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I feel the pain — it’s very difficult to detect many of the less ethical scrapers. They use residential IP pools, rotate IPs, and provide valid user agents.


And many proxy/scraping providers now use real browsers that can automatically bypass cloudflare captchas as well, and a bot with a real browser similarly won't be clicking on any invisible links, so... I am skeptical just how long this will make an appreciable difference.


So what you’re saying is that a CAPTCHA cannot actually T C and H A.


Telling humans and computers apart was never the purpose of CAPTCHAs, only how they initially worked. The name has been a complete misnomer for at least a decade now. Its actual purpose is, and has always been, abuse prevention. Has it been successful? Some yes, some no, and a lot of collateral damage. Its mode of operation now looks a lot like inscrutable blacklisting for some plus inconvenience and bad rate limiting for the rest.


> was never the purpose of CAPTCHAs,

TCHA of CAPTCHA is literally "tell computer human apart"


You ignored the emphasis and the rest of the sentence. And the rest of the comment.

(Also, the T was nominally Turing rather than telling.)


How does a human abuse a website, and how does a CAPTCHA stop a human from abusing a website when it's designed to let a human in? If it doesn't stop humans from abusing the site, then it must stop... computers from abusing the site. And it stops computers by using the CAPTCHA to tell apart a human and a computer? Am I wrong here?


I can tell you don’t live in a network Cloudflare hates.


I get hit with them all the time. That doesn't answer how does a human abuse a website? Hitting F5 on the keyboard 1000 times?


Abuse isn’t just about inducing CPU or network traffic load (in fact I doubt that was even considered when CAPTCHA was first invented). It’s spam, fraud, that kind of thing. A lot of it is bot-perpetrated, but quite a bit is by humans too.


> residential IP pools

So, is this a new profit center for sleazeball household ISPs?


No, this is done by paying app developers to bundle some random SDK. Search for Bright Data.


"Residential proxy" is just a word for a botnet. Apps and programs come with a trojan built in that offers your device as an exit node to "monetize" their apps.

It "residential proxy" sounds a lot better when you're talking to VC investors, though.


"free" vpns do this.


Not really surprised. I spend a ridiculous amount on time banning bots every week.


doesn't cloudflare have block bot traffic out of the box?


They do but it's largely useless against all but the most unsophisticated of bots.


It blocks the most egregious and give a bot score that you can use to get more aggressive at the next layer. That score seems to miss a lot of bad traffic, making it not very useful in it's current state.


Some of the bots I see use residential proxies, rotate IP address, countries, as well as fire-up a real browser.


I mostly read science fiction and fantasy, and I’ve just started Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It follows a scientist sentenced to a prison camp on a planet teeming with bizarre lifeforms. So far, it hasn’t drawn me in the way Children of Time did, though I’m only about a quarter of the way through.


Oh and also listening to an audiobook - Mythos by Stephen Fry. Liking it so far.


I loved some of his fiction, but haven't got past the first chapter of that book.


For me, rereading just feels like missing out on the excitement of finding something new. A fresh story, a different perspective, an author I haven’t met yet. So I usually skip rereads and pick up something new instead.


do you get sad or somewhat similar feelings when you finish a book or series or whatever? i sometimes get those feelings badly, and im a big fan of rereading/rewatching or whatever.

ive also found that ill sometimes sorta really neglect reading the final portions of a book or stop close to the end of a TV series, not because of disinterest, but because i do not want it to actually end.

im pretty much just wondering if these feelings don't hit you quite as strong and you are more excited by new stories, than you are sad about ending the current story.

of course this is more aimed at fiction or just stories in general rather than something like a self help book or whatever, for those those same types of feelings don't apply at all.


I get that! I usually don’t feel that end-of-story sadness strongly enough to make me reread. For me, jumping into a new world is just too exciting, so the “leaving one behind” feeling doesn’t stick around too long.


Reading has a higher barrier to entry than most media. Doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman—it takes time, focus, and mental energy. And unlike scrolling or streaming, books aren’t always cheap. A new paperback can be $18–$30, and that adds up fast. It’s just harder to get started.


I had the opposite experience with cloud run. Mysterious scale outs/restarts - I had to buy a paid subscription to cloud support to get answers and found none. Moved to self managed VMs. Maybe things have changed now.


Sadly this is still the case. Cloud Run helped us get off the ground. But we've had two outages where Google Enhanced Support could give us no suggestion other than "increase the maximum instances" (not minimum instances). We were doing something like 13 requests/min on this instance at the time. The resource utilization looked just fine. But somehow we had a blip in any containers being available. It even dropped below our min containers. The fix was to manually redeploy the latest revision.

We're now investigating moving to Kubernetes where we will have more control over our destiny. Thankfully a couple people on the team have experience with this.

Something like this never happened with Fargate in the years my previous team had used that.


https://github.com/claceio/clace is project I am building which gives a Cloud Run type deployment experience on your own VMs. For each app, it supports scale down to zero containers (scaling up beyond one is being built).

The authorization and auditing features are designed for internal tools, any app can be deployed otherwise.


Have a look at Knative


Clace is built to run on a single machine without needing Kubernetes. The plan is to add support for Kubernetes hosting later, but running on one or a few machines should not required Kubernetes.

Clace is built for the use case of deploying internal tools, so it comes out of the box with CI/CD, auditing, OAuth etc. With Kubernetes, you need to glue together ArgoCD, an IDP etc to get the same.


Knative is amazing!


Cool. I haven't had time to go through all the examples but I plan to. This will be useful (I recently moved away from ElasticSearch and embedded Lucene in a SpringBoot app directly)


I completely agree. The joy of reading comes from discovering stories that you truly connect with—not from checking off titles on a set list. While some reading lists can be helpful for inspiration, I find the “100 books you must read” type a bit off-putting. They can unintentionally suggest there’s only one right way to be a “good reader,” which just isn’t true.


Is there an API or downloadable catalog of the titles? Happy to feature them on meetnewbooks.com so more readers can find them.


Yes, we have complete feeds available for our Patrons: https://standardebooks.org/feeds


This happened to a team I know. They built a flashy SPA dashboard because it was easy to copy-paste from templates. It worked great—until a real-world requirement, like a data grid, came along.


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