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.
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.
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?
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?
Enterprise 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.
Erotic resource planning
I put on my robe and wizard hat
Is that a bash reference? Jesus im old
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.”
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.
Honestly, I didn’t even notice.
I actually enjoy when this happens. All this centralized shit will not end well.
Strangely enough, twitch streams and chat were working fine but everything else was broken, had an empty following list.
It’s seen tech talks by Twitch’s engineering team. Some of those folks are scary smart.
Not that it takes that much cleverness to avoid using CloudFlare, of course.
But might be related. Twitch had some clever fallbacks and work-arounds for slow Internet, in that tech talk.
Uh huh, just before a major democracy attacked an evil, evil country. Must be coincidence.
You’re funny.
Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works
So tell me, how does the world work? We all hold hands and hug and cry together?
I’m gonna Kum ba yah so hard, you won’t be able to stop me!
Maybe I don’t want you to stop, big boy.
eventually
Another reason to self host 😊
I’m pretty sure cloudflare has better uptime than you
This is dumb…
If you self host and your power goes out …
Think about it
…My UPS kicks in.
Maybe this guy lives in an area immune to random outages ? Never any power shutdown, internet disconnection or slowness. And his hardware never fails too 🫢
The problem was actually caused by Google Google Cloud went down hard on Thursday, and took Cloudflare and some of its customers with it.
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!
Lemmy is working though. What else do we need?
We need to break up Cloudflare.
We just should not use cloudflare. Why is everybody still trying to use cloudflare.
It drives me nuts. The default answer on all network problems: why don’t you just use cloudflare? No! No no.
It sucks because up until the “sales team” rugpull, they’re the cheapest (and closest to reality) for bandwidth cost, virtually all the other CDN providers charge astronomical prices and their margins are hundreds to thousands of percentage.
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
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
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.
He is not wrong. Look the whole internet is basically one centralized cloudflare if we continue this path.
