1dom

I think the comments in this thread are a little unhinged, and it's making me concerned about the sincerity and knowledge of the average commenter here.

The fact is the post shows no evidence of anything malicious being hidden, only that stuff is being hidden.

There are a few obvious explanations in comments for why they would want to hide this particular stuff in this particular way (e.g. if it's to detect abuse and competition).

I don't see how this is different to using e.g. sentry or google analytics, just with an extra bit of trying to hide. I always assume all tech companies do stuff like this, having worked at many tech companies where I've ended up on both sides of stuff like this. I always assumed the average HN reader had a similar background and would be completely used to this sort of stuff.

Like someone else pointed out, the data gathered is likely covered in the TOS too.

In the grand scheme of privacy invasion and modern tech software doing underhanded things to get data, this feels fairly standard?

I'm generally pro-local LLMs and I don't like Anthropic, and from the headline and comments I was ready to get riled up, until I read the article. If this was some small plucky EU privacy startup, then I feel the outrage would be a bit more justified, but this is a frontier AI lab - I can't have been the only one who knew/assumed this happens, and probably happens in some form with all software from any company valued over a certain amount (incl. MS, Google etc.)

I really think this comment section feels completely unhinged. It feels 99% ideology, politics, hysteria and astroturfing, rather than a reaction to the tech and technicality which is what I come to HN for.

I agree! It might even be an issue on my side, where I'm exposed to AI generated stuff that often that everything starts looking like a trope when it's not.

Either way, I've seen more than enough in this comment section to make me want to avoid bunny for now anyway.

The mismatch between how great Bunny is giving away free DNS, and the actual reality that I can't open an account and get free DNS from them is jarring and verging on dishonest.

Saying stuff is free when it's not in the small print feels like a distinctly American Tech thing to do, which is an odd angle for a company trying to be an EU alternative to cloudflare.

The 1 dollar thing, I think, looks exceptionally bad because it shows that what Bunny says can't be taken at face value.

The fact is we're here because they posted a blog talking about how great they are making DNS free "because a faster internet won’t build itself".

But now I've just learnt from comments on HN that Bunny DNS isn't free.

They've lost my trust before they even had it.

> I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.

That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.

Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.

To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!

Your first sentence is the proof that CORS is a bad solution.

HN is supposed to be full of people who need to know, use and depend on CORS and CSP. We might all just be idiots, but we're the idiots who are supposed to use this tool, and we can't explain it or agree on it.

If a tool can't be used or understood by the primary users, IMO it's by definition a bad tool/solution. It's easy to see why - it's security that depends on a browser, something we're traditionally told never to depend on for security.

I feel the same. Unfortunately, I've had to deal with CORS in a few situations where the request is "we need to get this thing from this server, but we can't change the servers CORS or CSP", which, in technical security speak is "we have this security system in place, we need to circumvent it".

Ultimately, it almost always depends on the server only being accessed via an untampered browser request.

The Zoom exploit was able to happen because CORS and CSP are so easy to get around on the client side, so Zoom did it. Sure, Zoom were bad/lazy/silly for doing it, but I feel we're bad as a community for still having this model.

It's natural to be a bit racist an xenophobic internally. We're all animals at the end of the day who are motivated to protect our in groups and people like us.

The same way as it's natural to have strong feelings of wanting to inflict pain and suffering on someone who's done wrong to us or people we care about.

Choosing not to do these harmful but natural things is called "being civil". Nobody has to be civil, but a civil society is that way because it makes uncomfortable consequences on people who aren't civil.

It is not sensible to be xenophobic and racist in a civil society unless you consider harming others and inviting uncomfortable consequences on yourself as sensible.

But you don't have to pretend. You can choose to be outwardly racist and xenophobic if you want, it just doesn't seem very sensible.

I'll take the bradford example and lazily assume Birmingham is the same.

Bradford Ethnicity (2021 Census)[89] Ethnic group Population % White 333,850 61.6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford#Demography

The difference we're seeing in numbers here is because the centres of cities are historically have a higher number of immigrants.

Fortunately, ONS did a specific report on "Bradford", which is the source for the wikipedia page I cited. The source link was broken on wiki, here it is though:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/censusareachanges/E080...

Which also concludes:

"In the latest census, around 437,800 Bradford residents said they were born in England. This represented 80.1% of the local population."

I chose Bradford because it's locally referred to (pejoratively, not by me) as "Bradistan". But despite that, according to ONS, 30% cite Muslim as their religion, which is more than "no religion" at 28%, but still lower than Christianity, at 34%

I encourage you to go check the sources for your sources, like I should have done (and you forced me to). If you look at this debate with an open mind, I believe you will find the majority of us rightly don't feel represented by the statement "Brits are legitimately fed up with immigration" any more. My bias' are that I'll almost always be pro immigration, within reason, but I completely recognise there have been times over the past 10 years where I've felt that position has been legitimately hard to defend. Now is not one of those times

The real issue is that every single time someone or something suggests immigration is a problem in the UK, it can trivially be reframed as an inequality issue.

To get back to the original topic, I think beneficiaries of inequality - like certain big tech players - are strongly motivated to keep the general public blaming anyone other than them for the problems caused by inequality.

edit: I just understood the census page a bit more, it's a generic report by area. You can put Birmingham in there too. It says basically the same: the overwhelming majority of residents are UK born and Christian or of no religion. Yes this is changing, slowly, like the world and populations change, slowly - not at a new or concerning rate.

I don't think it's a made up idea that immigration is a problem, some people clearly, definitely consider it a problem, and it can cause problems. But it's a problem that's been heavily worked on recently and has had a lot of success in solving in the UK over the past 2 years.

This is why it's completely barmy to suggest the average brit is fed up of immigration now, and I'm not sure why many people pointing that out are being heavily downvoted.

The most likely candidates are places like Bradford and Birmingham, which are still - according to wikipedia - 60%+ white british, that's without even considering british asian or other people born in and native to the UK.

Again, sorry, I can't find any sources to support your facts here, maybe I looked in a different place to you, so perhaps you could share your sources?

As a brit, I can confirm I am not at all fed up with immigration.

Your comment is unnecessary, unsubstantiated, doesn't add anything to the discussion and is just going to cause arguments in its current form.

This repo suggests running a PDS is a good thing because independence from platform changes, network resilience, data sovereignty and portability.

Doing that on cloudflare feels like a bit of a practical and ideological contradiction in places.

Regardless, still interesting/useful repo to learn a bit more about how PDS' work.

I agree, a comparison and distinction is helpful, maybe even necessary. But I felt the author's bias came across a bit too strong in places and was a little distracting. Still interesting stuff though!

Thanks for the fair response, I agree you're being cheeky. Sorry, I'm being lazy not searching here, but have you written anything on if instances of something is a good measure of decentralisation? (FWIW, I feel independently owned/managed instances in the traditional non-mastodon-definition seems like an okay measure of decentralisation.)

I completely agree with the point in your link that relays are different to instances - I love architectures involving dumb-relay or zero-trust type nodes. But I think Relays should still be mentioned in your post, since they're probably the main architectural element which protect PDS instances from the scale issues heavily federated AP instances might face, right? (I only have a high level understanding of ATProto and very little experience with AP, happy to be told I just need to learn more for this to make sense.)

Fair comment, it wasn't my intent to insult - I can completely see how it could come across as a lot more personally and insulting than I intended - sorry Tezza. I hope it's understood my frustration is not at the person or content itself (which I'm sure are both genuinely interesting and decent in the right places!) just the voluminous, qualitative and domain specific nature of the it in response to a request for quantitative stuff.

I hope you were both able to have great days since!

> Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a Mastodon-brained concept, and I wanted something I can link to that explains this clearly.

I feel like you've (perhaps purposefully?) misinterpreted "instances" just to plug ATProto specifically at the expense of ActivityPub (and RSS, a bit). I think you lower yourself by doing this:

1. it forces you to omit and contort the interesting technical truths about ATProto and Activitypub, like Relays and their pros/cons for ATProto and account migrations and pros/cons for ActivityPub

2. it creates unnecessary conflict and criticism and seems unnecessarily divisive for 2 platforms solving problems in such a similar space

It's also just seems a bit silly: why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers?

Sorry if this is overly harsh or I've misunderstood, but it gives me a strong vibe that it was motivated by disdain and frustration towards ActivityPub and ActivityPub users rather than wanting to legitimately inform the world about ActivityPub.

I did enjoy the diagrams and the explainers though! I just felt like the subtle digs and pops at activitypub were an unnecessary distraction.

simonw's pelicans probably wouldn't get posted in response to a request for a more quantitative analysis.

You and others are right though, that there's potentially interesting or enjoyable stuff in there (maybe I should have lead with that?). It's just a large volume of it is not useful in response to a question specifically looking for more quantitative or detailed usage analysis.

This is slop, in the sense that it looks like a lot of useful work and effort, and AI is heavily involved, and it was offered up when the opposite was requested, meaning it's not at all helpful in this context.

I raised this in a harsh, but repeatedly apologetic way. The person then responded telling me to "get my facts straight" and doubled down with more weak, qualitative outputs of LLMs.

I don't assume the person is incompetent because they used LLMs. I use them daily. I'm a firm believer everyone is an idiot, just in a different subject.

The issue here I feel is that LLMs are increasingly leading people think that they're not an idiot in any subject at all, and when real humans question it, they double down with more AI stuff.

I disagree. I wouldn't consider it unhinged. I'm clearly aware of my own frustration. It's also relatively civil, since I was able to temper it with appropriate apologies and acknowledgements. Many other people agree and support the sentiment of what I'm saying.

AI is a powerful tool and very capable of - amongst other things - making something look far more valuable than it actually is, and that is a huge waste of time that costs us all. We all have a responsibility to call this out when we see it.

It looks like you've just implied I'm entitled, unhinged, uncivil and and that I shouldn't have contributed at all, whilst thinking you've elevated yourself above that behaviour by saying "in my opinion" and "one should...". I think that's an unhinged, insulting and uncivil way to express yourself.

I did browse and check the links. This was the first link I went to: https://generative-ai.review/2026/05/vibe-coding-my-way-to-e... as it's the main one on the page, and I saw more qualitative stuff without quantitative stuff.

I just read the extra link you provided which has some more information, thank you. Sorry, but the links confirm my points. You're not giving any quantitative analysis of your use of the different LLMs or your process. Your "sciencey appendix" is all about the domain science of pyramids, nothing to do with how or what you put into the LLMs, or any quantitative analysis of the code put out.

I'm sorry, your response has just proved the point that frustrated me: you've either lost or never had the capability to recognise a decent quantitative assessment of technical software creations.

Your entire site is obssessed and fixated on the impressive looking outputs of LLMs, rather than actual quantitative assessment of the quality of the outputs. This is the killer problem of AI: it looks like it's good, and a lot of the time, things that look good are good. It's very easy to make stuff on a computer that looks good but isn't for various reasons, and I nothing in what you've said here suggests that you fully grasp that. Sorry again to be harsh here, this is just my opinion, and we're probably going to have to agree to disagree.

I enjoyed reading this at the start, the language is very... inspiring. By the end, I was disappointed. I don't disagree with what they're saying, but the opening style and statements made me expect some more specific or groundbreaking conclusions.

The point seems to be that generative AI just generates stuff, and that real discovery requires variation, evaluation and selective retention.

The call to arms seems based on the assumption that people only every talk about generative AI as discovery machines themselves. I think it's pretty widely accepted that's not the case by everyone apart from cliche out-of-touch CEOs.

But the talk makes me realise that generative AI are incredible tools to do the discovery cycle with, and this is what I imagine professionally successful AI users are doing: variation, evaluation and selective retention of their inputs and outputs to generative AI.

[flagged]

You just responded to a comment giving a specific advantage that applies to Rust and a few other languages which doesn't apply to a large amount of other languages (single static binary).

How can you still not see any advantage? Or was the point of your comment to say that you think the only real motivation is self or Rust promotion, suggesting some dishonesty amongst the people you're responding to?

So we agree on what their job is, but you're saying that if their job becomes impossible, they should quit, and I agree.

Do you think the author of the original article should have quit, rather than tried?

> It's not an engineer's job to fix upper management delusions, and engineering is poorly equipped for that in any case.

What is the job of engineering leadership in your mind then, if not to take requirements from the business and convert them into technical solutions which improve things for the business? The requirement here was "AI to improve DX" the outcome was developers lives are worse in many creative and future impacting ways.

I sincerely would love to know if the author or their employer consider what they've done as successful or not.

> When I returned from five months of paternity leave in early 2024, the org needed someone at my level to lead GenAI work in developer experience and I was the available person. It wasn't a bet so much as an opportunity I recognised when it showed up. I took enough time to satisfy myself that this wave was different from previous hype cycles before I committed, but once I did, I had to drop most of the rest of my work on developer experience to make space for it. For a while I was the only engineer at any seniority dedicated to this, and the depth I built up happened by necessity as much as by design.

Followed by....

> Senior engineers in AI-forward orgs are doing more leveraged, more hands-on, more meeting-heavy work simultaneously, with the human-focused parts of the role paying for it. The build cost collapsed, the alignment cost rose, the thinking time disappeared, and the productivity gains got captured by output volume rather than output quality. I

What is the job of a senior/lead engineer if not to take the uninformed hype chasing of the senior business, and deploy it in a way that makes things better?

I can't help but feel this senior engineer is talking far too casually about how - under their watch as senior AI engineer chap - engineers spend more time on throwaway code, have less personal development/1-to-1s, and didn't improve code quality. They haven't even mentioned the added financial token cost.

The only thing standing in the way of greedy hype chasing CEOs and a post apocolyptic wasteland is engineers taking their crazy requests and not making the world worse, and it sounds like the author has failed here. I think it's very positive and frank to share their experience, but I'm surprised they don't seem to see their role in it.

Hi! Thanks for the response. Like I mentioned, I only skimmed, and it sounds like there's more to it than I understand, so I'll take a deeper look and see how it feels in practice.

> Where timing gets interesting is that forge will slow down workflows because the retries mean you don't error right away. Bare runs were failing fast in my experience. But on a per-call basis there's very little overhead.

> I haven't detailed it simply because the order of magnitude of a single LLM call is so much higher than all the overhead put together.

Yeah, that makes sense and seems fair. The sort of delays are almost and inevitability, you're not trying to improve speed, but by improving reliability, it can obviously increase overall throughput.

Having watched the demo video too now, automating retries etc would be helpful for me. It's impressive to see how quick the models run on better hardware, and the performance improvements are impressive, even if the overall run takes longer sometimes because it does more correct things. Thanks again!

I agree accuracy isn't maybe the best word here, I used it as it was used in the original post, mainly a as a catchall for "everything but speed", so fidelity, perplexity, etc.

I also agree that if I spent more time using cloud based LLMs, I would very much find local LLMs less capable and useful. Comparison is the thief of joy though, and I'd rather feel blissfully ignorance towards SOTA LLMs rather than a dependence on them.

Before taking a local focus approach, LLMs increasingly left me feeling a mixture of FOMO, sadness and futility towards the future of software and tech. I assume it's 100% a me problem, but it has it's benefits:)

Yup, confirming what pamcake said, 30b with 3b active.

I have a laptop with a broken screen and an RTX2060 at my disposal. I can run 12b - 14b dense usably, just, although I think 4b - 8b dense models give me the best tradeoff of speed and usefulness.

Larger MOE models with more parameters (20b+) but fewer active (2 - 3b) are sometimes a little bit slower, but are often far more capable.