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

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461–470 of 668 posts

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

#461

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…

That still doesn’t explain why you can’t even start typing until that check proceeds. You could condition the outbound request from being processed until that’s the case. But preventing from typing seems like it’s just worse UX and the problem will fail to appear in any metrics you can track because you have no way of measuring “how quickly would the user have submitted their request without all this other stuff in t…

[flagged]

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

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. Thank you for the reply, Nick. It wouldn’t be a problem to disable the tracking for authenticated users then, would it?

It would because someone's KPI depends on number of tracked users lol

If logging in disabled all checks, all bots would just spam-create users first. Of course it needs to run for all users, without it being necessarily nefarious.

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

#464

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…

I really appreciate the free options, without even needing a login. Wish they would also keep the small free weekly allowance for Codex.

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

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things. I bet people being fucking DDOSed by AI bots disagree Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running

Off topic, but why is a DoS something considered to act on, often by just shutting down the service altogether? That results in the same DoS just by the operator than due to congestion. Actually it's worse, because now the requests will never actually be responded rather then after some delay. Why is the default not to just don't do anything?

I think some people use hosting that is paid per request/load, so having crawlers make unwanted requests costs them money.

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

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest issue is that there is no native component support for that. So everyone implements their own and it is both brittle and introduces some issues like: - "ctrl + f" search stops working as expected - the scrollbar has wrong dimensions - sometimes the content might jump (common web issue overall) The reason why we lost it is because web supports wildly different types of layouts, so it is really hard to opti…

Right. This is one of my favorite examples of how badly bloated the web is, and how full of stupid decisions. Virtual scrolling means you're maintaining a window into content, not actually showing full content. Web browsers are perfectly fine showing tens of thousands of lines of text, or rows in a table, so if you need virtual scrolling for less, something already went badly wrong, and the product is likely to be a…

Agreed - I've had this argument with people who've implemented virtual scroll on technical tools and now users can't Ctrl-F around, or get a real sense of where they are in the data. Want to count a particular string? Or eyeball as you scroll to get a feel for the shape of it?

More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).

There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.

Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)

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

#467
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a form of abuse.

Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things. The former relies on fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use to qualify as abuse, whereas the latter is direct financial damage – by your own direct competitors no less. It's fun to poke at a seeming hypocrisy of the big bad, but the similarity…

AI providers also claim to have small marginal costs. The costs of token is supposedly based on pricing in model training, so not that different from eg your server costs being low but the content production costs being high. And in many cases AI companies are direct competitors (artists, musicians etc.)

(TBH it's not clear to me that their marginal costs are low. They seem to pick based on narrative.)

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

#468

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…

It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web. Nick, I understand the practical realities regarding why you'd need to try to tamp down on some bot traffic, but do you see a world where users are not forced to choose between privacy and function…

> It's getting to the point where a user needs at minimum two browsers. One to allow all this horrendous client checking so that crucial services work, and another browser to attempt to prevent tracking users across the web.

Every time I try this, I end up crossing wires (ie using the browser that 'works' for most things, more than the one that is 'broken')

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

#469
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does not, in the seeming absence of other snappy examples and the overwhelming evidence of many, many slow React apps, the exception prove the rule?

There are plenty of snappy examples. Off the top of my head: Discord, Netflix, Signal Desktop, WhatsApp Web.

Discord, maybe. But Netflix and WhatsApp Web? Those are bloated cows, just less broken than average.

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

#470
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a form of abuse.

Scraping static content from a website at near-zero marginal cost to its server, vs scraping an expensive LLM service provided for free, are different things. The former relies on fairly controversial ideas about copyright and fair use to qualify as abuse, whereas the latter is direct financial damage – by your own direct competitors no less. It's fun to poke at a seeming hypocrisy of the big bad, but the similarity…

You’re describing the tragedy of the commons. No single raindrop thinks it’s responsible for the flood.
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