Comment by pdimitar
3 months ago
A take that I'm not seeing in all the "LLM scrapers are heading to our site, run for your lives!" threads is this:
Why can't people harden their software with guards? Proper DDoS protection? Better caching? Rewrite the hot paths in C, Rust, Zig, Go, Haskell etc.?
It strikes me as very odd, the atmosphere of these threads. So much doom and gloom. If my site was hit by an LLM scraper I'd be like "oh, it's on!", a big smile, and I'll get to work right away. And I'll have that work approved because I'll use the occasion to convince the executives of the need. And I'll have tons of fun.
Can somebody offer a take on why are we, the forefront of the tech sector, just surrendering almost without a single shot?
Because our sites are written in layers of abstraction and terrible design, which leads to requests taking serious server resources. If we hosted everything "well", you'd get a few 10-20k req/s per CPU core, but we aren't.
True. I am simply wondering -- is the resistance from executives' so powerful that it can be never overpowered? Can't we ever just tell them "Look, this is like your car with plastic suspension -- it will work for a few days or even months but we can't rely on it forever; it's time to do it proper"?
Especially when the car's plastic suspension is costing them extra money? I don't get it here, for real. I would think that selfish capitalistic interests would have them come around at one point! (Clarification: invest $5M for a year before the whole thing starts costing you extra $30M a year, for example.)
And don't even get me started on the fact that GitHub is written in one of the most hardware-inefficient web frameworks (Rails). I mean OK, Rails is absolutely great for many things because most people's business will never scale as much and as such the initial increased developer velocity is an unquestionable one-sided win. I get that and I stopped hating Rails long time ago (even though I dislike it; but I do recognize where it's a solid and even preferred choice). But I've made a lot of money from trying to modernize and maintain Rails monoliths; it's just not suited for one scale and on -- without paying for extremely expensive consultants that is. It's like, everything can be made to work but it does start costing exponentially more from one scale and further up.
And yet nobody at GitHub figures "Maybe it's time we rewrite some of the hot paths?" or just "Make more aggressive caching even if it means some users see data outdated by 30 seconds or so"? Nothing at all?
Sorry, I am kind of ranting and not really saying anything to you per se. I am just very puzzled about how paralyzed GitHub seems under Microsoft.
I'm fully with you.
However, execs I know lease cars, not buy them, for that exact reason. You don't care if the suspension is made of plastic, if it's a subscription model. The metaphor very much falls apart but I had a point somewhere.
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