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And Nystrom's book

Yeah, I really enjoyed Crafting Interpreters, wholeheartedly recommend!

From another comment:

> Kontext holds secrets server-side and mints short-lived tokens per session.

That probably makes this thing DOA for most people (certainly for me and everyone I know).


Thanks. Yes, I would have to put myself in that category. Typical play here is to offer the self-hosted option. Not sure if that is in the pipeline for the creators of this. Then you are into that trust/operational overhead tradeoff conversation.


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What do you anticipate to be the hardest part of supporting a self-hosted solution? I've worked a fair bit on converting SAAS -> self-hosted and always interested to hear others' pain points.

I imagine a lot of the organizations that would find this most valuable, and would be willing to pay a lot, would be the same ones that would require something like this.


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Currently we can use Bitwarden either hosted or self-hosted, which solves most of these problems (plus my own extra rig I built to generate OAuth tokens, for people which support that).

Could you elaborate on what challenges you face that can't be solved by the Bitwarden approach?


It looks like it's a fork of Django that just kinda changed a bunch of stuff arbitrarily?

From the readme: Plain is a fork of Django, driven by ongoing development at PullApprove — with the freedom to reimagine it for the agentic era.

I'm not very good at counting lines of code, but it seems like it's slightly less than Django. From a cursory glance the main difference I saw was that only postgres is supported, not necessarily a bad thing.

> the main difference I saw was that only postgres is supported, not necessarily a bad thing.

Then why not just delete the other files that you don't want? Why also completely change Django's API?


Very likely its being changed by an AI model, driven by human prompts.

That would be good if the changes are to slim it down by 80%.

Same thoughts as soon as I saw the code in the readme

> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions

Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?


There's a "European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles", signed by the member states, and I believe the right to access internet freely, without companies being permitted to mandate entire IP addresses blocks being forbidden from routing and within 30 minutes from the request surely would fit within that one, or others, in some way or another. No company should hold that power and it's a serious precedent others states in the union would want to leverage for their own reasons too. Reading this recent TorrentFreak article, the regulations should probably align with the following thinktank's analysis, at the very least:

>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.

https://torrentfreak.com/eu-pirate-site-blocking-is-broken-r...


if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.

for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.

among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are accessible legally, then spain would not be allowed to block them either.


> if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.

As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.

> for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.

Definitely not. You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one. There are some categories where you have to, but that explicitly excludes video streaming.

There is another regulation for subscribers temporarily traveling to a different EU country not losing access to a service they subscribed to in their home country, but that’s also something else.


You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one.

according to my understanding yes, you are:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/geoblockin...

i don't see mention of any exception for streaming there either. (maybe one exists, if you have a reference, i'd love to take a look)


They call it "audio-visual". From the page you linked:

> [...] services in sectors currently fully excluded such as transport and audio-visual


good catch, thank you.

if you look at the actual report summary however it shows that they want to change that:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-pub...

so even if not a reality in all sectors, removing geoblocking is in the interest of the EU.

going back to the original question:

Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?

they do care, and they should, and yes, they have the authority.

personally, when i read the report, seeing how young people are more interested in viewing content from other countries, what first came to my mind is the increased integration of EU countries and cultures that comes from that. that's the why.


> As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.

Aren't you being disadvantaged though? A customer in Spain can buy from an EU internet retailer (let's say ~10% of those retailers are in Spain using the population ratio of Spain to the EU), or from a brick and mortar retailer in their location 100% of which are in Spain.

They're blocking the thing where ~90% of the retailers are outside of Spain but not the thing where all of them are in Spain, is that not a disadvantage?


Surely EU members should care if Spain blocks the access to government services offered by EU members. In Finland various government services (like Police's website) do use Cloudflare.

And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.


Basically EU should step in whenever country level government doesn't do a good enough job for its citizens.

It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.


If Spaniards think their goverment is doing a bad job, why don't they vote them out? They are still a democracy, aren't they?

That would be an absolute disaster and basically destroy European democracy.

The way this works best is that you have a federal system that sets out what the member states can't do (e.g. block internet, censor speech, ex post facto laws, trade barriers) and then the central government exists only to enforce those constraints on the member states, who choose whether and how to do any of the things they are allowed to do.

So Spanish people are too stupid to vote for their own policy preferences?

How do you know the EU is guaranteed to do a better job than national governments representing the desires of that nation’s citizens?


Ask Hungarians at any point of the last 16 years. The problem is that 30% vote in a conman. 29% of people try to prevent that. Then 100% of people suffer for years.

It happened in Poland and in Hungary.

And even if that scenario doesn't play out exactly like that it always works this way to some degree.

People need enlightened remote central power to protect them from local petty tyrants.

It's the same thing as HOAs. If there aren't enough laws (with enforcement) in place, people tend to be exploited by "voluntarily" chosen local tyrants. At the level of home owners associacion, or at the level of national government.


It doesn't work like that. The EU is established by the states and only has the authority to do what is delegated by the member states to the EU.

Yes, it has the authority. There are plenty of EU regulations that states must obey, from fundamental rights to taxation.

The question is about the authority to pass laws that only some countries need to obey. To my knowledge, the EU does not have the authority to do that.

They don't have to do anything like that. Just create a law that says no country in the EU is allowed to block sites.

The EU doesn't work like that. It's a union of sovereign states, not a central government.

Banning the member states from legislating something would require changes to the Treaties of the European Union. And that in turn would require unanimous consent from the member states.

The EU could legislate the matter on its own, which would override national laws. But it's not in the habit of doing narrow single-purpose laws, because that's not in the culture of the people who run the union. Instead, there would probably be a comprehensive law on internet blocking and censorship, which would be a very bad idea.


> Compared to traditional C or C++ projects it's madness.

Those projects typically rely on an external package manager to handle their dependencies for them. Apt, yum, etc. Otherwise you end up in dependency hell trying to get ./configure to find the development headers of whatever it needs. I don't miss those days. Rust/Cargo is a godsend.


It may be better from a DX perspective, but it's pure pain for distros like Debian who don't want to use cargo at build time to fetch arbitrary dependencies and instead use vetted system versions.

Italy and Spain are the bad actors here. Not cloudflare.

Rampant bot traffic and scrapers are the real cancer. Until that goes away everyone is going to need cloudflare or some other bot firewall service.

Perhaps that is true, but the Cloudflare anti-bot protection is too stupid and annoying.

They should have used a cookie or something else that does not require asking me every few minutes to prove once more that I am not a bot.

There was a time when Cloudflare had become less intrusive, but for the last months it has begun again to intervene almost each time when opening some pages.

There is no doubt that anti-bot protection can be implemented in a better way than Cloudflare does, but presumably the alternatives would consume more resources on their servers, so probably they choose whatever minimizes their costs, regardless if that ensures maximum discomfort for Internet users.


You're getting frequent verification requests because you're behaving like a bot. Are you modifying your user agent string or using a VPN?

Who knows what upsets ClownFlare? I'm using Vivaldi on Linux on IPv6 in Denmark with every uBlock filter enabled and Cookie Auto-delete. That seems to confuse and anger CloudFlare and I get CAPTCHA tarpitted constantly.

> They should have used a cookie or something else that does not require asking me every few minutes to prove once more that I am not a bot.

> every uBlock filter enabled and Cookie Auto-delete

Hmm


So you know why.

No, it could be any, or other, totally normal and reasonable factors. Or maybe I posted too much Cloudflare hate on HN and they singled me out.

They're in the walls!

  NO CARRIER
  +CREG: 0,0

Those are easy enough to dissuade with readily available PoW solutions. People use CF & co. out of convenience, the exact same reason that most websites load resources from at least half a dozen third parties instead of self hosting.

It won’t. Some people are perfectly happy to destroy and destroy as long as they get some small portion as profit for themselves.

That, ironically, includes Cloudflare. Without rampant bots making the internet worse for everybody, they wouldn't have as much work. And their portion of profit is anything but small.

Spain is mandating their ISPs block cloudflare to stop people from illegally streaming soccer games. Cloudflare isn't the one doing the blocking.

Isn't the ONLY one doing blocking.

I'm not from Spain and instead of Spanish ISP I get a block from CloudFlare.

Now take a wild guess: which one is bigger - some Spanish ISP or CF?


> all of this falls apart if you use Mullvad

The only thing that falls apart is the IP address identification, which is only a very small signal for identifying an internet user. X/Twitter undoubtedly has more identity information than just an IP address.


> the government banning it from being released by executive order.

There's no legal mechanism for the president or the government at all to do that.


There's no legal mechanism for the vast majority of what the president has done.

Often it happens anyway, along with some protests, some resignations and maybe an eventual court case reversal months or years later.


There are ways for the government to do that sort of thing on an emergency basis, and it would take quite some time to make it's way through the courts. There are precedents from nuclear weapons technology and cryptography. I don't think it'll hold up or be particularly effective because the horse has left the barn already, but they could probably slow things down if they really wanted to.

Of course there is. Fully automatic weapons are banned. Certain chemicals and biologics are banned. Certain hacking tools are banned (DMCA):

> The “tools” prohibitions, set out in sections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b), outlaw the manufacturing, sale, distribution, or trafficking of tools and technologies that make circumvention possible. These provisions ban both technologies that defeat access controls, and also technologies that defeat use restrictions imposed by copyright owners, such as copy controls. These provisions prohibit the distribution of software that was designed to defeat CD copy-protection technologies, for example.

https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-ye...


Those things were made illegal by Congress, not by a president's executive order, which is what this thread is about.

I'm sure they will find something when it really starts to bother them personally.

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