dividends of shareholders who front the capital for companies that impose a burden on civilization doesn't sound outrageous to me. Especially since fining the company directly doesn't necessarily discourage bad behavior at the tiers of power that have the ability to take a different path.

Aside from the well written article itself, it's remarkable the thought and time put into the commentary that follows. This reminds me how much the quality of commentary has reduced on most places that use them. As well as how much effort I put in to contribute. Valuable discussion used to be scattered across various blogs and HN is in some ways the last vestiges of it.

A powerful engagement and influence was left by MySpace, but it's not put up in protective glass for ticketed visitors to take snapshots of. I appreciate the nuance of its impact on the world, but... we've moved on.

You're proposing then that Google is in a disappointment loop. I think that's much more true for the technologically versed than the broader public. If they shut down Gmail/Maps/YouTube/Chromecast that'd breach the layman dyke, but I can't see them doing that.

Google I feel's is this age's General Electric. They already borrowed all the wrong ideas from Jack Welch. Most people, if they dug a bit, just want Google to keep what it's already built running and not charge for it. It's just not a place you expect radically good innovation to come from anymore. So, like your Whirlpool dishwasher, you expect it to do its thing, never rave about it to anyone, and moan about it when it breaks.