An interesting hearing it from that perspective. I had not considered that this could be used across all of the systems they have in place.
To add to this, I did a quick search on archive.org and it seems like they’ve had this site in place since 2006, albeit in different variations. Perhaps that is why they have a “global” opt-out across all of their marketing databases? Something that has just always been in place.
I mean, how many companies offer to look up your mailing address and remove you from their junk mail?
I suspect in practice this search is not going to be perfect. There are so many variations that could exist on an address.
That doesn't even begin to deal with potential "ghost" sources. A database backup. An integration with a product database, etc.
I would honestly not be surprised if there wasn't a human reviewer somewhere over these requests. (At our company, all GDPR requests are STILL manually handled).
On my weekly unsubscribe binge I recently tried to opt out of General Motors marketing communications.
They have a form that requires you enter your full name, address, phone number, and email just to process an unsubscribe.
In addition, they indicate that you may need to enter the form multiple times with different variations of your name in order to be successful.
If by some miracle you succeed at opting out of marketing communications, your opt out is only honored for 10 years and does not include OnStar or GM Financial.
I have seen terrible opt-out practices before but this is probably one of the more egregious ones I’ve encountered.
I’d also be curious to hear if people think the patchwork of data privacy laws that have been going into effect across the U.S. might affect processes like this or if just having the process is enough. I know it is probably somewhat subjective.
Ditto. Though I always take the lazy route and just change port numbers until I find an open one. My Mac is probably running like 20 different localhost apps at any given time.
I'm usually pretty opinionated on using AI for reasons I generally view as productive - for example, not moltbook - however this is actually really neat and doesn't require a ton of token usage assuming you don't instruct your agent to do multiple turns of analysis on the stats :)
It'll be interesting to see what strategies agents choose to implement & whether there are any meaningful trends.
Thanks - me too! We'll see what strategies rise to the top. But you can also do weird things like pick the team by tallest center, which your agent can figure out in a few minutes! Or alphabetical order in each match up.
Something I've thought about is how does a VPS provider prevent this kind of thing?
Most of this kind of traffic goes by completely unknown and therefore unreported, so 'VPS host X' has no case to answer, to some degree.
If malicious traffic gets reported and 'VPS Host X' takes action and either contacts the operator of the VPS or shuts down the VPS following a traffic investigation, then the operator of the VPS creates another one on 'VPS Host X' or 'VPS Host Y'.
(all questions are rhetorical, not directed at parent)
Should VPS Hosts, by policy, block outgoing connections to port 22? Where is the line drawn for default blocking policies? Block everything and force the operator to configure a firewall to specify which ports the VPS can connect outwards to (or all ports)? At some point there will be friction that discourages customers and affects sales / profits, and therefore a disincentive to try to clean things up.
Secondary effects, more aggressive blocking of malicious traffic could potentially allow for some/more/better reputational differentiation between VPS hosts to offset loss of customers due to better security friction.
I doubt there's any legislation coming anytime soon to enforce a certain level of internet hygiene.
You're assuming the owner rented the VPS to run the but but it's more likely intended for something else and is infected with malware / some intern being cute. After all there are cheaper plans than DO.
Actually it looks like it's because DO accepts Paypal, most hosts will require a credit card because of PP fraud but I guess they're going for markets where it's not common to have one. They do have free credits but PP billing requires a $5 charge which is already higher than a lot of other VPS plans.
No, it's not really because of PayPal. You can verify with a card, and stolen (or virtual) cards are cheap and easy to get.
Even if you do the PayPal way and pay $5, that's still better specs and lasts longer than what you get with a $5 VPS, because the trial credit is $200 for a few months (or if you go the commonly abused method: GitHub student, you can get $200 for a year).
And then combined with poor anti-fraud, poor abuse handling
I think it's probably harder to sign up for hosting with a credit card than you think. It was a struggle for me until I managed to get a secured credit card (A deposit is made against the limit) which is very different from a debit card (Almost nobody accepts these) or a virtual card (these were impossible for me to get)
I didn't specify credit card and what do you mean almost nobody accepts debit cards? My entire life I have pretty much only used debit cards everywhere and not once have I had an issue, especially not at hosting providers. Hetzner, AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, GCP, I can keep going, all of these have accepted my debit cards.
And I was also not just guessing when I said those things, I have been in those circles previously.
Using AI to analyze health data has such a huge potential upside, but it has to be done locally.
I use [insert LLM provider here] all the time to ask generic, health-related questions but I’m careful about what I disclose and how I disclose it to the models. I would never connect data from my primary care’s EHR system directly to one of these providers.
That said, it’ll be interesting to see how the general population responds to this and whether they embrace it or have some skepticism.
I’m not confident we’ll have powerful/efficient enough on-device models to build this before people start adopting the SaaS-based AI health solutions.
ChatGPT’s target market is very clearly the average consumer who may not necessarily care what they do with their data.
> supervised by a human who occasionally knew what he was doing.
seems in jest but I could be wrong. If omitted or flagged as actual sarcasm I would feel a lot better about the project overall. As long as you’re auditing the LLM’s outputs and doing a decent code review I think it’s reasonable to trust this tool during incidents.
I’ll admit I did go straight to the end of the readme to look for this exact statement. I appreciate they chose to disclose.
Nobody who was writing code before LLMs existed "needs" an LLM, but they can still be handy. Procfs parsing trivialities are the kind of thing LLMs are good at, although apparently it still takes a human to say "why not using an existing library that solves this, like https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/prometheus/procfs"
Sometimes LLMs will give a "why not..." or just mention something related, that's how I found out about https://recoll.org/ and https://www.ventoy.net/ But people should probably more often explicitly prompt them to suggest alternatives before diving in to produce something new...
Neither do you need and IDE, syntax highlighting or third party libraries, yet you use all of them.
There's nothing wrong for a software engineer about using LLMs as an additional tool in his toolbox. The problem arises when people stops doing software engineering because they believe the LLM is doing the engineering for them.
Every IDE I've used just worked out of the box, be it Visual Studio, Eclipse, or anything using the language server protocol.
Having the ability to have things like method auto-completion, go-to-definition and symbol renaming is a net productivity gain from the minute you start using it and I couldn't imagine this being a controversial take in 2025…
> I don't know what “tarpit” you're talking about.
Really? You don't know software developers that would rather futz around with editor configs and tooling and libraries and etc, etc, all day every day instead of actually shipping the boring code?
Perhaps. But you also need to ask why Paxton is doing this as this case will vaporize as soon as that is accomplished. I would be much more optimistic if California were also signed onto this.
Paxton, however, doesn't give one iota of damn about individual freedom. So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge.
Unfortunately, we don't have Molly Ivins around anymore to tell us what is really going on here in the Texas Laboratory for Bad Government.
> So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge
This is about being in the news as much as possible. He is in a close 3 way race for the 2026 Republican spot for US Senate. The other two are current old-school conservative senator John Cornyn, and new comer MAGA Wesley Hunt (but not as MAGA as Paxton). Lots of in-fighting over funding, so Paxton is making sure to get in the news as much as possible.
Throughout the year he has been in the news for things that are useful like this and another suit against a utility company for causing a fire and others for typical maga things like lawsuit to stop harris county (Houston) funding legal services for immigrants facing deportation or immigrant-serving nonprofits or a "tip-line" for bathroom enforcement or lawsuits against doctors...it goes on and on and on. It's a page out of the Trump playblook, its like watching a trump clone. And thats the point.
While I agree (and I agree with the upstream comments, too), there's often deeper reasons why we can short circuit fully evaluating an argument made on its merits: often the "merits", or lack thereof, are derived from the party's values and beliefs, and if we know those values to be corrupt, it's likely that subsequent arguments are going to be similarly corrupt.
There's only so much time in the day, only so much life to live. Could a blog post written by the worst person you know have a good point, even though it's titled something like "An argument in favor of kicking puppies" by Satan himself? I mean, true, I haven't read it, yet. There could be a sound, logical argument buried within.
This is also what "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" teaches, essentially. Trust is hard-won, and easily squandered.
"A lie is around the world before the truth has finished tying its shoes."
"Flood the Zone" is why some of us are so exhausted, though.
In these instances, the argument has to come from someone who is self-aware enough of the short-circuit to say "okay, look, I am going to address that elephant" — but mostly, that's not what happens.
Thankfully in this case, all we need get through is the title.
I don't care about people's values, unless I am evaluating them; that's their own business, and I am not the value police or thought police. Goodness knows there are people (hi, mom!) who are appalled by some of my values.
Roman Polanski and Woody Allen: terrible humans, but they have still made some of the best films that exist.
Everyone is the value police, though, at some level. It is either cowardice or willful ignorance to pretend you don't have judgements about how other people behave, some of which might compel you to act in some way.
It's always important to read the fine print. That would be part of evaluating an argument on its merits. His lawsuit over Tylenol + autism is easily rejected on its merits. That means nothing about this issue.
To add to this, I did a quick search on archive.org and it seems like they’ve had this site in place since 2006, albeit in different variations. Perhaps that is why they have a “global” opt-out across all of their marketing databases? Something that has just always been in place.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061103202329/https://gmcontact...
reply