Why do you expect web search tool calls to continue to be useful in the presence of modern AI slop farms, AI-assisted SEO, and search engines largely turning themselves into AI-based question-answering engines?
(At present, Gemini's question-answering capability (which Google kind of makes its users use) seems extremely error-prone -- much worse than competing LLMs when asked the same question.)
I agree with you, this is a huge concern, and we are still in an age where most content on the internet isn't ai generated yet. What about 10 years from now? We have many instances of people writing posts on reddit or uploading videos and blogs using AI generated text. What happens when that is a significant percentage of content?
I recently saw a video discussing a researcher who published a fake scientific article about a fictitious disease, with bogus author names, even a warning IN the article itself that stated "This is not a real disease, this article is not real" (paraphrasing) but still AI ended up picking up this article and serving information from it as if it was a real disease.
It even got cited in papers (which were later redacted of course), but the fact those papers got published in the first place is a serious issue.
> I recently saw a video discussing a researcher who published a fake scientific article about a fictitious disease, with bogus author names, even a warning IN the article itself that stated "This is not a real disease, this article is not real" (paraphrasing) but still AI ended up picking up this article and serving information from it as if it was a real disease.
Isn’t a lot of pretraining done by chopping sources up into short-context-window-sized pieces and then shoving them into the SGD process? The AI-in-training could be entirely incapable of correlating the beginning with the end of the article in its development of its supposed knowledge base.
> Tell us your hopes and dreams for a Cloudflare-wide CLI
No long lived tokens, or at least a very straightforward configuration to avoid them.
One option: an easy tool to make narrowly scoped, very short lived tokens, in a file, and maybe even a way to live-update the file (so you can bind mount it).
Another option: a proxy mode that can narrow the scope. So I set it up on a host, then if I want to give a container access to one domain or one bucket or whatever, I ask the host CLI to become a proxy that gives the relevant subset of its permissions to the proxied client, and I connect the container to it.
I like how GitLab does this, with an SSH server that implements only a few commands for creating PATs, so you can authenticate with your SSH keys and create a short-lived PAT in one command.
>> tariffs... too directly put the blame on the president. Would starting a war with Iran... be a more solid mechanism?
War puts the blame on the president even more directly.
>> Especially when the US is a net exporter from oil and could conceivably protect domestic industries from the same?
The US is a huge net importer of goods. The oil surplus is rather small, has been recorded only for the last 3 years and it can't meaningfully change the US balance of trade.
> shocking energy and transportation prices, raising the costs of exports from every other country... and the US could conceivably protect domestic industries from the same?
Nothing will be protected, quite the opposite, the US will be the country hardest hit by inflation because, given the huge net imports, we are the country that benefits the most from unimpeded trade and lower cost of production in other countries.
Trumps tariffs didn't decrease the trade deficit, in fact the deficit for 2025 was significantly higher than the pre-covid 2019. The deficits for Feb and Mar 2025 were the highest monthly deficits in history, beating the previous records by almost 100%.
>> Let’s say your goal was to reduce globalization
"reducing globalization" is a meaningless term, reducing the standard of living is what matters, choking international trade will cause higher reduction in the US than in other countries.
> I mean it’s high risk and maybe dumb, but I wouldn’t put it past the current thought leaders to turn against traditional free market ideology.
"Ideology" is a fig leaf, what matters is the money and power in the hands of the most special interest groups, it's a small club and you ain't in it.
> But here’s the part that really gets us. At our CORE, our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share. A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time.
I would prefer not to give my email address to a company that thinks that this should give them a good email reputation. If you email me because you are excited and I’m not, I probably think of it as spam.
During a 1 month period (2024-03-26 to 2024-04-25) FontAwesome sent me 18 different marketing emails, including 4 in one day. I am not sure that matches with their supposed 'instinct' and I am unsurprised that they have a bad email reputation.
Off-topic: you're the same famfamfam that used to have a really great set of flag icons years ago? Thank you for that, I used it on a project and it was totally awesome.
I don't mind if a company sends me emails if I gave them my email address. As long as, when I click "unsubscribe" to the email, they stop. I don't want to have to go log back into their system and unsubscribe. I just want to click the unsubscribe button and have it be done - forever, not just until they add a new category for email.
I have a fair number of companies that send me emails (because I signed up for their service) on a "slow" basis (ie, when they have something interesting.. not just "every week, so you don't forget us). I don't mind those. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don't. I don't unsubscribe and I don't mark them as spam.
I'm not saying you should be the same as me. I _am_ saying that, just because _you_ don't like it, doesn't make them "clearly in the wrong". Because there are people that feel like the way they are acting is reasonable.
FYI, requiring logging in to unsubscribe is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S., I just mark those as spam if they don't allow one-click unsubscribes.
Teflon is PTFE, which is fully fluorinated but is also very much a plastic: it’s a highly unreactive solid at reasonable temperatures (which sadly do not include temperatures commonly encountered on stoves).
By “the Teflon chemical” are you perhaps referring to the various nasty liquid, water-soluble surfactants commonly used in factories that make or process PTFE? Those include PFOA, PFOS, and the newer and not obviously any safer “GenX” compounds.
Yes, they are referring to PFOA/PFOS; they're talking about PFAS which is the broad class of chemical compounds that includes PFOA/PFAS. And PFAS are not plastics.
One of my favorite bits of hardware is a UPS. I’ve played with several over the years, from fancy server-grade rack-mount APC stuff to inexpensive edge stuff. Without exception, downtime is increased by use of a UPS. I used to plug a server with redundant PSUs into the UPS and the wall so it could ride out UPS glitches.
Even today, a UPS that turns itself back on after power goes out long enough to drain the battery and is then restored is somewhat exotic. Amusingly, even the new UniFi UPSes, which are clearly meant to be shoved in a closet somewhere, supposedly turn off and stay off when the battery drains according to forum posts. There are no official docs, of course.
Sounds like crappy UPSes. Even the cheap old used eBay Eaton UPSes I have in my homelab have a setting for "Auto restart" and the factory default setting is "enabled".
But even rackmount UPSes are more of an "edge" sort of solution. A data center UPS takes up at least a room.
I assume that datacenters UPSes are better, but I’ve never used one except as a consumer of its output.
But I’ve had problems with UPSes that advertise auto-restart but don’t actually ship with it enabled. And that fancy APC unit was sold by fancy Dell sales people and supported directly by real humans at APC, and it would still regularly get mad, start beeping, and turn off its output despite its battery being fully charged and the upstream power being just fine (and APC’s techs were never able to figure it out either).
> I assume that datacenters UPSes are better [...]
I don't know about specific datacenter models, but in our colocation there are humans available 24/7. So the UPS might not start after failure, but there's a human to figure it out.
Most (all?) decent datacenters also have generators on site, and the intent is that the UPS will never run out of charge. So the fully-discharged case is an error and it might be intentional to require intervention to recover.
Yeah, some people treat UPSes as "backup power" but that's not really what they're intended for. Their intended purpose is to bridge the gap during interruptions... either to an alternative power source, or to a powered-off state.
Sure, but when you stick a UPS in the closet to power your network or security cameras or whatever for a little while if there is a power interruption, you expect:
a) If the power is out too long for your UPS (or you have solar and batteries and they discharge overnight or whatever) that the system will turn back on when the power recovers, and
b) You will not have extra bonus outages just because the UPS is in a bad mood.
I completely agree with B. But alas, people love buying shitty cheap UPSes.
But A is along the lines of the misconception that I'm referring to... There should be no such thing as "the power being out too long for your UPS". A UPS isn't there to give you a little while to ignore the problem, it's there to give you time to address it. Either by switching to another source of power, or to power off the equipment.
Now, the reason that every UPS that supports auto-restart has it as a configurable option, is because you often don't want to do this for many reasons, e.g.:
* a low SOC battery could not guarantee a minimum runtime for safe shutdown during a repeated outage
* a catastrophic failure (because the battery shouldn't be dead) could be an indication of other issues that need to be addressed before power on
* powering on the equipment may require staggering to prevent inrush current overload
The whole use case of "I'm using the UPS to run my equipment during an outage" is kind of an abuse of their purpose. It's commonly done, and I've done it myself. But it's not what they're for.
But also, if you want a UPS that auto-restarts -- they exist -- but you get what you pay for.
> a low SOC battery could not guarantee a minimum runtime for safe shutdown during a repeated outage
A lot of devices are unconditionally safe to shut down. Think network equipment, signs, exit lights, and well designed computers.
> a catastrophic failure (because the battery shouldn't be dead) could be an indication of other issues that need to be addressed before power on
This is such a weird presumption. Power outages happen. Long power outages happen. Fancy management software that triggers a controlled shutdown when the SOC is low might still leave nonzero remaining load. In fact, if you have a load that uses a UPS to trigger a controlled shutdown, it’s almost definitional that a controlled shutdown is not a catastrophe and that the system should turn back on eventually.
All of your points are valid for serious datacenter gear and even for large server closets, but for small systems I think they don’t apply to most users, and I’m talking about smaller UPSes.
> > a low SOC battery could not guarantee a minimum runtime for safe shutdown during a repeated outage
> A lot of devices are unconditionally safe to shut down.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean you want to expose them to brownout conditions when your UPS is depleted. If the power is continuing to flip on and off, it's better to just leave it off if you don't have the battery to prevent even short interruptions. A good UPS can do this automatically for you. A cheap one will just stay off and let you respond to the outage.
> This is such a weird presumption.
It wasn't a presumption I was making for all users -- but an example of why some users might not want auto-restart as a feature. Of course, if you want auto-restart as a feature, you can buy a UPS that has it as a feature and turn it on.
> they don’t apply to most users, and I’m talking about smaller UPSes.
Yeah, I know the situation: Someone has a network closet on a budget with a UPS they've sized to get them a few minutes of runtime. They put a UPS on the BOM because it checks a box. So they buy a low-end UPS that either doesn't have the feature, or it doesn't work right.
The solution is just to buy the right UPS for the thing they were trying to do... and test it.
GPT 5.4 is remarkably good at figuring out machine code using just binutils. Amusingly, I watched it start downloading ghidra, observe that the download was taking a while, and then mostly succeed at its assignment with objdump :)
A pilot light is tricky: in typical designs, it needs to heat a thermocouple enough to produce enough current to drive a solenoid to allow the rest of the flame to ignite. Thermocouples are outrageously inefficient.
The pilot lights I’m familiar with just light the rest of the flame directly since they are burning already - turning on the fuel is all that is required. What systems uses a thermocouple and a solenoid?
Any modern country with safety regulations will require a thermocouple in the loop if there is a pilot light on the appliance. The last non thermocouple appliance I saw was an industrial kitchen stove, but it had been modified for propane, and I suspect that the guy who did it ripped out the safety stuff.
Every factory appliance will gate the full gas flow behind the activation of a the thermocouple.
When you push and hold a dial or button to get a pilot lit, what you are actually doing is bypassing the thermocouple safety until it gets to temperature. If you release the “hold to light” knob too soon your pilot will go out since the thermocouple needs ~10 seconds to get to temp.
The only commercial kitchen stove I interact with on a somewhat regular basis is a miserable piece of crap. It has multiple pilot lights, some of which go out frequently and stink up half the building with unburnt fuel. I suspect that just the pilot lights consume $50-$100/month of natural gas.
Stoves seem to be somehow special in safety regulations. I guess regulators assume that they are never operated unattended, so they tend to have no real built in safety features. Both commercial and residential stoves will happily operate unlit at full power.
I've got a Honeywell digital controller on my hot water heater. It's powered by the thermocouple. It can make troubleshooting a lot easier because it has flashing lights for diagnostics.
It’s extremely common for the mechanism that only allows the fuel to be turned on if the pilot is lit to work by having a thermocouple in the pilot flame. Some of these also power the controls (thermostat, for example) and some don’t.
(At present, Gemini's question-answering capability (which Google kind of makes its users use) seems extremely error-prone -- much worse than competing LLMs when asked the same question.)
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