You're bombarded with Cloudflare captchas because bots are heavily scraping the websites you're browsing and they are struggling to stay online by putting in place heavy-handed bot-fighting tactics. Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing.
Or CF could just do better caching, which was their original reason for existence.
CF is not magic, they have limits too. What's the point of serving cached copies to bots while real users experience unavailability?
Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. The source is available and it is permissively licensed. If they did something truly onerous, Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium. The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because…
>Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. There's a tightly controlled pool of developers who make up the decision-making body about which commits get approved. That pool is dominated by Google employees so they effectively control whether something gets committed. So it's not open in the sense that would be most people's first impression, which is that anyone can contribute code to the project and see it real…
>You'd have to fork it and maintain a Google sized code base.
As opposed to maintaining an alternate google size code base of a non-chromium browser?
Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/graphs/commit-activity If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards…
> Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example: He published free, open-source software. He's not obligated to work on a particular project forever. This is a particularly strange critique given that he shifted focus away from those projects to focus on other open-sourc…
It would be a bad look if he took the money and quit.
To add to this, Apple’s share of the control is minimal and precarious. A timeline where Google is the sole web engine authority could easily become reality and is even likely. Hedging on a promising upstart makes a lot of sense.
Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. The source is available and it is permissively licensed. If they did something truly onerous, Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium. The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because…
Except they do. One just has to look at the inability to keep JPEG-XL mainlined in Chromium. Sure, some forks still have JPEG-XL, but it's effectively gone at this point.
Or CF could just do better caching, which was their original reason for existence.
CF is not magic, they have limits too. What's the point of serving cached copies to bots while real users experience unavailability?
Unless they're actually dropping the connections with a RST, I wonder how much bots repeatedly hammering at their CAPTCHA pages (which is actually relatively large in comparison to many static sites) costs them, vs. just serving the actual content which could actually be smaller.
As someone who's lived in the bay for a bit over 10 years now, when I first moved here Google was very much that company that you think they were. Now, they are not. Every single friend (and it was >50% when I moved here!) has since left Google in the bay area. There is one left at Google entirely, and they're only remaining due to physical location (near family outside the US). I have watched my friends get brutally…
Hi, can you provide a few examples of 'tiniest bullshit reasons'? Kinda curious as what is considered bullshit there, I'm from the EU with zero experience of anything like S.F.
One was pipped because they were placed on a moonshot, told how amazing their work was, gave internal talks on it, then the moonshot was defunded... so they got pipped over their lack of business impact. Instead of, y'know, being placed on a normal team, like where they came from only a year or so before.
> you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value. I would like to understand where this breaks down. Would a for-profit individual be more reliable? Would a non-profit? At which point does quality deteriorate?
I think Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) are a way to try and solve that problem. I recently switched to Kagi and their Orion browser, and that's when I learned about PBCs. A PBC legally takes a triple mandate, the first is just as any for-profit corp, to maximize shareholder value, the second is to the benefit of the stakeholders, and the last can be anything they write down when they register as a PBC. The Delaware…
> A PBC legally takes a triple mandate
where are you getting this? PBC has no actual legal aspect to it at all - its all self reporting and self adherence. PBC is more marketing/signalling than legal requirements
The hype around Omarchy is just insane.. It is not an installer script (anymore), so instead you have to download a 7GB ISO file (in the name of 'good UX') that ships with Zoom, Spotify, Hey, Basecamp, Steam, Minecraft (??), etc. but you still end up using the same package mirrors (arch's). If it was an install script, like LARBS or many others (before and after omarchy), I'd (almost) get it. If it was a derivative d…
It's YouTube-hype, there is a newfound love for TUIs and DHH, as a very influencial person fell for it as well. I don't think anybody really wants an OS with e.g. Rails pre installed, not even people using Rails. People use specific versions for specific apps. I think Omarchy will be soon forgotten.
I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole. As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.
I recently saw https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/ on the front-page but then I gave up as that's my daily reality with cloudflare and friends already. I use 3 browsers on linux with Thai IP address because at least one of them is always blocked by cloudflare. Especially if I go work on public wifi I often actually have to hotspot myself to 4g to even get stuff to load.
I've started taking more extreme stance these days of ctrl+w instantly and maybe email the admins if I'm particularly angry that I will not buy whatever they're selling because I simply can't be bothered with their spyware blocking me. Maybe some day people will wisen up on the damage cloudflare is doing to their business.