49 pointsby corvad8 hours ago13 comments
  • Starlevel0046 hours ago
    > Designing a product with billions of eyeballs on it isn't just challenging — it requires a fundamentally different approach.

    I'm not reading this.

    • thorum6 hours ago
      Their design approach wasn’t particularly unusual, so I’m not sure what that sentence means.

      I do miss the days when technical reports were clear and concise. This one has some interesting information, but it’s buried under a mountain of empty AI-written bloat.

      • an hour ago
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      • dematz6 hours ago
        It's annoying because it is a super common widget and it is interesting work, the first draft or literally even prompt they gave the AI probably would've been a great post, all they had to do was not ensloppify it...
    • cocoa19an hour ago
      To CloudFlare employees: This is a super interesting topic, but next time we'd rather hear from you, grammar mistakes and all, not from AI.

      If I want AI slop, I'll gladly have a chat with my paid $20 bucks Gemini account.

    • upmind6 hours ago
      Did you base the AI use on the emdash or is this an a common AI phrase (or both)?
      • Starlevel0046 hours ago
        "Not just X -- it's Y" is one of the more irritatingly common signs, especially for sentences like that one which absolutely do not need it.

        The Wikipedia article on detecting AI writing is a big help if you need to calibrate your sensors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

        • upmind6 hours ago
          I see, thx for the article too!
          • upmind6 hours ago
            I think I'll actually post the article here, quite useful
        • mock-possum6 hours ago
          Yeah it’s basically the prose equivalent of getting too much radio play - hilarious how the breakthrough of LLM content has ‘ruined’ “it’s not X—it’s Y” for so many of us now

          Maybe, like overplayed pop songs, in 20 years or so we’ll come around to viewing the phrase fondly.

        • TacticalCoder5 hours ago
          > "Not just X -- it's Y" is one of the more irritatingly common signs ...

          It's a bit of a "Karen AI" telltale sign. It's probably been trained on a lot of "I-know-it-all-Karen" posts and as a result we're bombarded with Karen-slop.

      • Retr0id6 hours ago
        It's not just overused phrasing — it's the hallmark of LLM prose.
      • iamacyborg6 hours ago
        “It’s not X, it’s Y” is an absolutely ubiquitous AI pattern. Throw in an em-dash and it’s basically ai;dr
      • mostlysimilar6 hours ago
        It's also just an utterly meaningless statement. Filler words with no value whatsoever.
      • mh22665 hours ago
        "Let's be honest" is another extremely strong tell.
      • BolsunBacset6 hours ago
        [dead]
    • JadedBlueEyes6 hours ago
      Yet again [0] quality standards seem to have slipped on the cloudflare blog. I'm not able to point at a cause, but it's not painting a pretty picture.

      [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516

      • CapsAdmin6 hours ago
        It kinda looks like employees need to make a blog post about something twice a month.
    • tamimio6 hours ago
      I remember back I think around 2011, CF was new and I was testing it on some vbulletin forum, all the email communication were with the cofounder if I recall correctly, the UI had only the dns settings back then. Now they make a whole article on some text redesign, time flies.
    • andrepd6 hours ago
      That's why I say most AI content isn't just slop—it's fundamentally about deception. It's about tricking someone into believing that a text was written by a human, or that a photo or video is a true recording of a real event.

      Like this, its purpose is to fly under the radar unless your figurative ears are pricked up and primed to detect the telltale signs. Fuck this shit.

      • holden_nelson29 minutes ago
        Can’t tell if the “it’s not X — it’s Y” as your first sentence is intentional irony or not lol
  • christina976 hours ago
    Am I reading it right, the widget is seen 5B times per day, and they recruited 8 people for testing to make sure their “redesign would work for everyone”…?
    • KolmogorovComp6 hours ago
      This! The comment I was angrily about to write.
      • jazzpush26 hours ago
        Why? Genuinely, who cares? Is some demographic group not caught in the 8 going to be offended by basic checkbox screen? Is someone with a niche form of colorblindness going to have difficulty navigating the UI?
        • KolmogorovComp6 hours ago
          How can you seriously pretend to do any study with only eight people involved? Especially when your company is worth billion. It just calls for bad press and criticism of amateurism.
        • madeofpalk6 hours ago
          I mean, yes? A very broad spectrum of people need to use the internet, and cloudflare has inserted themselves in the middle of it.

          I don't necessarily find a problem with them, but its weird how they boasted about massive scale and importance of this, but then only just went with 8 tests.

    • kingkongjaffa6 hours ago
      The process described in the article is literally just checking the boxes blindly for what passes for a design process these days. The guru's say interview customers so they have done just that without really understanding why. Given it's AI it's also possible the whole thing is entirely made up and someone just tweaked the design over an afternoon and shipped it.
    • mock-possum6 hours ago
      With a bit of A/B testing they could’ve recruited billions of people sounds like…
  • noplacelikehome7 hours ago
    As a user of an unsigned Firefox fork, Turnstile has ruined a moderate portion of the Internet for me. The way Cloudflare doesn’t think twice about eroding user freedoms, for the sake of a gate that can be trivially bypassed with solvarr or similar, is deeply disturbing. They are no longer a force for good on the web.
    • tempest_7 hours ago
      As bad as cloudflare is there is a reason people use it.

      If you try and run a site that has content that LLMs want or expensive calls that require a lot of compute and can exhaust resources if they are over used the attack is relentless. It can be a full time job trying to stop people who are dedicated to scrapping the shit out of your site.

      Even CF doesnt even really stop it any more. The agent run browsers seem to bypass it with relative ease.

      • neoromantique6 hours ago
        Vast majority of websites today can and should be static, which makes even the aggressive llm scrapping non-issue.
        • PaulDavisThe1st6 hours ago
          One of the things that a lot of LLM scrapers are fetching are git repositories. They could just use git clone to fetch everything at once. But instead, they fetch them commit by commit. That's about as static as you can get, and it is absolutely NOT a non-issue.
          • LoganDark6 hours ago
            No... Basically all git servers have to generate the file contents, diffs etc. on-demand because they don't store static pages for every single possible combination of view parameters. Git repositories also typically don't store full copies of all versions of a file that have ever existed either; they're incremental. You could pre-render everything statically, but that could take up gigabytes or more for any repo of non-trivial size.
            • KolmogorovComp6 hours ago
              > Git repositories also typically don't store full copies of all versions of a file that have ever existed either; they're incremental

              This is wrong. Git does store full copies.

          • neoromantique6 hours ago
            that's a pretty niche issue, but fairly easy to solve.

            Prebuild statically the most common commits (last XX) and heavily rate limit deeper ones

    • flexagoon6 hours ago
      I see people saying that a lot, but I use Zen which is a fork of Firefox and I don't think I've ever had an issue with Turnstile, at least not noticeably more than I had on mobile Chrome.
      • pchew6 hours ago
        Zen has been signed for close to a year.
    • sebzim45006 hours ago
      How does Cloudflare know you are using the fork? Can you not just set the user agent to match firefox's (or even chrome's for that matter)
    • tick_tock_tick6 hours ago
      Isn't it the opposite? They allow you to still use it when it would almost certainly be better for cloudflare and the website behind then to just block you.
  • Retr0id6 hours ago
    Their final design looks incredibly visually unbalanced, the icon on the left does not have enough breathing room on the left and right.
    • connorshinn38 minutes ago
      Honestly the entire "redesign" just feels uninspired and poorly executed.

      Another problem I have with it - they state that the red text was such a huge problem, but then their solution is to... Keep only using red? Why not, for example, make certain non-failure notifications yellow or some other color? Surely using other colors should at least be tested as a solution, right? The whole process seems bizarre to me

    • bitpush5 hours ago
      This. I kept scrolling to find the new version, and couldnt believe that's where they landed on.

      It doesnt .. look very new?

  • diath6 hours ago
    Will this also be accompanied by a global Turnstile outage like all the other Cloudflare services that get touched? If they end up vibeslopping the redesign like they did with this article, it may just happen.
  • jdprgm6 hours ago
    Remember when we used to care about sub 100ms page loading time and now we have introduced a best case 5 second blocker all over the place.
  • stevebmark6 hours ago
    37 em dashes :(
    • upmind6 hours ago
      If this truly was written with AI it's really quite poor. Some of the employees at Cloudflare seem to be negligent tbh based off the fact they've been down so many times recently
    • DavidVoid6 hours ago
      I like em dashes—and sometimes overuse them—but 37 times is absurd in that amount of text.
    • swills4 hours ago
      In a row?
    • mock-possum6 hours ago
      That’d make a good tongue in cheek band name for AI music
  • jiehong4 hours ago
    It’s a checkbox with a loader, and some bike shedding.
  • altern86 hours ago
    CloudFlare might be good for site owners, but many times their page makes me click back to search results.

    I can't be the only one.

    It's slow and annoying, AI overview is good enough for me most of the times so that added time I bet makes websites lose a lot of visits.

    • hsbauauvhabzb5 hours ago
      Infinity captchas left a bad taste in my mouth. I hate AI but hate captchas more.
  • furyofantares6 hours ago
    LLM-ass written content about this widget nobody wants but is necessary due to bots. Fuck off and write the post yourself.
  • masswerk6 hours ago
    > We recruited 8 participants across 8 different countries, deliberately seeking diversity in age, digital savviness, and cultural background.

    > 5 out of 8 points versus just 3 for "I am human." For the verifying state, it was even more dramatic — 7.5 versus 0.5.

    n × p >= 5? (Sample size and margins of errors. Is 5:3 even meaningful or is this rather random personal preference?) Apparent splitting of missing or inconclusive data points? (7.5 vs. 0.5 out of a total of 8 subjects.) What kind of (social) research is this supposed to be?

  • fleroviumna5 hours ago
    [dead]
  • cyanureworld6 hours ago
    [dead]