switz

They are banned at the edge in Cloudflare (now), they never hit my application.

There is so much spam, abuse, and aggressive scraping that I've had to block:

  - AWS
  - Google Cloud
  - Azure
  - Alibaba Cloud
  - Oracle

and a handful of other ASNs on almost all of my properties. It would be one thing if it was simple scraping, but it's often genuine agentic abuse (just spamming for vulnerabilities* or scraping millions of pages with very little valuable or dynamic content). These clouds must get the abuse happening under their own roof under control.

I banned Alibaba's Cloud two years ago and it still hits one of my domains 1 million times per day, despite every route 4xx-ing during that time.

Even Apple has aggressively ramped up its scraping in the past few months, but thankfully they do respect robots.txt.

It's frustrating because some of my real users route through these clouds via their work VPNs. Also, there are a lot of less-than-reputable AI scrapers using global bot-nets via residential IPs to scrape, making it even harder to detect and ban them without affecting real people.

* like leaked .env routes, brute forcing admin panels, and so on

Been really enjoying the X3 lately. This is a great piece and ideally how a good blog post written about an experience with AI should go – authentically written, and not AI generated. I had fun reading it.

4.6 was the last model that didn’t over-cook its writing in circular loops. I use it as a daily driver and drop into fable when I’m doing higher level architectural work. 4.6 is so much more efficient in its effort.

It became obvious to me very quickly that 4.7 and on were broken. I’m a little puzzled how others didn’t realize it, but maybe they don’t actually review model output (code) or have a strong process/workflow.

It largely works and it's a massive business success. This is the classic engineer asking the 'why this technology?' to what amounts to a business question.

They chose it early on, it works, and it makes obscene amounts of revenue. End of story. That doesn't mean it was the "greatest" choice, or has a perfect technical architecture.

Rewrites are never easy, even the bun rewrite. But a non-UI developer tool with a rigid API surface contract (and associated tests) will always be easier to trust after a rewrite than a partially tested UI tool with ambiguous functionality.

I do this. The awkward thing is when I am in person or on the phone and have to explain that my customer email address is [their_business_name]@my_weird_domain.tld

But the people usually just nod along.

The other downside is that it's forward-in only, wish I could proxy responses without setting up a whole new inbox (and outbox).

Can someone explain to me if EU card transactions are capped, why Stripe charges me (US) the full ride on my EU customer's cards? In fact, I get charged even more for EU cards – perhaps as much as 2.5% extra.

I just checked and I get charged ~8% in fees on a 10 euro transaction on Stripe. Of course some of that is the low transaction amount (flat 0.30), but it's brutal for a small business like myself.

    2.9% + 1.5% (intl card) + 1% (currency conversion) + 0.30

    Payment amount (€1.00 EUR = $1.15253 USD)
 
    €10.00 EUR -> $11.53 USD

    Fees

    Total:    - $0.93 USD

    Stripe currency conversion fee 
    - $0.12 USD

    Stripe processing fees
    - $0.81 USD

    Net amount
    $10.60 USD

I guess the NA interchange is charging the card, rather than the EU? Could using a MOR reduce the fee structure?

I personally don't agree, and my experience is that RSCs embrace the inherent complexity of building websites. All websites span the server and the client to some extent. Giving you the tools to wield those boundaries is actually a bid for developer autonomy and flexible control over user experience.

It is complex because the domain is complex. Though it requires a deep understanding of the web as a platform, most high-level websites could net-benefit from the ideas behind RSCs. I don't find it to be quite as much of a footgun as most people would suggest, but if you don't understand both server and client in a deep manner it is, of course, confusing.

Happy to dig in deeper for anyone who wants to have an honest discussion about the benefits and drawbacks without dropping into FUD. Even if you decide it's not for you, all web developers could glean something from their model.

It's also always worth noting that RSCs don't require a server, and still bring value without one.

It's a shame that VCs have corrupted a $200MM/year business into the perception as a failure. Who cares if the VCs didn't get a large return, or if the outsized impact of the software didn't quite fully capture the value created. $200MM/yr without aggressive R&D or operational costs could be an incredibly healthy business.

Maybe we should stop trying to build so many billion dollar/year businesses and work on more sustainable models.

Please do not wash your authentic writing through an LLM.