I'm not 100% convinced, while iterating fast on an early prototype, what's wrong with legitimately not knowing what e.g. the data structure will end up looking? Just let it run, check debugger/stdout/localhost page and adjust: "Oh, right, the entries are missing canonical IDs, but at the same time there are already all the comments in them, forgot they would be there – neat". What's wrong with that? Especially at uni, when working on low-stakes problems.

> what's wrong with legitimately not knowing what e.g. the data structure will end up looking?

But that's not what the above comment said.

> Just let it run, check debugger/stdout/localhost page and adjust: "Oh, right, the entries are missing canonical IDs, but at the same time there are already all the comments in them, forgot they would be there

So you did have an expectation that the entries should have some canonical IDs, and anticipated/desired a certain specific behavior of the system.

Which is basically the meaning of "what will the output be?" when simplified for programming novices at university.

The point of university isn't to get things done - it is to imprint knowledge into your brain. If you are approaching school with the attitude of "how do I get this over with as fast as possible," you are wasting your time and the time of the teacher.

Was the number of partners you picked random or you chose 2137 on purpose? As it's actually somewhat related to the topic...

Entirely random of course. I would never reference unsavory memes about past Popes or anything like that.

I tested the latest flagship reasoning models (so the only models I use outside of coding for general questions):

- Opus 4.6 (Extended thinking): "Drive it! The whole point is to get the car to the car wash — you can't wash it if it's still in your driveway."

- Gemini Pro Deep Think: "You should definitely drive. Even though 50 meters is a very short distance, if you walk, your car will stay where it is—and it's pretty hard to use a car wash if you don't bring your car with you!"

- ChatGPT 5.2 Pro (Extended thinking): "You’ll need to drive the car—otherwise your car stays where it is and won’t get washed. That said, since it’s only ~50 m, the most sensible way to do it is often: 1. Walk over first (30–60 seconds) to check if it’s open, see the queue, confirm payment/how it works. 2. Then drive the car over only when you’re ready to pull into a bay/line."

A pretty reasonable answer by ChatGPT, althought it did take 2min4s to answer, compared to a few seconds by the other two models.

It's surprising how many people are either unaware or dismissive of 5.2 Pro's capabilities.

Too bad it's $200/mo, wish it was $0/mo.

I' migrated to purelymail.com around 2 years ago and. Reaaally cheap, easy to set up and without any bloat whatsoever. The webpage might look sketchy at first, but don't judge a book by its cover :)

You seem to imply that its outputs aren't found by people to be useful, which isn't true.

That's super cool! Do you have any plans to commercialize it or it's just a pet project?

Pet project just for fun, thanks!

I think it is true that it is a real problem (EDIT: but doesn't necessarily make "hosting untenable"), but you are correct to point out that modern pages tend to be horribly optimized (and that's the source of the problem). Even "dynamic" pages using React/Next.js etc. could be pre-rendered and/or cached and/or distributed via CDNs. A simple cache or a CDN should be enough to handle pretty much any scrapping traffic unless you need to do some crazy logic on every page visit – which should almost never be the case on public-facing sites. As an example, my personal site is technically written in React, but it's fully pre-rendered and doesn't even serve JS – it can handle huge amounts of bot/scrapping traffic via its CDN.

OK, I agree with both of you. I am an old who is aware of NGINX and C10k. However, my question is: what are the economic or technical difficulties that prevent one of these new web-scale crawlers from releasing og-pagerank-api.com? We all love to complain about modern Google SERP, but what actually prevents that original Google experience from happening, in 2026? Is it not possible?

Or, is that what orgs like Perplexity are doing, but with an LLM API? Meaning that they have their own indexes, but the original q= SERP API concept is a dead end in the market?

Tone: I am asking genuine questions here, not trying to be snarky.

What prevents it is that the web in 2026 is very different than it was when OG pagerank became popular (because it was good). Back then, many pages linked to many other pages. Now a significant amount of content (newer content, which is often what people want) is either only in video form, or in a walled garden with no links, neither in or out of the walls. Or locked up in an app, not out on the general/indexable/linkable web. (Yes, of course, a lot of the original web is still there. But it's now a minority at best.)

Also, of course, the amount of spam-for-SEO (pre-slop slop?) as a proportion of what's out there has also grown over time.

IOW: Google has "gotten worse" because the web has gotten worse. Garbage in, garbage out.

Thanks for the reply. I mentioned tech, but forgot about time. Yeah, that makes solid sense.

> Or locked up in an app...

I believe you may have at least partially meant Discord, for which I personally have significant hate. Not really for the owners/devs, but why in the heck would any product owner want to hide the knowledge of how to user their app on a closed platform? No search engine can find it, no LLM can learn from it(?). Lost knowledge. I hate it so much. Yes, user engagement, but knowledge vs. engagement is the battle of our era, and knowledge keeps losing.

r/anything is so much better than a Discord server, especially in the age of "Software 3.0"

I've been on-and-off working on a portable, sturdy electrical cloud chamber for a couple of months now. It's a device that lets you see ionising radiation with a naked eye, right on your desk.

It's already working, but it requires so many tweaks and adjustments that make the project hard to finish-finish.

It's controllable by an ESP32, can run automated cooling benchmarks (to find the power vs temp sweet spot) and is pretty much all made out of metal, not 3D-printed – I've learned a ton about working with metal, especially around drilling, cutting, and tapping/threading. Who knew precise drilling a solid copper block could be so tricky at times (saying this as a person who has never drilled anything except wood/concrete before)!

I'd really love to have this. Do you plan on either selling units, or open-sourcing the design?

Seconding this - love the concept and would really like to see any details you have on it.

I'm not the person you replied to, but yes, I've been using RiF since the API changes ...with a small 4-month l break last year when I was automatically flagged as bot API traffic and instantly permabanned with no warning. Reddit's built-in appeals went unanswered and ignored. Luckily I live in the EU, I appealed under DSA and they unbanned me after actual human review right before the 1-month deadline.

Could have I created a new account instead? Maybe. Did I want to check if DSA actually works in practice and can get me back my u/Tenemo nickname that I use everywhere, not just on Reddit? I sure did! Turns out Reddit cannot legally ban me from their platform without a valid reason, no matter what is in the ToS. Pretty cool!

Back to using RiF with a fresh API key after that and haven't had any issues since.

Oh, that's actually even cooler. I had no idea that was a thing we could do under the DSA. Where would one go in case their rights were being violated? (Because it's all nice on paper, but if nobody actually enforces it ...)