I just write my own code and then ask AI to find any issues and correct them if I feel it is good advice. What AI is amazing at is writing most of my test cases. Saves me a lot of time.

I've seen tests doing:

a = 1

assert a == 1

// many lines here where a is never used

assert a == 1

Yes AI test cases are awesome until you read what it's doing.

To be fair, many human tests I've read do similar.

Especially when folks are trying to push % based test metrics and have types ( and thus they tests assert types where the types can't really be wrong ).

I use AI to write tests. Many of them the e2e fell into the pointless niche, but I was able to scope my API tests well enough to get very high hit rate.

The value of said API tests aren't unlimited. If I had to hand roll them, I'm not sure I would have written as many, but they test a multitude of 400, 401, 402, 403, and 404s, and the tests themselves have absolutely caught issues such as validator not mounting correctly, or the wrong error status code due to check ordering.

It's good at writing/updating tedious test cases and fixtures when you're directing it more closely. But yes, it's not as great at coming up with what to test in the first place.

I write assert(a==1) right before the line where a is assumed to be 1 (to skip a division by a) even if I know it's 1. Especially if I know it's 1!

The assertion here is not about implementation logic. GP presumably has in mind unit tests, specifically in a framework where the test logic is implemented with such assertions. (For the Python ecosystem, pytest is pretty much standard, and works that way.)

Don't use AI for that, it doesn't know what your real data looks like.

Majority of data in typical message-passing plumbing code are a combination of opaque IDs, nominal strings, few enums, and floats. It's mostly OK for these cases, I have found. Esp. in typed languages.

lol. okay. neither do you.

Even if someone starts a meeting early, I still don't join until the start time out of spite.

> Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago

Maybe in the US, but not overall.

I haven't got to 10m yet, but I saved 70-80% of my take home pay since ~2008 and I have enough to quit at any time and live the rest of my life without working. That is just by investing in the 3-fund portfolio and without the crazy SF salaries.

No one knows you here. Give some real numbers. How much are you paying for housing? What’s your gross pay?

Numbers don't matter. If you can save 80% of your paycheck for 15-20 years and you invest it wisely, you are FI on the 4% rule.

So exactly how do you save 80% off of $175K and live off of $30K a year? Especially considering everything above your 401K max is post tax?

That’s only twice the minimum wage and even in Atlanta they are offering cashiers at McDonalds more than that.

Before Covid, I lived on about 25K a year since I had a paid off condo then. Now, I am renting and live on around 36K a year. I realize my situation doesn't work for everyone. Some people cannot fathom not buying a new phone and computer every year and a new car every 3 years.

Also, now, I am fully working from home so that helps with saving on gas and not eating out as much. I make my coffee every morning instead of Starbucks on the way to work and I make my own lunch and dinner 95% of the time.

We aren’t talking about buying a new phone. We are talking about buying a place to live and food to eat.

What is the average rent where you live for a one bedroom? What is the tech hiring seen like?

Do you have kids?

No kids, rent is $1800 a month for a 1 bedroom. I could rent the same for cheaper but I like this place. I'm in Washington State, Software Devs make decent money where I am but not SF wages. I make good money but nowhere near the top. I have an easy job, WFH and rarely work over 40 a week.

Being FI helped me out greatly in December 2020 when My company laid off half of my team and expected me to take on double the load, including lots of extra after hours on-call support. I had a pretty great time not working for ~3 years during Covid. However, I am back to work after an old friend and boss offered me a WFH job that I couldn't refuse. He has since retired so I will stick around until current management pisses me off again, they downsize me or I just get sick of logging into teams/outlook at 7AM every morning.

I wish I would have done what you did. Especially since I wanted 128GB. Now I am probably going to settle for 64GB or maybe 96GB.

The better play would've been to buy Bay Area real estate in the 1970s, but what're you gonna do? lights cigarette

I've only played with CachyOS in a VM but I plan on installing it on my next computer build.

You could always pre-hash the password with sha256 or something similar to guarantee you won't go over the 72 byte limit.

I don't understand why this isn't a mandatory first step in the bcrypt algorithm itself. Who thought that a 72 byte limit was a good idea?

I am not well versed in this problem but can't the web servers rate limit by known IP addresses of these crawler/scrapers?

Not the exact same problem, but a few months ago, I tried to block youtube traffic from my home (I was writing a parental app for my child) by IP. After a few hours of trying to collect IPs, I gave up, realizing that YouTube was dynamically load-balanced across millions of IPs, some of which also served traffic from other Google services I didn't want to block.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same with LLMs. Millions of workers allocated dynamically on AWS, with varying IPs.

In my specific case, as I was dealing with browser-initiated traffic, I wrote a Firefox add-on instead. No such shortcut for web servers, though.

Yoric, dropping some knowledge vis a vis the downstream regarding DNS:

* https://www.dnsrpz.info/

* https://github.com/m3047/rear_view_rpz

Thanks!

Why not have local DNS at your router and do a block there? It can even be per-client with adguardhome

I did that, but my router doesn't offer a documented API (or even a ssh access) that I can use to reprogram DNS blocks dynamically. I wanted to stop YouTube only during homework hours, so enabling/disabling it a few times per day quickly became tiresome.

Your router almost certainly lets you assign a DNS instead of using whatever your ISP sends down so you set it to an internal device running your DNS.

Your DNS mostly passes lookup requests but during homework time, when there's a request for the ip for "www.youtube.com" it returns the ip of your choice instead of the actual one. The domain's TTL is 5 minutes.

Or don't, technical solutions to social problems are of limited value.

Any solution based on this sounds monstruously more complicated than my browser addon.

And technical bandaids to hyperactivity, however imperfect, are damn useful.

I think dnsmasq plus a cron on a server of your choice will do this pretty easily. With an LLM you could set this up in less than 15 minutes if you already have a server somewhere (even one in the home).

Thanks for the tip.

In this case, I don't have a server I can conveniently use as DNS. Plus I wanted to also control the launching of some binaries, so that would considerably complicate the architecture.

Maybe next time :)

Makes sense! Keeping your home tech simple definitely a recipe for a happier life when you have kids haha

A browser add-on wouldn't do the job. The use case was a parent controlling a child's behavior, not someone controlling their own.

Yes, my kid has ADHD. The browser add-on does the job at slowing down the impulse of going to YouTube (and a few online gaming sites) during homework hours.

I've deployed the same one for me, but setup for Reddit during work hours.

Both of us know how to get around the add-on. It's not particularly hard. But since Firefox is the primary browser for both of us, it does the trick.

For those that don't want to build their own addon, Cold turkey Blocker works quite well. It supports multiple browsers and can block apps too.

I'm not affiliated with them, but it has helped me when I really need to focus.

https://getcoldturkey.com/

They rely on residential proxies powered by botnets — often built by compromising IoT devices (see: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/10/aisuru-botnet-shifts-fro... ). In other words, many AI startups — along with the corporations and VC funds backing them — are indirectly financing criminal botnets.

You cannot block LLM crawlers by IP address, because some of them use residential proxies. Source: 1) a friend admins a slightly popular site and has decent bot detection heuristics, 2) just Google “residential proxy LLM”, they are not exactly hiding. Strip-mining original intellectual property for commercial usage is big business.

How does this work? Why would people let randos use their home internet connections? I googled it but the companies selling these services are not exactly forthcoming on how they obtained their "millions of residential IP addresses".

Are these botnets? Are AI companies mass-funding criminal malware companies?

>Are these botnets? Are AI companies mass-funding criminal malware companies?

Without a doubt some of them are botnets. AI companies got their initial foothold by violating copyright en masse with pirated textbook dumps for training data, and whatnot. Why should they suddenly develop scruples now?

It used to be Hola VPN which would let you use someone else’s connection and in the same way someone could use yours which was communicated transparently, that same hola client would also route business users. Im sure many other free VPN clients do the same thing nowadays.

I have seen it claimed that's a way of monetizing free phone apps. Just bundle a proxy and get paid for that.

A recent HN thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746156

so user either has a malware proxy running requests without being noticed or voluntarily signed up as a proxy to make extra $ off their home connection. Either way I dont care if their IP is blocked. Only problem is if users behind CGNAT get their IP blocked then legitimate users may later be blocked.

edit: ah yes another person above mentioned VPN's thats a good possibility, also another vector is users on mobile can sell their extra data that they dont use to 3rd parties. probably many more ways to acquire endpoints.

“Known IP addresses” to me implies an infrequently changing list of large datacenter ranges. Maintaining a dynamic list (along with any metadata required for throttling purposes) of individual IPs is a different undertaking with higher level of effort.

Of course, if you don’t care about affecting genuine users then it is much simpler. One could say it’s collateral damage and show a message suggesting to boycott companies and/or business practices that prompted these measures.

Large cloud providers could offer that solution but then, crawlers can also change cycle IPs