tech

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year | Tom’s Hardware

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year | Tom’s Hardware:

We were also interested in looking at Cloudflare’s breakdown of human/bot traffic by country. The most bot-ridden traffic comes from the tiny island of Gibraltar (92.1%), followed by Singapore (76.4%), then Iran (76.4%). While some of these places have a lot of data centers and hosting infrastructure compared to population size, Iran’s high bot count may rather come from the heavy use of VPNs with automated scraping and bypass tools. Cloudflare has also previously flagged Iran as a hotspot for malicious bot activity.

[What a mess…]

Reviving UserLand Frontier (and friends) – Jake Savin

Reviving UserLand Frontier (and friends) – Jake Savin:

Frontier’s modernization might be one of the largest open source C-language projects in the world that’s 100% managed with AI by a single person. Research I did in April suggests this is the case, but that won’t be true forever since these models and agentic harnesses are advancing very fast, and I’m sure there will be more similarly large and complex one-person efforts soon if not already.

[Facinating work. I look forward to seeing where this goes.]

Scripting News: Online suckage is everywhere

Scripting News:

The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you’re trying to do.
It’s another freaking algorithm.

Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It’s a fucking machine, how could it possibly know.

Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it’s a fucking machine. it has no idea what i’m doing.

First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.

[It’s some kind of mess.]

making things true

making things true:

when i look at the history of computing, the most important moments weren’t new features. they were new primitives. the command line gave us composable programs. the GUI gave us direct manipulation. the web gave us hyperlinks. the smartphone gave us sensors and connectivity. each unlocked entire ecosystems because they provided new atoms that could be infinitely recombined.

AI isn’t just a feature. it’s a new primitive. it’s a new way of decomposing and recomposing reality.

[Hmm…]

npilk // ChatGPT is my static site generator

npilk // ChatGPT is my static site generator:

In the end, I decided to cobble something together with Jinja. I wrote a base_common.html for my header and footer, a basic template for posts, and a custom script to generate the full site from the post templates. This wasn’t quite as automated as I hoped, but it was simple, and left me with plenty of control.

Modern problems require modern solutions

After tediously copy-pasting the first couple of posts into my template, I had a thought that’s becoming more and more common. Why not just ask ChatGPT to do it?

I wrote a simple prompt:

I need to put my blog post into my standard template. I’ll paste the template from an old post and then the new post content. Can you update it into the correct format?

Here’s the template from a prior post: {pasted template}

And here’s the new post: {pasted new post}

[Nice!]

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors:

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

It’s been well over a year since I started serving 429s to clients which are hitting the feed too often. Since then, much has happened, and most of it is generally good news.

I’ve heard from users and authors alike of feed software. Sometimes the users have filed bug reports and/or feature requests and have gotten positive results from the project (or vendor). Other times, the authors of such software have gotten in touch, did some digging, found a few nuances of how their libraries work, and improved the situation.

Some of them are trying but are still not quite making it right.

Here’s some of what’s been going on.

[Facinating how we keep looping around…]

Scripting News: One way is always better than two

Scripting News: One way is always better than two:

It’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia page on RSS that I had a format that does what RSS does, a year before it existed, but I gave it up so that Netscape and UserLand would build on the same format, RSS.

[I can attest to this. I don’t remember the context, but Dave and I had a conversation about the two formats. His was, from my perspective, clearly better*. I think he had already made up his mind about the situation (we only talked formats, not the larger context of what he was trying to accomplish and with whom), but I didn’t know it at the time. Still the “Scripting News format” was being used by Dave back then.]

[* My perspective was as a developer who had a native desktop editor for blogs. The very first I believe. It was beautifully simple to use. I miss it a lot. But it was written as a personal project, not a business, and I chose an environment and language that didn’t last. It also led to the creation of Really Simple Discoverability, the XML format I created to make it easier to use editors with blogs. Allez!]

Interesting that Edit This Page came up the day before or so. One of the things I loved about using “Archipelago”, the editor I had written and mentioned above, was exactly this feature. There was a link on every page of the blog, and if you clicked it the magic was performed to open that page in the editor. No matter how long ago that page was created you didn’t have to go searching for it in order to edit it, the link was always there. Days like this make me feel that so much was lost along the way to today. The open web is making a bit of comeback these days… who knows? Maybe we’ll catch up with the past.