Great article. It should be noted that your web browser allows websites to do this with javascript.
Also, since this tracking isn't really trying to hide, people have compiled lists of the dns names of the destinations of these requests.
If you host a DNS server and you take that list and return NULL for everyone on the list. Then clients on your network who have ad tracking software will try to look up the destination to send your data and your DNS will tell them that there is nowhere to send the data and so the data isn't delivered. So, all of the smart TVs, game consoles, refrigerators, toasters and doorknobs which automatically send data but you cannot configure will fail because they use DNS also.
This sounds complicated to do, but I'm just describing Pi-hole (https://pi-hole.net/). It only takes a few minutes to setup the container and change your router's DHCP configuration in order to give out the address of the Pi-hole DNS server.
Assuming you're on Linux, which you are because you're a reader of a c/Privacy... right?
Until Trump let Elon erase decades of soft power gains with his trashy chainsaw and then imposed unilateral tariffs on our trading partners and threatening to invade allies.
Every EU country has taken initiative to move away from the US, ignoring banking sanctions and fining American tech companies for violation of EU laws are not unlikely.
They're overestimating the costs. 4x H100 and 512GB DDR4 will run the full DeepSeek-R1 model, that's about $100k of GPU and $7k of RAM. It's not something you're going to have in your homelab (for a few years at least) but it's well within the budget of a hobbyist group or moderately sized local business.
Since it's an open weights model, people have created quantized versions of the model. The resulting models can have much less parameters and that makes their RAM requirements a lot lower.
You can run quantized versions of DeepSeek-R1 locally. I'm running deepseek-r1-0528-qwen3-8b on a machine with an NVIDIA 3080 12GB and 64GB RAM. Unless you pay for an AI service and are using their flagship models, it's pretty indistinguishable from the full model.
If you're coding or doing other tasks that push AI it'll stumble more often, but for a 'ChatGPT' style interaction you couldn't tell the difference between it and ChatGPT.
Yeah, I used it until they rolled it into the business accounts (which I upgraded to in order to dodge data caps and have a symmetrical connection, because bittorrent).
It's because, historically, humanity as a whole is a bunch of subtle and devious con artists wearing different hats and masks. Naturally, anything trained on the output of such a species would adopt its traits.
But the equivalent would be to take tutorials, examples and small open source projects and tinkering with them, rather than asking a machine to do it for you, no? I
I've found that using LLMs to research/summarize eases the friction of entering a new hobby and having to learn the tools, techniques, vocabulary, etc. You can just use Google (As an aside, nobody worries about how dependent we are on search) but the answer may not be in a answered in a way that is understandable to you or that fits into the context that you're working with.
I'm going to RTFM eventually, but right now I need to figure out what the hell 'Hello World' means, who is World? Where do I type this text? What does compile mean?
Of course, none of this changes anything about the fact that it requires actual mental effort and problem solving in order to learn. LLM agents provide a new tool for people to use to avoid making that effort which can injure their own education, I can agree there. However, if deployed intelligently, they're a useful tool/tutor if you can't afford a, fairly incompetent, human expert in every field to be on call 24/7.
Using LLMs as a semi-incompetent tutor is a good use. They know the basics well enough to explain it to you and have an idea of how to do the more complex stuff.... but if you actually needed the thing done, you'd hire a professional.
On top of that, hypersensitivity, projection, victim-role adoption, blame pre-loading.
While these are effective rhetorical tools for manipulating people, this isn't how reasonable people engage in conversation.
If you're not a bot then you're a narcissist or have picked up narcissistic behaviors from reading social media arguments and should, as the kids say, touch grass.
I’m not sure about Cloudflare but it might be as well.
Cloudflare was a chain of unfortunate events.
The TLDR is, a permission change caused a poorly written SQL query (without a properly filtering 'where' clause) to return a lot more data than normal. That data is used by an automated script to generate configuration files for the proxy services, because of the large return the configuration files were larger than normal (roughly 2x the size).
The service that uses these configuration files has pre-allocated memory to hold the configuration files and the larger config file exceeded that size. This case, of having a file too large for the memory space, was improperly handled (ironically but not literally ironically, it was written in Rust) resulting in a thread panic which terminated the service and resulted in the 5xx errors.
So, it's more similar to the Crowdstrike crash (bad config file and poor error handling in a critical component).
Great article. It should be noted that your web browser allows websites to do this with javascript.
Also, since this tracking isn't really trying to hide, people have compiled lists of the dns names of the destinations of these requests.
If you host a DNS server and you take that list and return NULL for everyone on the list. Then clients on your network who have ad tracking software will try to look up the destination to send your data and your DNS will tell them that there is nowhere to send the data and so the data isn't delivered. So, all of the smart TVs, game consoles, refrigerators, toasters and doorknobs which automatically send data but you cannot configure will fail because they use DNS also.
This sounds complicated to do, but I'm just describing Pi-hole (https://pi-hole.net/). It only takes a few minutes to setup the container and change your router's DHCP configuration in order to give out the address of the Pi-hole DNS server.
Assuming you're on Linux, which you are because you're a reader of a c/Privacy... right?