xeubie

I did finally block them at the firewall level last night. They are constantly trying to connect anyway.

It seems that Meta didn't mention one aspect of their "next-generation" AI training system: their incompetent web crawler hammers websites while completely ignoring robots.txt. Meta's 57.141.0.0/24 made up about 90% of all requests to my server this past week, and it didn't stop after I blocked it. They continue to make a request every 2 seconds despite me responding with a 403 every time. Truly an engineering marvel that Meta has bestowed upon us.

edit: I just checked and they are back to hammering my server at 105 requests per minute. These are the Meta-owned ranges I'm blocking now, in case it helps anyone: 57.141.0.0/16, 57.142.0.0/15, 57.144.0.0/14, 57.148.0.0/15

Yeah you should try it. I place a very big value on simplicity and code size but the combo you describe might have benefits.

Blue badges were for government employees (like I was), and green badges were for private contractors. And yes they have a lot of math and physics guys; my own physics lecturer was in my orientation class, actually. He was there for quantum computing, which reinforces my point. The government can be good at pioneering unproven / uncommercialized technologies, but in general they are like a blunt weapon; the profit motive and lack of bureaucracy eventually makes the private sector far better for improving the technology later. In the case of LLMs, they didn't even originate in government, and I don't think there's any chance they are being developed there at a more advanced level.

I can't say what they're doing now because I worked for the NSA 15 years ago but the view of them as an omnipotent power is a product of Hollywood. The government is good at throwing an ungodly amount of resources at something to get a result through sheer attrition, and so they are often the source of original development of technologies. The private sector has always been much better at building a technology to greater sophistication and efficiency. There may be blue badgers in Fort Meade trying to train models but there is no chance they are competitive with the frontier AI companies. It's like saying the government has an amazing home-grown fighter aircraft that is beyond what Lockheed has ever made...they delegate that stuff to private companies for a reason.

Yes the article I linked mentioned d/with (speculative writes), and you are right that it is useful for testing -- but not much else, since it is purely in-memory. If you want to call that in-memory branching that's fine, I'll concede that.

My database supports persisted branching, but not just at the database level. You can "branch" (i.e., make a fast clone) data at any level, such as data for a specific user. Many production uses for this, not just testing, yet almost no database supports this. It uses the same HAMT algorithm that Clojure uses.

If each "branch" is read only, it's not a branch at all. The entire idea of branching implies that you can make changes on one branch, then switch to another branch and make changes to it. They start from the same point and grow in different directions, as the metaphor of branches on a tree depicts.

I really like it. API-first git repos without the limitations of a git service like github that are built primarily for humans. Looks like a competitor to code.storage by pierre.

Zig is a great choice. I spent the last three years working on my own git implementation in Zig (see my profile) and it's really the perfect language for this. It gives precise low level control and heavily emphasizes eliminating dependencies (like libc) which makes it perfect for web assembly.

What a banger of a release. The new `Io` interface was a huge breaking change for my project, but I made the transition. Zig seems to be pulling the same trick it pulled with allocators: just make it an explicit value that you pass around. Explicit allocators felt obviously right in retrospect, and so far this feels obviously right too.