busybee fluffy rambles

Some comments have happened on certain other sites from my last post about the Comma. Most of them are in the form of, “This person is insane/irresponsible/reckless for doing this.”

Some points:

1. The vertigo attacks are triggered by anxiety, and only last a few seconds. Having the safety net of automatic steering (which is really just fancy lane centering) has cut down on my anxiety significantly, and I haven’t had a vertigo attack while driving ever since I installed the Comma 3X.
2. If an attack were to last more than 1-2 seconds I would still pull over.
3. I have over 30 years of driving experience and have never caused an accident. In fact the only time I’ve ever been in a car accident while driving was when someone rear-ended me at a stoplight. This was 30 years ago.
4. I live in an area with a lot of Teslas, where it is almost certain that many people are using Tesla FSD. I am having the Comma do way less for me than what people — possibly several of the same people making comments questioning my safety — entrust Tesla FSD with. I would absolutely trust Comma’s training process far more than Tesla’s.
5. I am disabled, basically unemployed (and what little work I do, I do it from home), and don’t have reliable access to transportation otherwise. Without the Comma unit I would be completely stuck at home or reliant on Lyft/Uber, which would get very expensive very fast and not allow me to do most of the things I actually need a car for. On days when I’m having worse anxiety/vestibular issues I still don’t drive, I take Lyft or put a trip off. I am still not driving all that much, and I have, so far, about one hour total of drive time with the Comma.
6. I am taking on the full liability of using this device, and I am still in control of the braking and acceleration.
7. Also, notably, even when I have had vertigo attacks while driving, I have never lost control of my vehicle. I just feel like I might, and having a supportive presence is the best thing to pull me out of an anxiety state.

Choose kindness and charity.

Wellp, my whack-a-mole approach finally got to be too much to maintain. The last day or so my server has been absolutely inundated with traffic from thousands of IP blocks, all coming from China, and I got sick of trying to keep up with it myself.

I looked into setting up Anubis and preparing to just whitelist a lot of IndieWeb things, but it’s all just so very overwhelming and for now I’ve gone with Cloudflare, problematic as they are, because the amount of energy I can put into this shrinks every day and sometimes I just want things to stop sucking for a while.

All of my DNS has propagated but of course it’ll be a while before the bots decide to update their own DNS caches, so my server is still getting absolutely hammered, but hopefully things will subside, and in the meantime things are at least responsive.

I guess at some point I’ll have to figure out how to actually set up TLS with Cloudflare (since I’ve been using Letsencrypt wildcard certs but obviously those don’t work anymore when Cloudflare is handling my DNS) but that’s a problem for future me. Also I’ll definitely be on the lookout to make sure that Cloudflare is properly honoring my login cookies. It’d definitely be unfortunate if it gets confused about logins, which is one of the more common failure modes with HTTP proxies.

I’m also super worried that this will interfere with IndieWeb stuff, because of course most of the anti-bot things assume that any traffic coming from data centers or from headless/scriptless user agents is abusive. Which is, y'know, 99.99% accurate, but that 0.01% is stuff I really care about (namely interop).

Anyway. I resent that this is the state of the Internet right now. It’s getting really difficult for me to find anything positive about AI when this is how the industry treats everyone.