Live data from Hacker News

ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

buchodi.com

131–140 of 668 posts

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#131
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we really don't. We don't need worldcoin, we don't need papers, please. We just don't. "Prove your humanity/age/other properties" with this mechanism quickly goes places you do not want it to go.

No, it doesn't go places we "do not want it to go". What part of zero knowledge doesn't make sense? How precisely does a free, unlinkable, multi-vendor, open-source cryptographic attestation of recent humanity create something terrible? It would behoove people to engage with the substance of attestation proposals. It's lazy to state that any verification scheme whatsoever is equivalent to a panopticon, dystopia as th…

The ZK part isn't the problem. The "attestation of recent humanity" part is. Who attests? What happens when someone can't get attested?

You've been to the doctor recently, right? Given them your SSN? Every identity system ever built was going to be scoped || voluntary. None of them stayed that way.

Once you have the identity mechanism, "Oh it's zero knowledge! So let's use it for your age! Have you ever been convicted?" which leads to "mandated by employers" which leads to...

We've seen this goddamn movie before. Let's just skip it this time? Please?

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#132
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're discussing the quality of screening here, not the act/necessity of screening itself.

>We're discussing the quality of screening here The "quality" of TSA's screening seems be pretty bad too given how many people have to go through secondary screening vs how many terrorist they catch (0?)

they caught 11 million by now (just as arbitrary as your 0 but probably more accurate since we haven’t had a large terrorist attack since they got the gig to serve and protect and before we lost thousands of lives…)

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#133
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had the insane experience of filling out 15 consecutive captchas, after, I had checked out and entered my payment information into the payment processor widget. I just wanted to submit the order. I was logged in to their website, and the bank even needed a one time code for payment. If the bank is pretty sure I am human then your ecomm site can figure it out surely.

A while back I was buying tickets for a gondola for a trip in Europe and the checkout process failed during payment because their site didn't load their analytics/tracking stuff with proper error-handling, so when my ad-blocker prevented the tracking stuff, their checkout process failed to handle my CC's 2-factor auth and the checkout would fail. Had to contact my CC company and work with the gondola company to tell…

To be fair, this sometimes seems on the ad blocker. I've definitely seen mine accidentally nuke part of the payment Javascript (or maybe the 3DS iframe?) because some substring of it matched some common ad URL, which is obviously unrecoverable for the site itself.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#134

Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform. A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users. We also keep a very close…

You’re doing gods work sir, thank you!

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#135
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because we want to keep free and logged-out access But don't you run these checks on logged-in users too?

Yep, on logged-in users too. The reason is basically the same: we want scarce compute going to real people, not attackers. Being logged in is one useful signal, but it doesn’t fully prevent automation, account abuse, or other malicious traffic, so we apply protections in both cases.

Nothing you do can fully prevent automation. Someone who wants to automate requests badly enough will be able to do it, especially when the “protections” are as easy to decrypt and analyze as the OP proved.

Meanwhile, the rest of us (well, not me, because I don’t use your garbage product, but lots of others do) have to suffer and have our compute resources used up in the name of “protection.”

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#136
post #112
post #14

It's absurd how unusable Cloudflare is making the web when using a browser or IP address they consider "suspicious". I've lately been drowning in captchas for the crime of using Firefox. All in the interest of "bot protection", of course.

Surprising really, because I'm a Firefox + Ublock Origin die hard and I never get Cloudflare captchas. Wonder what the difference is? I have CGNAT turned off, if that matters at all (probably not).

I could definitely imagine a public IPv4 with lots of good, logged-in Cloudflare traffic to act as a positive signal for their heuristics, possibly even overriding the Firefox penalty.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t know if it’s related to the article, but the chats ui performance becomes absolutely horrendous in long chats. Typing the chat box is slow, rendering lags and sometimes gets stuck altogether. I have a research chat that I have to think twice before messaging because the performance is so bad. Running on iPhone 16 safari, and MacBook Pro m3 chrome.

Yeah just had this earlier today, I had to write my response in vscode and paste it in, there were literal seconds of lag for typing each character. Typical bloated React.

Just because a web application uses React and is slow, it does not follow that it is slow because of React.

It's perfectly possible to write fast or slow web applications in React, same as any other framework.

Linear is one of the snappiest web applications I've ever used, and it is written in React.

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#138

Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform. A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users. We also keep a very close…

Don’t know if it’s related to the article, but the chats ui performance becomes absolutely horrendous in long chats. Typing the chat box is slow, rendering lags and sometimes gets stuck altogether. I have a research chat that I have to think twice before messaging because the performance is so bad. Running on iPhone 16 safari, and MacBook Pro m3 chrome.

In the good old days Netflix had "Dynamic HTML" code that would take a DOM element which scrolled out of view port and move it to the position where it was about to be scrolled in from the other end. Hence he number of DOM elements stayed constant no matter how far you scroll and the only thing that grows is the Y coordinate.

They did it because a lot of devices running Netflix (TVs, DVD players, etc) were underpowered and Netflix was not keen on writing separate applications. They did, however, invest into a browser engine that would have HW acceleration not just for video playback but also for moving DOM elements. Basically, sprites.

The lost art of writing efficient code...

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#139

Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform. A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users. We also keep a very close…

Y'all just salty that DeepSeek et al are training their LLMs on yours

Re: ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state

#140
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are on a CGNAT these days, drowning in captchas is the new normal. You’re at the mercy of one of your neighbors not hosting a botnet from their home computer.

For better or for worse, CF's fingerprinting and traffic filtering is a lot more in-depth than just IP trend analysis. Kind of by necessity, exactly because of what you mention. So I'd think that's not as big a worry per se.

Yet here I am drowning in captchas every once in a while, so it's quite a big worry for me.

Maybe I just have to disable all ad blockers and Safari tracking prevention? Or I guess I could send a link to a scan of my photo ID in a custom request header like X-Please-Cloudflare-May-I-Use-Your-Open-Web?

Post reply on HN