Meh. I was trying to add additional domain names to an api key but it didn't work. Assuming that it's not operator error, it's a pretty annoying bug but its not the only one I've hit this week.
Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
91–100 of 106 posts
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think people whose circumstances are favorable to them are more likely to succeed and less likely to complain?
I think that as soon as you start viewing certain groups/categories/etc as bad and blaming them for everything, as many engineers do to the non-engineering staff at tech companies, you have stopped thinking logically and are just reacting emotionally. "PMs bad, engineers good" is such a common idea in these spaces and it really makes me think less of the thinking skills of anyone who espouses it.
I am just assessing the work that I saw. I saw people do stupid things constantly when people could have clearly done better work. It wasn't market pressure, it was just an organization with lax standards and weak leadership.
Obviously this assessment is only as good as my skill at assessing things, so believe it or not, but I know what I saw and I know that it was disappointing.
In my opinion there is a bizarre and largely harmful phenomenon in our culture where many people have come to believe that it is impossible to just look at something and know if it is good or bad. They learned about cognitive biases and subjectivity and then overindexed on them, entirely throwing out the idea that any subject assessment could even possibly be correct, on the basis that some of them are incorrect. When in fact it is clearly a question of skill: some people's subjective assessments are more correct, some are not. Of course I believe mine are good, but you have no reason to agree, and that's fine.
Plenty of companies are run idiotically and everybody knows it. It is not hard to believe. It is not that they are following market pressures and their actions are therefore inscrutable to outsiders. It is that they are bad at their jobs, but the feedback loops that would do something about that either don't exist, or are weak, or work too slowly to be effective. or, often, that being bad at their jobs is totally fine: the requirements for survival are decorrelated with the quality of their work for various reasons, and so there is no particular reason they should figure out how to do better. Regardless, it can still be true that their work is disappointing in a way that is obvious to outsiders.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say that AI products aren't related to the market. The problem is not that they're AI it's that they're badly done.
Every cloudflare product I've ever used has been a legit delight to use. I use it for lots of stuff on my homelab. Everything works well and is simply pleasant. Maybe if you use it heavily for enterprise that changes, but it just hasn't been my experience.
Ah, I was only referring to the things in the OP. I don't know anything about Cloudflare in particular.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#94> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet. It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested…
>It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries? If it's painful, that's not because of cloudflare. You can get past turnstile challenges using tor browser in a VM. You still might be blocked because of policies set by si…
> but that can hardly be blamed on cloudflare
They are installing the gates with configurable locks that the site owners use. They are absolutely to blame.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#95Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off? If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better. Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but…
I disagree with your disagreement. I wrote the post and I am not blaming the innovation. I am blaming the chaos of innovation. Everything feels DISJOINTED. The innovation is useful, the delivery of the innovation is the pitfall here.
Innovation is only linear in hindsight . Pure speculation on my part but once CF made some leaps in a particular area this enabled them to gather more data and shift direction to reach their over all goals by stifling the causes and the innovation that lead them there. New management comes in, requirements change and this is evident to us on the outside as disjointed behaviour. Companies need to make money from the internet for it to exist. Companies also need to behave and refrain from tragedy of the commons for the internet to keep existing as we know it.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries? If it's painful, that's not because of cloudflare. You can get past turnstile challenges using tor browser in a VM. You still might be blocked because of policies set by si…
> but that can hardly be blamed on cloudflare They are installing the gates with configurable locks that the site owners use. They are absolutely to blame.
Should nginx be blamed too, because that also allows site owners to ban tor/VPN users?
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#97> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet. It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested…
>It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries? If it's painful, that's not because of cloudflare. You can get past turnstile challenges using tor browser in a VM. You still might be blocked because of policies set by si…
>in a VM
Are you saying it's possible to detect VMs in the browser without using the WebGL vendor? Mind sharing some resources?
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#98Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off? If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better. Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but…
They have cool tech but they can't do product, like most of big tech. Have you tried wrangler? holy Hire enough product owners and that's what happens. That's why they need to buy startups every once and then, to bring some good bacteria in their messed up corporate gut.
yep, wrangler is a monster, the idea is solid - it's like the gcloud or heroku toolbet - the execution isn't nearly as neat.
Re: Cloudflare's AI Psychosis
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, I wrote the post, I think blaming the org for releasing things that aren't engineered/created with "love" (including docs, examples, long-term planning and a roadmap of improvement that will follow-on), and suitable for production, without labeling them as beta, is in fact detrimental to the status of a company's image.
So where do you stand on AWS that may release more than 25 new services a year?
I wouldnt be surprised if AWS buys Vercel (an AWS wrapper btw) and puts all the "cool new things" under the vercel cli.