Character.ai being mentioned in the same line is a sign of the times.
The people yearn for the digital anime waifus
If you’re not running your waifu on a local machine she’s just a digital prostitute.
The one downvote on this comment makes it like 20x funnier
When you stop using a search engine and use AI-generated responses for everything, I guess having your LLM backends go down could qualify as having a disruptive functional impact.
A disruption to disfunctional search engines does not sound bad.
Well, the actual headline is:
Massive internet outage: Google services, Cloudflare, Spotify all down, users report
Character.ai is only mentioned in the lengthy list of services that are down.
Massive internet outage reported: Google, Cloudflare, Twitch all down
It even swapped in Twitch when I read it at the time. Headlines be changing.
And when I went there, it said Google, Cloudflare, and Frank’s Dildo Emporium all down, like of all the random sites, why pick FDE?
Oh shit, a fellow FDE-head in the wild… What do you think of the latest Bad Dragons they just got in? I got one for 50% off, and it was only slightly used by Frank.
Ai? Or a catch headline
It’s a joke. I don’t think there’s really a website called Frank’s Dildo Emporium. But if there is, lmk.
You could just google it-
oh wait
What is character.ai? Have I been living under a stone? When I visit the page I have to log in just to learn what it is?
It’s LLMs for ERP
… What’s ERP? Or don’t I want to know?
I put on my robe and wizard hat
Is that a bash reference? Jesus im old
Enterprise resource planning
Erotic resource planning
That’s how I read it too at first- and as bad as ‘erotic role play’ with a LLM chatbot sounds, the other one is so much horribly worse.
Actually RP and by proxy ERP is basically a perfect fit for what LLM are good at.
Good RP is basically nothing but improv and rolling with a functional scenario no matter how weird it gets. Which LLM are fantastic at doing.
You arnt worried about accuracy or memory after all. Just that it can string together coherent English and play pretend with you. Literally the ideal use case for a LLM.
My front-line guess is “Erotic Role Play” but I am not familiar with character.ai
I had guessed the nature of the site and “roleplay.” It is a tad silly on my part to not have guessed “erotic”; thanks for getting me there (and not in an erotic way).
edit: Had left out the word “there.”
Ohh that’s why everything is slow and this is my sanity check.
But its scary how if Cloudflare went down most popular websites will go down with it
Cloudflare is a cancer
tell me more
It blocks anyone not using one of its preferred browsers, among other things. It’s become the gatekeeper for a large fraction of the Internet.
It also flags my DNS filter and nearly every site I go to has to “check if I’m human”
What browsers does it block?
Minority browsers. Since I daily drive Pale Moon, I’m among the people affected. It’s suspected that they test only the 3-4 most popular browsers, and whether anything else works with their code is up to luck.
You may think browsers with tiny market shares aren’t important, but all new browsers start out that way. I fear for Ladybird if it ever makes it past the alpha stage, for instance.
I’m super interested in alternative browsers but never have the time to test them. I always wonder what the Internet would be like if we built it from scratch right now instead of having the legacy of 30 years of development to support.
great article, and I had no idea that happened to Brian Krebs, of all people! o.O
I do think the EFF makes a good point though, and I think personally I tend to be biased towards content neutrality over moderation (at least, more strongly the larger the platform is, and Cloudflare is very large). Not to the point of Xitter, obviously, but I think there’s at least a reasonable argument for Cloudflare in this case.
that said, after some searching, I did find the following two articles, and I find their arguments against Cloudflare very compelling:
- https://www.devever.net/~hl/cloudflare
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/07/14/cloudflare-we-have-a-problem/
Fortunately I’m already using end-to-end SSL certs via Caddy, but now I’m considering just moving off Cloudflare entirely and instead providing regular backups to Internet Archive–most of the stuff I host is entirely static and very lightweight.
Like the bad kind
Most people who dislike cloudflare do so for their centralization of the internet, rightly so.
Me? I HATE THE STUPID “VERIFYING YOUR REQUEST” PROMPTS. THEY TAKE WAYYY TOO LONG AND DONT WORK WITH MY USER AGENT SWITCHER. STUPID WEBSITES WITH 3 MONTHLY USERS ARE TURNING ON ADVANCED “DDOS PROTECTION” JUST TO MAKE EVERY FUNCTION OF THEIR APP TAKE 18 MONTHS
You can try https://github.com/FlareSolverr/FlareSolverr
Interesting, I have a lot less problems with the Cloudflare verification, than with Google captchas. The slightest unusual thing seems to put you in captcha hell
When I get to that screen, I just x out most of the time. It’s usually not that important.
Lemmy is working though. What else do we need?
I think that at least some instances use Cloudflare for various things, so depending upon what and how much stuff at Cloudflare is broken, some lemmy instances may be impacted.
I remember the day I went why are we all selfhosting and still relying on a site like Cloudflare?.
I’m glad I agreed with me on it.
this “me” character is so smart, aren’t they
Oh, he’s the best. Keeps me out of trouble, that one.
I’ve migrated about half of my services off of cloudflare DNS proxy. Guess which half still worked this afternoon. (Self hosting pangolin with CrowdSec as replacement). I wasn’t even using the cloudflare tunnel. Just their proxy for some bot mitigation.
been really enjoying pangolin so far! i got scared and ended up not installing crowdsec.
am i missing out? how hard would that be to add after the fact?
Can’t speak to how difficult it would be to do after the fact. My guess is just adding in the lines in the docker compose. As for CrowdSec, it seems to run in the background and I haven’t looked at it much. I’ve triggered it a few times and locked myself out. So I’ve added my home IP to the whitelist (it’s running on a VPS). It also locked out my uptime Kuma so I whitelisted that too.
still hard. most projects still CDN online instead of packaging into a single application.
it’s one of the most infuriating things about self-hosting. so I made my own self-hosted CDN and have rewrite rules that replace most public cdb domains and reroute them to my own local.
it would be great if I could just have something in the middle that would download once and cache locally on request, but it’s effort that would be taken from my time afk.
By self-hosted you mean you have hardware geographically distributed? Like… boxes at friend’s houses or…?
no, self-hosted meaning it’s all on the local network. it’s just a folder on NAS that has a local DNS route to it.
rewrite rules that rewrite the HTML and replaces “cdn.stuff.com” to “mycdn.local.net”.
so not a true CDN, but a mock.
I use it for DNS and domain hosting, but that’s it, none of their proxying stuff.
Why though? You have other options less detrimental to the internet than using and supporting them…
Domain registration and renewal is at cost, and DNS is free. I’m not sure what’s detrimental to the internet about that…
My paid hosting is elsewhere, so they’re not making any money off me.
For me it’s because it’s free, easy to use, and supported by ddclient.
I used Cloudflare tunneling for a while, then started to have similar thoughts. I’m off Cloudflare now.
This is my workday now
Nowadays they will tell you to work on something else in the meantime.
Your code can compile while you’re in a retro, retrospectively looking back at the action items raised in a previous retro but not assigned any sprint time in the current sprint so you just raised a “what went wrong” about it not being planned and now you have more non-sprint work to do because every problem should be presented with a solution and if you could have that for the next retro they’ll review this retro’s action items and see if you have a proposal for fixing retro action items
This is why I call scrum masters scrumlords.
Thankfully my boss is hands off so I took a walk and then worked on an internal tooling side project that really only I will appreciate.
Scrumlords I love it
You have a good boss!
Quitting my last job for this one might be the best thing I’ve done since I tricked my wife into marrying down.
My mental and physical health has improved a ton.
As someone who hasn’t worked anywhere with a profit-motive in over a decade, I don’t know how you guys do it. Truly…
Yep
The problem was actually caused by Google Google Cloud went down hard on Thursday, and took Cloudflare and some of its customers with it.
I’ve been looking everywhere for somebody to explain it. Like, there are dozens of articles outlining exactly what happened. Which I don’t need because I was there. I know what happened. I just have been wondering why and finally you have provided a link that actually gives me a reason.
So, thank you kind stranger.
I actually enjoy when this happens. All this centralized shit will not end well.
Centralized is control. Control is profit. It’s already not “well”, that’s why we’re here discussing it.
*Laughs in self-hosting services.
I wish I had that luxury with work.
All my personal stuff is 100% unaffected though!
You’re not wrong. The gangly stacks of orchestrated black-box containers at a pubcloud beholden to shareholder whim is going to be a huge factor. Sorry grandma can’t get her pills, but - phew - the number will still go up.
Same. Feeling pretty good about using Anubis instead of Cloudflare for our dinky systems.
At work just about all major services are super slow or down. It’s like cloud strike again.
Oh well I still get paid. But it’s crazy how much centralization affects the world wide web.
It’s like cloud strike again
When The Cloud goes on Strike. Damn it they’re just asking for more power, Scotty! Don’t let those scabs cross the picket line!
Honestly, I didn’t even notice.
Dafuq is a character.ai and why is it in the same list as google and cloudflare? Like yea my local grocery store had some issues should that be on the list too?
An AI chatbot that pretends to be a character and you roleplay with it.
Back in my day, we just told Cleverbot to suck our dicks
Had to include something AI because of the craze, probably picked at random
It is very used actually. There’s a lot of lonely people… :(
(I don’t use it tho, I just yell at the void on Fedi)
c/selfhosted having a field day rn
Yeah, wonder how those cloudflare(d) tunnels werd keeping up.
The answer always seems to be: Cloudflare is fucking up again. This isn’t the first time.
Google Cloud status page:
Thanks I have updated the Google link to this instead of downdector.
Holy shit, goddamn near everything is down, nearly everywhere.
Fucking Tracer Tong ending from Deus Ex, hope somebody has a save file they can reload from soon, otherwise… yeah…
Was trying to order food online and that was apparently affected.
Gotta love having all our eggs in one basket, eh? We learned something from the big ass east coast AWS outage!
