Exactly this. It's like reading the news! It seems perfectly fine until a news article in a domain you have intimate knowledge of, and then you realise how bad/hacked together the news is. AI feels just like that.
But AI can improve, so I'm in the middle with my optimism.
Sure is in NZ at least. RTT to NextDNS is ~30ms for me, RTT to my AdGuardHome is 1ms.
I don't setup a VPN, I setup a public SSL certificate (this requires you to own a domain) on it, listening on port 853. Then doesn't matter if I'm at home or on Mobile/4G/Someone Else's Wifi. I don't need the hassle of an always-on VPN, I just have an always-on AdGuardHome.
The biggest hassle was making sure the world can't hit it (though it's not UDP 53 so it's not an amplification vector anyway) but only local NZ IPs, which I did with GeoFilterig on my router.
That's why i setup a local caching resolver. RTT to NextDNS in Denmark is ~10ms, and RTT to my local caching resolver is 1-2ms, so yes, it's quicker, but my caching resolver is essentially just what my router offers (Unifi), with NextDNS as upstream (DNS over TLS).
"I just have an always-on AdGuardHome"
I've self hosted for 20 years, i honestly can't be bothered anymore. The power consumption of self hosted hardware alone costs more than the equivalent, better, service in the cloud. NextDNS is $18/year, thats 51 kWh at €0.35/kWh. 5W for a year is 43.8 kWh, which is roughly what a Raspberry Pi 3/4 uses, so for just €2.5/year i can have enterprise hardware and massive redundancy with zero operational risk compared to running on a single RPi at home.
Yes, i'm aware you can run better hardware with more services, but that really only makes the problem worse, both in terms of power consumption, but also in terms of TCO with hardware costs, as well as cybersecurity.
For most people, running in the cloud is cheaper than self hosting. If you have less than 5-6TB of data, the cloud will also be cheaper. After that the math starts going in the favor of self hosting, but year for year the amount of data you can store in the cloud cheaper than at home keeps growing. Yes, the cloud prices increase, but so does the price of harddrives and other hardware.
"but only local NZ IPs, which I did with GeoFilterig on my router."
I know geofiltering is usually security by obscurity, but it does keep the worst bots away, and i used to use it as well (when i self hosted). It cut down dramatically on the various "drive by shootings" by random bots constantly pinging various ports.
All good points. I already have a server that runs a whole bunch of other stuff (my router is a VM, my Unifi controller is a VM etc, all on the one box) so a tiny little AdGuardHome process and a port-forward in the router isn't using anymore power/effort.
To you and me, the consumer, the value of an app is "the same" as the old loyalty cards. But the value to the company is huge! How often you open the app (how often are you thinking about their food), how often you accept an offer, what the price of the offer is, what card you used to pay, where were you when you opened the app etc etc.
Going to be fun times when in 10 years time they sell all that information to your health insurance provider for them to go "Holy hell" and jack your insurances prices up 5 times over.
You don't need to use words like "slop", it's pejorative and has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
And the link you use is just different people getting different discount coupons in the app. Companies also mail different coupons to different people based on their purchase history. I can't really find myself getting worked up about different people getting different promotions.
And it's illegal for health insurance to offer customized pricing like that. And the credit card companies already know I eat at McDonald's or wherever else. Using the app isn't adding any new data.
And it's not $0.20 off. It's usually more like $5 off a $15 meal that brings it down to $10. And those numbers add up over the course of a year -- across a few apps, it adds up to hundreds of dollars of savings a year.
This makes no sense to me? I don't understand why a company, even if it is using GPT or Claude as their true backend, is going to leave API calls in Javascript that anyone can find. Sure maybe a couple would, but 73% of those tested?
Surely your browser is going to talk to their webserver, and yup sure it'll then go off and use Claude etc then return the answer to you, but surely they're not all going to just skin an easily-discoverable website over the big models?
I don't believe any of this. Why aren't we questioning the source of how the author is apparently able to figure out some sites are using REDIS etc etc?
It's very confusing in the text of the article, at times it sounds like the author is using heuristic methods (like timings) but at times it sounds like they somehow have access to network traffic from the provider's backend. I could 100% believe that a ton of these companies are making API calls to providers directly from an SPA, but the flow diagrams in the article seem to specifically rule that out as an explanation.
I might allow them more credit if the article wasn't in such an obviously LLM-written style. I've seen a few cases like this, now, where it seems like someone did some very modest technical investigation or even none at all and then prompted an LLM to write a whole article based on it. It comes out like this... a whole lot of bullet points and numbered lists, breathless language about the implications, but on repeated close readings you can't tell what they actually did.
It's unfortunate that, if this author really did collect this data, their choice to have an LLM write the article and in the process obscure the details has completely undermined their credibility.
It makes perfect sense when you consider that the average Javascript developer does not know that business logic can exist outside of React components.
Yea I understand maybe 10-20% of these AI clowns don't know what they're doing, but to suggest they're all making a mistake this silly doesn't stack up IMHO.
Home Adguard Home works regardless of if I'm at home or not, without a VPN. I'm on Android though and I just set the Private DNS setting - I have a domain and point it at that. I dunno if you can do Private DNS on iOS though?
No one I've spoken to is happy with the AI shove. It's great to see people finally really speaking up and saying no. The bubble is getting close to popping.
100% this. I fully disagree with the post - screenshots show context/colour/formatting etc that often doesn't even translate properly if you DO try to paste it into some IM or other "text swapping" application.
Sure, if you want someone to reproduce the text of course you'd send them actual text. But to show a problem, a picture is, as they say, worth 1000 words.
Another reason I compile my own kernels and disable features like this. I also disable loadable kernel modules.
Of course this makes standard support channels... Difficult.
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