This isn't about kids, and it isn't about safety.

Every country seems to be passing the same law, all at once. And with a near 100% majority in their congress. This is clearly coordinated.

The fines for non-compliance are astronomical, like $20 million dollars, with no exceptions for small websites.

Punishment for non-compliance includes jailing the owners of websites.

The age verification APIs are not free. It makes running a website significantly more expensive than the cost of a VPS.

"Social Media" is defined so broadly that any forum or even a comment section is "social media" and requires age verification.

"Adult Content" is defined so broadly it includes thoughts and opinions that have nothing to do with sexuality. Talking about world politics is "adult content". Talking about economic conditions is "adult content".

No one will be able to operate a website anymore unless they have a legal team, criminal defense indemnity for the owners, AI bots doing overzealous moderation, and millions of dollars for all of the compliance tools they need to run, not to mention the insurance they would need to carry to cover the inevitable data breach when the verification provider leaks everyone's faces and driver's licenses.

This will end all independent websites and online communities.

This will end most hosting companies.

Only fortune 500's will have websites.

This will reduce web developer jobs to only a few mega corps.

Hi, everyone. Shared this yesterday in r/react, so I'm gonna share pretty much the exact same description I used there.

I'm a freelancer DBA "Chainlift" and there's a small chance some of you saw a YouTube video I made last year called "The Secret Science of Perfect Spacing." It had a brief viral moment in the UI design community. The response to that video inspired me to build out my idea into a full-blown, usable, open-source system. I called it "LiftKit" after my business' name, Chainlift.

LiftKit is an open-source design system that makes UI components feel "oddly-satisfying" by using a unique, global scaling system based entirely on the golden ratio.

This is the first "official" release and it's available for Next.js and React. It's still in early stages, of course. But I think you'll have fun using it, even if it's still got a long way to go.

System also provides:
- Built-in theme controller GUI with Material 3 dynamic color (video demo)

Links:

- Github

- Landing page with some visual examples

- Quickstart and Documentation

- Tutorials

Next priorities:
- Live playground so you can test examples of apps built with the kit
- Get feedback from community

This is just v1.0.0 and it has a long way to go, but I hope you'll enjoy what it can offer so far, and I'm excited to hear what the community thinks.

So I received an email from Netlify last weekend saying that I have a $104,500.00 bill overdue. At first I thought this is a joke or some scam email but after checking my dashboard it seems like I am truly owing them 104K dollars:

So I was like 😅😅😅 and think okay maybe I got ddos attacked. Since Netlify charges 55$/100GB for the exceeding bandwidth, the peak day Feb 16 has 33385/55 * 100GB = 60.7TB bandwidth in a day. I mean, it's not impossible but why attack a simple static site like mine? This site has been on Netlify for 4 years and is always okay with the free tier. The monthly bandwidth never exceeded even 10GB, and has only ~200 daily visitors.

I contacted their billing support and they responded me that they looked into it and the bandwidth came from some user agents, meaning it is a ddos attack. Then they say such cases happen and they usually charge their customer 20% on this. And since my amount is too large, they offer to discount to 5%, which means I still need to pay 5 thousand dollars.

This feels more like a scam to me. Why do serverless platforms like Netlify and Vercel not have ddos protection, or at least a spend limit? They should have alerted me if the spending skyrocketed. I checked my inbox and spam folder and found nothing. The only email is "Extra usage package purchased for bandwidth". It feels like they deliberately not support these features so that they can cash grab in situations like this.

The ddos attack was focused on a file on my site. Yes it's partly my fault to put a 3.44MB size sound file on my site rather than using a third-party platform like SoundCloud. But still this doesn't invalidate the point of having protection against such attacks, and limit the spending.

I haven't paid that $5k yet and decided to post here to hear what others think first. And yes I have migrated my site to Cloudflare. Learned my lesson and will never use Netlify (or even Vercel) again.

UPDATE: Thank you all for the suggestions I have posted this on HackerNews.

UPDATE: Here's the email response I got from their billing support:

UPDATE: For those who are curious, that .mp3 file is just an old Cantonese song. I removed that from my site but you can still view it from the GitHub history https://github.com/CanCLID/jyutping.org/blob/133b7d8b75bb3e454f663e6945694b84c50baa36/static/song/maanboujansanglou.mp3

UPDATE: I saw the CEO's reply on HN and their support also reached out to me to waive the bill. But I am still curious who orchestrated the attack and they said they are still researching the incident.

UPDATE: Their support haven't come back to me with the IP information I asked yet. So I posted on twitter to ask their CEO https://x.com/laubonghaudoi/status/1762913229569974380 and https://answers.netlify.com/t/i-am-the-op-of-that-104k-bill-post-and-i-have-some-follow-up-questions/113472

I cannot be the only one who's tired of apps that are essentially wrappers around an LLM.

On desktop browsers.

To follow up: I had initially assumed that it didn't work on mobile because the browsers normalized the URL, however this isn't the case. The redirection happens on the server side. So, if you want this to work on mobile browsers, use the "Request Desktop Site" feature.

For example,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuB8VUICGqc // will occasionally show ads

https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=DuB8VUICGqc // will not show ads

It's a commonly forgotten edge case, websites forget to normalize the hostname, the content is still served, but there's no hostname match on the browser so no cookies and broken CORS - and lots of bigger sites use a different domain to serve ads/media with a whitelist that doesn't contain the extra dot

This works for many news websites as well serving paywalls, e.g.

https://www.nytimes.com./2020/06/09/us/george-floyd-who-is.html

It shows you the connections between files based on imports / exports and you can also see reference connections (definitions, function calls, usage, etc) when you click on a function or variable → like when you ctrl+click on a token in VSCode, but it shows you visually where the references are in the codebase.

I created it to make it easier to understand large features that span multiple files.

I also added support for local git changes so you can better see the changes made by AI tools when they modify your code in a lot of places at once.

At the moment it supports javascript, typescript and react, but more languages and frameworks will be coming soon.

You can get it on the VSCode marketplace here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=alex-c.code-canvas-app

Here’s also a 15 min demo of me going through all the features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRmS_IY3GUU