Web developer. Lead developer of PieFed

  • 28 Posts
  • 702 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 4th, 2024

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  • I got an email from a client last week asking me to install an AI-generated list of containers onto a server. The key container, the database at the center of the whole system, has commits from Claude in it’s git repository. Great start guys.

    They outsouced the software architect job to a chatbot and then had a veteran of the industry who has been around since the internet equivalent of the big bang install a handful of docker containers. Reverse centaur to the max.

    It’s going to hurt in 12 months time if they realise the reason why everything sucks is because they built on sand. But they probably won’t even realise why the project failed because their chatbot won’t be able to tell them why.





  • I used fail2ban as an anti-scraper strategy for a few months. It helped with the really basic scrapers that only use one or a few IP addresses.

    But then they adapted and started using hundreds or thousands of different IP addresses, each one only making a couple of requests. fail2ban became counter-productive as it slowed my server down - the log files it was monitoring became massive under high load and it needs to scan the log files often to check if an IP has been seen before.

    I’m not saying don’t try it, I’m saying it’s only effective in some situations.