I think Excel is a good example that everyone can build a clear mental model on how to use it, but implementing one is a daunting task.

Pretty much anything. I mean, even consider a text editor, monospace font, no syntax highlighting. It's already pretty daunting. Doable, certainly, but a big task. We're lucky people already made some, and we can copy their designs even when we choose not to copy their exact code.

Now consider Microsoft Word.

Are you nuts?

Excel is great, but it's an arcane beast rivaled only by Emacs configs. People pass down Excel formulas by word of mouth like they're magic spells.

Yes, I was thinking about it being an insanely low-code programmable machine, hidden in the seemingly limited 2D grid of cells.

That is already the case for most neural networks and LLMs.

Except there's 10 trillion gears

Hope the author finds CodeMirror 6 to be a solid foundation. It uses the same contenteditable-based approach but abstracts away all the browser-specific edge cases and quirks for you.

It's an amazing project but I always found the docs lacking. Maybe you'd have to sit down with the code for a while or ask AI to explain it, but there were concepts, like "facets", that seemed crucial but were never really explained. I also found the way the docs sites were structured to be really frustrating and confusing - it always felt like there were pages missing and I was never sure if I was on the right page for the thing I was trying to read about (or even on the right site, as it's split into multiple projects).

It takes a bit of time to get used to the abstractions, but I think it is worthwhile. To make a minimal working text editor you will only need a little surface of API (covered in the system guide [0]), but to do this by yourself you need to know a lot about browsers' internal working and their undocumented quirks, which is much more overwhelming. (you can glance over `@codemirror/view`'s commit history to see what I mean)

[0]: https://codemirror.net/docs/guide/

I do not think the metaphor can go very far. Have blindfolded chess become the "productivity trend" that every one should learn it to enjoy chess? Have normal chess players been replaced because skilled players can do blindfolded?

Compared to original sokoban game, the player's final position does not matter, and the number of boxes is strictly equal to the number of goal marks.

That's by design. This is a variant originally from an AI class I took

I wrote and shared uBlock Origin filters for Facebook, shared on Reddit and up to a week later they changed the DOM structure bypassed the filters. After some attempts I no longer publish the filters.

Could you publish it with a license saying it shall not be used by any Facebook employee or something?

It is like prohibiting LLM consumption by putting a small reminder -- never works if done without using weird tricks (like mentioning nuclear weapon) also if they are forging new DOM structure they are NOT using the filter itself

Maybe a better approach is to convert the page to an image, run OCR over it, use an LLM to remove the ads, present the result to the user.

How would you comment or watch a video if you did that?

You can still do that.

The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).

I don’t see how presenting an image would allow you to interact with the page, especially if all you are doing is modify the image you’re presenting, not the page itself.

Think of it as looking at your screen through AR goggles, where the goggles modify the image before it reaches your eyes.

Everything happens at the image level so there's no way Meta can obfuscate the DOM to make ads pass through.

So the ads are still served, just… hidden. Self-defeating, no?

Are you saying you would get the image, detect the ad in the image, then regenerate the HTML without the ad based on where it was located in the image?

You don’t need to regenerate, insert a DOM element to obscure it.

That sounds like an upside.

> And yes, my site gets its data by scraping those public documents. So I'm a scraper writing a blog post complaining about scrapers. I'm aware of how that sounds.

There's a difference between someone running a scraping tool occasionally and bots constantly and rapidly re-scraping the same site over and over again

The author's website is responsible for storing its own data. AI services currently treat the entire web as their storage and cache layer.

This is an important context: the site is more likely to be targeted by scrapers because it is a curated collection of scraped information.

Do the bots care? Seemingly very little intelligence in many of them. Could be as simple as the site has more pages, so more traffic.

Loot first, ask questions later.

A curated collection of people who give away money. Was ever sweeter honey ever found in a pot?

Similar to the dose making the poison - the thing that jumped out at me in this blog was the ratio of scraping to visits. Unless OP is scraping thousands of times a day I don't really think they're in the same class as the bots they are blocking.

OP here: I'm not scraping thousands of times per day! Usually just a few times per year.

Live by the scraper, die by the scraper

I pondered for a while, it IS the company I used to know

> LLMs are as good as almost any security researcher, and anyone can run them.

I wonder what the metrics are. Also, not "anyone", just the affordable.

I doubt the benefit. Practically every Electron app on a desktop uses different versions of Chromium and many are very out of date because of the risk of breaking when upgrading.

People build web apps for an array of browsers and huge ranges of versions. I think if you started using some tech to deploy an end user program and knew from the beginning the browser could be updated beneath you it would work just fine. But if you start with a golden version of Chrome and put off updating for too long you’ve let yourself get too comfortable.

> People build web apps for an array of browsers and huge ranges of versions.

en masse they don't. They just target the latest Chrome

De facto they do because functionality built three years ago and tested then is running along side functionality they built yesterday and tested on today’s Chrome.

People also do seem to test on iOS Safari because that pain in my ass needs special care on my software. So if a site works on it they either got lucky or tested on an iPhone. It’s generally only other people’s weird tech demo stuff that doesn’t work.

I agree and disagree, you can't target everything, but most (not shit) devs will target at least Safari - 1 or 2, simply because the iPhone market is too good to miss out on. And Safari being, well, Safari, means targeting that is a pretty safe bet for anything else.

Depends on the region, no one where I work has an iPhone or a current Mac, so stuff gets tested on FF and Chrome, and Safari gets thoughts and prayers. We would test on Safari if it were simple, but alas.

Skipping testing on 15% of all devices to save $600? Sounds like a poor business decision.

15% of devices is not 15% of users. From my own experience having a web app that is 99% desktop windows users, why would I care about safari?

Maybe for your app, it doesn’t make sense. And if it’s a pure enterprise app, fair enough (assuming it’s an enterprise that was started more than 15 years ago and only targets regulated or very specific markets). But a good way to guarantee that your app will never go beyond Windows desktop users is to ignore the most dominant mobile platform by users who actually pay for software.

Well, if your app doesn't run on Safari, you're not going to have any users on Safari.

My logs tell me what they try to use. It’s not safari. Also they are paying users and would tell me if it didn’t work on their browser. The demographic I target is 99%+ Windows users.

We are a very small company, and have always had far more Firefox than Safari users. And though they get by via dominance, IE style bundling of the browser to the OS is toxic, so good riddance.

I target IE6 and it just works everywhere

You could, but by targeting a specific Electron app the mindset would be much simpler. Just take a look of how many times does the dev behind VS Code decide to upgrade their Electron/Node.js version, and how many breakages due to them.

It is all about unknown unknowns.