Cloudflare is the professional wall builder you hire to protect your garden.
Tech monopolies have always had a vested interest in locking up user data, dictating the policies, and enforcing their own ownership rights.
It used to be that only the largest and most sophisticated companies had the resources to shield that data, but Cloudflare changed all that. Walls are now trivial to set up, and virtually unbreachable, and that has forever changed the character of the internet by enforcing monopolistic policies with such technical precision that they're virtually impossible to overcome.
The ‘Internet 3.0’ isn’t coming because of Cloudflare. It’s coming because these monolith big tech companies have an army of engineers who have been centralizing and building it this way for years.
Cloudflare didn’t build these walls, it’s more of a giant boat now navigating it because other companies have no choice.
I like to think of them as giant data ferryman in this regard versus “a wall builder”.
I’m not saying frustrations aren’t warranted but — like come on — have a little perspective of what’s really happening with the Internet and who is actually driving it.
Clearly Cloudflare isn't responsible for the data centralization that is corrupting the internet. They are however, a very sophisticated and efficient enforcer of those policies. They've helped ensure large portions of the web is no longer crawlable, and that serves to consolidate information and power in those tech monopolies.
You already get a lot of defaults from your vendor (OS, device, browser). Why couldn't these vendors maintain a bigger list of default entrypoints for the web? They already do for "apps".
Plus there is already an endless sea of walled stuff (paywall, "create an account and login" wall, "fill in your address/ZIP code and we'll give you the best price" wall, government filtering wall).
I'm not saying it's great, or it would be great, but currently having 1 (or maybe 1-and-half) search engines is also very far from ideal.
Aka, SMB's now have access to the same tools the tech monopolies do.
GDPR-like policies will continue to flood as governments partition their Internets and data making it harder and harder to run international Internet businesses.
I'm not particularly happy about things either (especially crawling access), but it will be a net positive whenever you can level the playing field with competition.
When the biggest infringers of data are driving the creation of government policies that only they can circumvent and navigate -- that's a serious, serious problem.
As I read this I literally had a config file open in another window with references to ua.com. it's owned by UnderArmour and serves endpoints to their Fitness API.
This would have been one of the more interesting answers to the most common support question at my company: "Why wont my runs sync?"
I read about Bitcoin here over a decade ago. Took the time to setup a miner, and let it run for a week. I think I generated a few hundred coins worth less than a dollar total. Figured the electricity cost way more than that and deleted it all.
Fantastic work. This looks immediately useful. I'm often inspecting data structures with D3, but the ability to do this on the server side is a game changer. Can't wait to try it out.
I read a book about Chaser shortly before I got my pup. And I followed much a what I read, naming everything he came in contact with, talking to him using familiar nouns and verbs, not wasting words. At almost 3, he's not Chaser smart, but he has developed an ear that can recognize the most subtle variations in words, and he can figure out novel combinations of nouns/verbs sometimes with a direct obect. For example right after he learned the word window, he could generalize it to any glass that you look out through, and then I could tell him to "take the [object name] to the window" and he would find the nearest window (or glass door) and bring the given object there.
He was way ahead of a human child in terms of linguistic cognition up until maybe the age of about 1 and a half, then he maxed out. Having a dog with the verbal understanding of a toddler comes in handy sometimes...but rarely, mostly I just wish he could learn to walk on leash.
If you want to encourage the smart look into clicker training, particularly free shaping[1]. The most well known books are by Karen Pryor. You can train pretty much anything, and get insanely complex including the things this collie was doing.
For a decent introduction (there's a lot of crap on Youtube) this channel gives pretty good info, introductions, and lots of short videos on how to train all sorts of things: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-qnqaajTk6bfs3UZuue6IQ
Be warned, once it starts to work both dog and owner can find it (very) addictive. :)
Most impressive thing? First time seeing my dog stop and think, puzzle it out, then try something different. This is not mindless training by repetition.
[1] Edit: Free shaping is leaving everything to the dog to work out with human just providing helpful carefully timed nudges when he edges closer to the right thing. Before long the dog will start experimenting and look to you for reactions a lot more. It's magic, fast, and you'll transform your view of how smart your mutt is.
A dog's life is pretty boring. There's a lot of laying around, a lot of waiting to eat and go for a walk. A smart dog needs things to do, and it's work for you to make that happen. Talking, TV, computers, work, the things we fill our time with a dog can't participate in. My dog is in perpetual state of disappointment and mopiness, just waiting for the next interesting, stimulating thing to happen. I could train him for hours on end and he'd never get bored, but laying on the floor watching me sit in front of a computer, he can barely contain his boredom.
We had a trainer once who said the hardest thing for a smart dog to do is to just ignore stimuli. You're putting together furniture, cleaning the closet, setting up a stereo, what's that? where does it go? what does it smell like? Is this a game? Can I help?
Genuinely curious - is there any reason why person would potentially prefer a less smart dog? I always thought that, the smarter they are, the better companions they can be, so your comment got me wondering.
The smarter they are, the more they observe and learn. This means they also learn bad or annoying things and it can be very difficult to then train them out of it. A good example is a border collie I know that accidentally broke a screen door, then suddenly learned that all screens can be opened at will and no window was safe.
Smart breeds also need to be kept busy and entertained or they get anxious and angry. They'll start destroying property or fighting with others. If you don't have the time and energy, it's much better to get a less intelligent and mellow dog instead.
The problem isn't high intelligence per se, it's that high intelligence in dogs also correlates with high energy (this makes sense, most intelligent dogs are sheep herders, like border collies, which were expected to be working most of the day!) and other personality traits that can be less than ideal.
High energy dogs get bored, frustrated, or destructive when not given enough exercise. And a high intelligence just means they're that much more creative in finding ways to amuse themselves (that probably won't amuse you...).
Additionally, part of what makes dogs such amazing companions is their empathy for humans not just intelligence. The current dog of my aunt and uncle is pretty dumb, compared to the previous one. But he loves people, cuddling, and he's super mellow.
He still needs to be walked 3-4 times a day, but not particularly long and he's perfectly happy just chilling and lying next to you all Saturday. That fits much better into less active lives than something high energy that needs to run 10-15 miles a day...
I fostered a very smart dog at one point and came away a bit spooked, honestly. If you were hanging out with someone it didn't trust and said that you were going to the restroom, it would immediately walk into there and wait for you, and it could tell the difference between time concepts like 'soon' and 'later'. We never had any real problems with it, but the sense that it listened, understood, and did not speak back was unsettling.
Dogs differ widely in mentality, behavior, and energy levels. A border collie - for example - requires lots and lots of time and activity. If you haven't got that to offer, both you and your dog are much better off if you pick less demanding breed.
I had a stupid dog (took him months to learn his own name) and now I have a smart dog, and I really miss the dumb one. It was so easy to keep him happy and satisfied and well-adjusted. He loved people and was just happy to lay around all day and then hang out with us when we got home from work. The smart dog requires constant entertainment and interaction to keep him from going insane.
Energy levels are difficult with a smart dog that is less than 3 years old. My border collie has calmed down in the last year, but the first few years she needed 3-5 hours of both mental and physical stimulation daily.
One of the things that was very useful for me was that I got my dog while travelling, and he spent the first couple years of his life in different countries. The whole time I was keenly aware of the difficulties of picking up language, and so I would talk to him like I wanted someone to talk to me in Italian/Spanish/German/Czech...slowly, in simple phrases, using words I know in the present tense.
Just pretend you got picked up by aliens who only communicate via flashing lights. After months you might be able to associate certain light combinations and color are associated with food, with being allowed to use the bathroom, with types of interaction, and if you were really smart you might be able to figure out verbs and simple sentence structure, but those lights need to be flashing slowly and distinctly, and if the aliens start using the same light to mean two different things then you're going to get screwed up.
For another species to grasp our language is an incredible thing, something no human has ever done, you have to keep things incredibly simple and teach them as if you were teaching language, not just saying what comes into your head.
My dog is frequently confused when he eaves drops on conversations and hears some one talk, for instance, about a long drive to the beach last year, and he waits at the door excited to go. And I have to think why is he waiting at the door, does have to pee? why is he so excited?
After leaving NYC I've lived in more than a dozen European cities over the last five years. The one commonality that I've seen is that where ever an area is pedestrianized it just explodes with life. Terraces, shops, children, dogs.
No one wants to be anywhere near a 100km/hr road. It can sometimes be ok to walk next to a 50km/hr road but it's not nice and it's best to avoid it. 30 km/hr you can stroll or sit on a terrace and it's fine. But when it's 20km/hr or just closed everything changes.
When there's no chance your kid is going to get killed by a car, he can just go out and play. Your dog can sit off leash under your table while you eat. You can be absorbed in a conversation and not worry a misstep will result in serious injury or death.
We somehow just accept that the possibility of death or jury is just outside our door. Like live electric wires running down streets. When you take them away, everyone just relaxes a lot more.
This is a small feature change with a big marketing angle. Facebook has been cutting the minimum amount of information shared when you "Connect with Facebook" with each iteration of their API. At launch, Facebook literally shared all of your information and most of your friend's information by default with no way to limit it. Then they pared it back to selective requests with a minimum of name, gender, and email. Then name, gender, and anoynimized email. Then it was name and anoynimized email. And now it is just an token specific to that site and nothing else.
They started by building what site owners and developers want - everything about a user without having to build a complex form and have the user agree to fill it out. And they ended up with what the user wants - to share nothing at all with the site owner and fill out no forms.
My guess is this will be stupidly successful, and good for absolutely no one, but Facebook.
> My guess is this will be stupidly successful, and good for absolutely no one, but Facebook.
Why? I see it being very good for Facebook users. I'm very happy about not giving any data about myself to random websites I want to check out just once. I especially look forward for the amount of spam (er, value-added marketing e-mails) it cuts out of the circulation.
By the scope and polish, it's obvious many hundreds of hours of work have been invested in this library. It's at least as comprehensive as Bootstrap or Foundation, and only a casual review is needed to see that it's a lot easier to use then either. And yet all the comments are about the CSS transform in the header, or a knee jerk snipe about the name of the framework itself.
Lots of examples in there, useful to Inspect. I'm glad this got resubmitted or I might have missed out, it seems extremely comprehensive to prototype with.
I'm an hour through checking it out, and as it already solves problems for me, I'm just going to try to bring it into my work toolset as quickly as possible .. only hiccup was getting through the 'gulp' install, but relatively smooth sailing throughout. (Plus, I just learned about better-console, which is actually now some other thing on my Todo list, but a good one. ;)
As a relative troglodyte on the subject of CSS and web-UI stuff, I have to say that its thrilling to see so many takes on the same ol' thing. A vibrant and thriving scene indeed.
Tech monopolies have always had a vested interest in locking up user data, dictating the policies, and enforcing their own ownership rights. It used to be that only the largest and most sophisticated companies had the resources to shield that data, but Cloudflare changed all that. Walls are now trivial to set up, and virtually unbreachable, and that has forever changed the character of the internet by enforcing monopolistic policies with such technical precision that they're virtually impossible to overcome.