Blocking IP ranges and user agents has nothing to do with "AI". It's a bad practice by lazy sysadmins who'd rather discriminate users than fix their infra. Writing this from a non-profit ISP (fdn.fr) whose IP range is blocked by Google and Reddit and noone still knows why or how to unblock it [0].
Residential proxies on the other hand i don't think have any legitime usecase. I would support people working around Youtube to export interesting videos to Bittorrent. But what's happening is malicious actors going around rate limiting to run bad-behaving scrapers on smaller sites. That, and much worse is the residential proxy economy.
As an owner and daily driver of one of these absurd oversized tonkas, I have to say that it's almost like they're precision engineered to murder children.
I'd trade this princess in for a hi-lux or a road-worthy late 90s ranger any day of the week, but try finding that on the market.
I own a large truck for logistical reasons (mostly hauling water and equipment and egressing a snowy area). I had a 2wd 4-banger tacoma prerunner and was going to sell it, but it's a lot better for actually driving the oil field roads where I live and much easier to park than the long bed.
I don't see why anyone would drive some giant truck when they don't have to- it's not a fun vehicle to drive, certainly not safe for other folks, and I avoid driving it in places where there are humans.
Having lived in the truck bed for a while it's nice to have some space.
I'm on off-grid solar and am looking forward to paying $90K ($14k in 2026 dollars) for a chinese fully electric when they become sale-able in the US.
Yeah they're fine/reasonable rural vehicles - functionally ok and the critical features work well. But the size is just.. comical, and an absolute hazard in urban environments. I have similar needs to you - I semi regularly use private wooded unmaintained roads where there's some chance of needing to saw a fallen tree out to keep moving.
I don't really want a second vehicle as it would get rare use. Urban driving with it is just an unpleasant experience. I am forced to be hyper-aware of any and every corner a tyke COULD have walked out of and entered into my driving range without me seeing, especially when running errands for the kid to places where other kids are around. Cannot relax for a moment.
Right? The person who you impersonated would then be marked as having voted twice, which would pretty quickly get noticed and investigated. So somehow you'd have to get away with that, plus do this at scale so as to actually influence the outcome. Doesn't make sense.
To me to key “insight” is that if you are going to spin up single VMs (or even groups) per-customer and then route queries, you need to be able to estimate the query cost first.
I know snowflake does this, they do the query optimization before sending it for execution. So it knows about how many resources will be needed (it can obviously be wrong).
[Author] Basically yes, but we spun up pods on EKS. It was hard for the customer to estimate how much they might need and hard for us to know how much capacity to provide. Given our plans on pricing on CPUHours (or similar) the logic was kinda broken.
How does Snowflake use that information? You still need to pick the warehouse. It would be cool if there was an "elastic warehouse" where heavier queries are routed to bigger Warehouses, but that's not the case
[Author] Basically what we are doing with the help of Trino: a distributed query engine which can use as many resources as the query needs dynamically.
Right, there is an option to scale horizontally, if a lot of queries are queued, Snowflake can spin up another node. But that doesn't help if you query is spilling to remote storage. You need a bigger node to speed up those queries.
Snowflake has an option to add more resources, which is supposed to be vertical scaling, but it doesn't work as well as increasing the size of the warehouse
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