I honestly don't know how to distinguish the two.
Almost certainly, though. I've never seen a community that wasn't, at least numerically, "dominated" by lurkers.
ZorbaTHut
7d ago
Honestly if anything it's better at fixing these problems than I was :V Webdev has never been my speciality.
As near as I can tell, the basic issue we're running into is that load is increasing, heavily thanks to bot scraping, and that's resulting in various things that weren't problems becoming problems. The earlier one turned out to be a massive leak in our Currently Online Users reporting; this wasn't a big deal when we had maybe a few thousand users, but as soon as we started having tons of "users" (including IPs as users!) it blew up and become a gargantuan perf issue.
I'm honestly curious if rDrama ever ran into that same problem.
Anyway, the latest one was kind of sitting around passively; we did a redesign to improve performance, but it turns out we missed a bunch of stuff, and thankfully Claude knows these tools better than I do and can put in automated warnings for various performance thing. So that should cut a few hundred SQL queries on big pages.
Coupled to that was a nasty bug that would kill threads faster than they should be killed, which itself would cause server crashes, and that was a lot of boom.
The biggest problem is that I never had a good way to instrument this and figure out what was going on perf-wise, and now I have . . . some tools for this . . . so hopefully it's just a matter of squashing issues as they show up.
ZorbaTHut
7d ago
I'm kind of surprised nobody here has Claude Opus access, and modern Opus is a lot better than Sonnet 4.0, so I went ahead and hucked it at Claude Opus 4.6. For the record, my setup was:
- I prepended "here's an AI test, go solve it" to this post, then copypasted the whole thing in
- I chose Extended Thinking and Research, which is the mode where it will cheerfully scan literally a thousand webpages if it thinks it's a good idea
Unfortunately, for some reason, Claude Opus doesn't let you share advanced-research discussions, so I can't link the full "discussion". But it didn't ask for any extra info, just hopped into it.
(One note: it tends to be limited per query, so asking for two albums at once is going to do about half as much work for each. I dunno if that would produce different results though.)
It took about twenty minutes, scanned 711 sources, and produced this full report, which goes into detail on methodology and sources. The tl;dr:
Both The Turtles' "Grim Reaper of Love" and the Henry Paul Band's Feel the Heat lack unambiguous release dates in readily available sources. Applying the hierarchical methodology systematically, the best-supported release date for "Grim Reaper of Love" is Monday, May 16, 1966, and for Feel the Heat is approximately Monday, July 21, 1980 — though both dates require significant inferential work across multiple source levels.
So, it ended up with the same GRoL result as GPT 5.2 Agent.
It did find the Wikipedia page and decided it was wrong, and it wasn't able to read the ARSA database. I don't think it's possible for the web version to apply a username/password, but I could probably have gotten that working with a local login; in the end, it fell back to the Billboard. Didn't manage to find the radio chart, but that's the ARSA access issue.
For FtH, it queried the copyright office, but got access-denied errors. I'm guessing this is specifically anti-AI-bot stuff :V
This does feel like a lot of the sources you want to rely on are specifically blocking Claude. I'm slightly tempted to set up local tools that pretend to be not-Claude, or give it access to a web browser and tell it to go wild; that might be more effective.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Yup.
I'm not sure if it would have even sent a message to the server - it's plausible that the button action doesn't get hooked up unless you actually hit the "shadowban" button, a lot of stuff works that way - but even if it did, the server would respond "hey wait, you're not an admin! you can't do that, denied".
For obvious reasons, we don't let logged-out users, or logged-in users without the admin flag, shadowban people :)
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
(whoops just saw this)
It was harmless before, just a confirmation page that could pop up. Should be fixed now though.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
Yeah, this actually might be somewhat reverted now, I'm still messing with stuff.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
It's theoretically possible it's a bug with a specific browser; what browser are you on?
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
Yeah. I'm very glad I set things up in a way where I could just move the servers easily.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
There's a bunch of problems here. Yes, China traffic spiked, but it didn't spike that much. Also, now that the analytics have caught up, it spiked a day or two before the server problems began, and everything's back to normal. So . . . was it bots? Eh, maybe, maybe not. And while I can get a long list of IPs, it's not clear that there was any significant pattern within that.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
If you had an employee whose work you had to check every single time, you'd fire him.
In most of the programming jobs I've been in, code reviews are considered mandatory for all programmers. Everyone's work is checked every single time, and yet we don't all get fired. Humans make mistakes, and we've set up systems to better solve that issue. So do computers pretending to be humans. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
There's a lot of cases where figuring out how to solve a problem is far more complicated than verifying the solution, and those are cases that LLMs are fantastic with.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
I don't know what you've tried, but:
- Claude is probably the best-integrated system out there; use the commandline tool because it's able to go research your codebase on its own.
- Make it a CLAUDE.md with general architecture. It can make a CLAUDE.md for you with the
/initcommand, but read over it by hand to make sure it's right. - Make sure thinking is enabled (hit "tab"). If you're asking it to do a really hard thing, use the "ultrathink" keyword, which will give it more space to think.
- If you have reference tests to use as a model, point it at those. Telling it something like "read existing tests and use the same general style" can help a lot; if you can be more specific, do so.
- Ask it to run the tests and fix problems.
- Expect the occasional mistake. Review its code.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
I'm paraphrasing a bit; I ended up with a bunch of prompts, including "write tests to cover every endpoint" and "write tests to increase code coverage" and "stop skipping this specific file, I've seen you consider it six times now and you keep saying it'll be hard and going to do something else, knock it off, go do it for real" and at one point it started just writing tests that verified an endpoint returned a success code instead of actually checking the data and I had to tell it to go back and fix them.
But nevertheless, it was fundamentally "go write a bunch of tests kthx".
What kinds of tests does it write?
Pretty simple ones. In general it's either "call endpoints and verify that the right thing happened in the database", or "change the database and verify that the right thing happened from the endpoint".
How does it know what to expect or assert in the tests?
By reading the code. It's not a black box, it just goes and reads the code. Then it tries stuff.
Then if the stuff didn't work, it reads the error messages and fixes it.
Same way a programmer does it, except it does it while I'm in the kitchen making a snack.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
Some of this might actually be fixed, or at least, in a position where it can be fixed. We had a problem for a while where updating the software was impossible because it caused crashes and largescale fixes were sketchy due to how badly tested it was. Thankfully, with the rise of AI, I can (and have) just point Claude at the codebase and say "write a ton of tests kthx" and now it's a lot less questionable to do work on.
It actually found a few bugs while writing the tests which was pretty funny.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
Honestly, I'll take some credit, but the mods have been putting a lot more work into it lately than I have. Give them most of that credit :)
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
Nobody mentioned it to me until maybe twelve hours ago :V I think it's now fixed, I think the computer it was on was having problems and the solution ended up being "bump it to another computer" . . . after doing a few in-retrospect-unnecessary optimizations. But hey, at least the optimizations are done.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
The thing that's weird about this, though, is that it ramped up gradually over a period of a week. And it's hard to believe that us specifically would get a massive increase in traffic over simultaneously such a long and a short period of time.
That said, I may have solved it; I think we were just on a crummy cloud computer, I recycled the node and performance is fine again. Gotta remember that for next time.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
To be honest, I'm not sure. If it's a DDOS it's a weirdly terrible one that's spending a lot of effort looking like a misbehaving web crawler. On the other hand, if it's a misbehaving web crawler, it's a weirdly terrible one that's spending a lot of effort looking somewhat like a DDOS.
Either that or we've gotten incredibly popular in China over the last week.
It's not just you. Working on it. :)
(Should be better now, I'll let it sit for half an hour or so and see how it's going. More work may be needed.)
(Edit: Sigh, not solved. Still working on it.)
(This may now be fixed; I think we were just running on bad hardware.)
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Yeah, it's trying to remove tracking codes, so I decided to leave that in for now.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
This should now be fixed. I also stripped out the weird URL-replacement stuff that was going on :)
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
I should definitely do that - I actually started a #workshop thread on a Discord for much the same reason, though unfortunately a lot of stuff that I'm doing is backend and hard to share in interesting ways. But I'll see if I can start posting there when I do have things of interest :)
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
Absolutely! I'm hoping to get a somewhat-serious public release in the next few months.
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
Is he really busy with work? Life in general?
Pretty much, yeah.
(ping @TitaniumButterfly @Southkraut)
So, here, lemme give a sort of tl;dr of The Shape Of Zorba's Life.
I vaguely divide most of my tasks into a few categories. In no particular order, those are:
- Sanity
- Family
- Survival
- Professional hobby
- Unprofessional hobby
The tricky part is that I usually have time for at most four of them. Unsurprisingly, Sanity, Family, and Survival end up in those four. They're kinda important.
In my case, I work in the game industry. So "professional hobby" is making my own game studio. "Unprofessional hobby" is The Motte. I end up having to choose between them, and for a while, I was aiming most of that spare time at The Motte in the hopes I could make it start paying for itself; if The Motte could take over Survival (which more-or-less gets summarized as Money, usually in the form of Day Job) then suddenly "I have time for four of them" starts looking pretty good.
Well, I'm not going to say that outcome is impossible, but at the moment, it seems pretty unlikely. I took a serious shot, it did not immediately work out. This meant I had the long-term choice of sacrificing professional-hobby in favor of unprofessional-hobby, or vice-versa.
That whole "can I make The Motte take over Survival" thing also applies to the game studio, though. And I found myself in a situation where I had some really promising ideas and tools, which made it seem like I had a plausible shot at making Professional Hobby actually become my day job, thus subsuming Survival entirely, if I started working for myself and managed to get something viable before I ran out of savings.
And so that's what I'm fundamentally focusing on. If I can collapse Professional Hobby and Survival into one thing, then I have spare time to keep working on Motte stuff. But I just can't afford to get too distracted from this, because the bank account isn't going to last forever.
So the tl;dr is that I ended up needing to triage and The Motte got the short end of the stick. That doesn't mean it's abandoned - I really do want to work on it - that just means that there's enough stuff I have more immediate needs for that it has to be sidelined for now.
I will say that the mods have done a great job of keeping this place going. Its current survival is entirely thanks to them and I am extremely grateful. Fingers crossed that my current project is successful - in fact I'm looking at a major milestone coming up in a week that'll give me a much better sense of whether this is viable - and if it is, then I'll be able to come back to The Motte and put some serious effort into long-term plans that I simply never managed to work on.
Until then . . . keep it up, y'all.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
How do you in-person voters... remember anything meaningful?
I go over the sample ballot, make my choices, and either mark them down on the sample ballot or print them out.
Then I bring that in as a cheat sheet and just follow it.
I used to write it down on my phone, but the state I'm in disallows phones while voting, so, paper solution.
Hopefully fixed, at least for the moderate future; this ended up being a bunch of performance fixes and tweaks. Things are looking at lot better sitewise now.
At least until a bot finds a new URL that's really slow :V
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