929: Cloudflare Blocks AI Crawlers × Debugging Local Data × Raising Kids with Healthy Digital Habits and More

Scott and Wes tackle listener questions on everything from local-first databases and AI-built CRMs to protecting APIs and raising kids with healthy digital habits. They also weigh in on Cloudflare’s AI crawler ban, portfolio critiques, and more hot takes from the dev world. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:49 Dreaming about web components. 02:55 Local-First Apps for Customer Support. Brought to you by Sentry.io 08:17 AI-Built CRM: Portfolio or Problem? Ben Vinegar’s Engineering Interview Strategy. 18:55 InstantDB vs. Other Local-First Databases. 21:46 Raising Kids with Healthy Digital Habits. Porta Potty Prince on TikTok. 32:55 Cloudflare Blocks AI Crawlers. Good for Creators? Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl. Cloudflare No AI Crawl Without Compensation. Chris Coyier’s Blog Response. 41:46 Protecting APIs and Obfuscating Source Code. 44:49 Will Portfolio Critiques Return? 46:45 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs. Sick Picks Scott: Wifi 7 Eero. Wes: Plastic Welder Shameless Plugs Scott: Syntax on YouTube Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. We've got a potluck episode for you today where you bring the questions, we bring the answers. Some really good questions around Cloudflare's new setting to block AI LLMs. So should, if you put content on the internet, should you be blocking LLMs from accessing that? A bunch of local first questions about local databases and syncing data. Kids' digital hygiene, should kids be on YouTube? Should they have iPads? AI projects in a portfolio. This guy vibe-coded a little too close to the sun and now has a product that he's selling. Should that go in your portfolio if you didn't really code it? And obfuscating data via an API, is that something you need to do? So let's get on into it.

• 0:49Wes Bos?

  How's it going today, Scott?

• 0:50Scott Tolinski?

  Hey, I'm doing super good. We were talking about Web Awesome before this recording and I was telling you that I, Web Awesome got into my brain in a very funny way this morning where I had to check on Web Awesome. I kid you not, for no reason in particular, I had a dream last night that was like-

• 1:12Wes Bos?

  About web components?

• 1:13Scott Tolinski?

  That was like, Web Awesome is officially like, complete. And I was like, oh yeah, I'm gonna just dump Web Awesome and everything. Now, Web Awesome, for those of you don't know, it's like a collection of web components formerly, like, based off of like, Shoelace was a collection of web components.

• 1:28Wes Bos?

  Like UI components, carousel, avatar.

• 1:31Scott Tolinski?

  UI components, yeah.

• 1:31Wes Bos?

  Slider, tabs.

• 1:33Scott Tolinski?

  modals. And it's great stuff. I was a Kickstarter back on it. But yeah, I woke up this morning being like, oh, I can't wait to check out that Web Awesome full release. And then I was like, wait a second. When was I looking at that? I wasn't looking at that. And then it hit me that I was in a dream. This is my life, apparently.

• 1:55Scott Tolinski?

  I am going to be using it today, though. I do, I do, I think it's neat. So I'm stoked to actually dive in. It looks like their beta has gotten a little bit further along. How are you doing today, Wes? Did you have any dreams about web components?

• 2:09Wes Bos?

  I did not have any dreams about web components, but I'm a, I'm a big fan of, of web components. We've talked about this many times. I'm a big fan of using web components. I don't necessarily love writing them myself.

• 2:21Scott Tolinski?

  Somebody else can do that, yeah.

• 2:22Wes Bos?

  But when it comes to something like, like UI or obviously the media chrome video player from Mux is an awesome example of cross browser implementation. And that's great because you can have somebody build a really hard thing, which is a video player that does absolutely everything. And then you just get to use it in React or Vanilla or whatever framework you want to use. And I'm a big fan of that approach.

• 2:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, same here. Yeah. So let's get into it. Today we have an awesome Potluck episode for y'all. And we can kick off the very first question here from Sam. How to do customer support in a local first app? So they're asking really, how do you even consider doing customer support when the data lives locally? So a customer support rep will typically log into a customer's account and view and change their data, but they are only seeing a single customer for up to one hour. Seems like this use case doesn't fit local first, but the alternative is to write a whole new regular backend, front ends for the back office app.

• 3:31Scott Tolinski?

  You could share an agnostic TypeScript library for logic perhaps, but a bit too much work, right? What do you think? So I, I think Sam might be thinking about this as being like, in our scenario, when we are trying to like at, at where Sam works, when they tried to debug someone else's app, they, they typically, they get access to that, that customer, maybe like through, what do they call that?

• 3:56Wes Bos?

  Like you spoof it, you log in as a customer, right?

• 3:59Scott Tolinski?

  But there's a word for it. And I believe it starts with an I, but the only word that's coming to me is Improvise for some reason, you're pretending to be that user so that way you can experience the app as that user. It's a very common way that that people are able to access this. In fact, I just saw the run on Twitter the other day where somebody was saying, "Hey, I just viewed the app as you on Twitter and your feed looks fine." So even Twitter can do this, folks, if you're wondering about that. Either way, they're wondering, if the data's all living locally, in a local-first context, how do you even begin to be able to see the app from their perspective, given that the data's living locally?

• 4:41Scott Tolinski?

  Now, so this is interesting, but ultimately, a lot of these local-first-style apps do end up syncing to a server, meaning that you should be able to still do the same thing, where you are masquerading as that user, seeing the app with their data.

• 5:01Wes Bos?

  Yes, it's local-first, not entirely local, right?

• 5:04Scott Tolinski?

  Correct. And if it was the case that it's local only, you should be able to have enough tests and robustness in your data that you can make sure that you're using the app. Or you're using something like Sentry that is reporting back what's going on, or you're having error logs that tells you what exactly is happening in the application. So you shouldn't always just need that user's exact data to dial in on any bug. That said, many times in local-first, that is syncing, right? If you're wondering why, like, or how people do this in general,

• 5:45Scott Tolinski?

  I think the best place to look for general concepts would be like native iOS apps or native Android apps. Tons of those are using data only on the device, and they're debugging them based on crash analytics, they're debugging them based on observability, things like Sentry, those things to be able to understand where the errors are happening, not necessarily always, just impersonating the user. Impersonating is the I-word.

• 6:16Scott Tolinski?

  Just said it.

• 6:16Wes Bos?

  Impersonating. That's, I just found it on Better Off, because we talked about this in the Better Off thing, and I was like, "Yeah, I'm looking for it. I'm darting around impersonation session duration."

• 6:26Scott Tolinski?

  Why, that's a weird non-word recall right there. So that's how you debug this type of thing. You don't always need the user's data. There's a lot of other alternatives to masquerading, or I've already lost the word.

• 6:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 6:39Scott Tolinski?

  Improvising. It's not the right word.

• 6:41Wes Bos?

  Impersonation.

• 6:43Scott Tolinski?

  Impersonation. So, that's it, Sam. Not too much there. Yeah.

• 6:47Wes Bos?

  I think, I think the important thing that you said there is, things can break, and when it only happens locally on the user's computer. So this, this happens even with local storage, where you write a bit of code, and you assume that, like, for example, often people will take like an object, they'll JSON stringify it, and they'll throw that into local storage. But for some, for whatever reason, you throw something into local storage, and it doesn't get stored as a string properly, right? It might just be undefined, and then you try JSON parse the, the string of undefined, and then it, and then it's broken, right? So, what can happen there? Like, I, I've certainly had that on my own website. I'll store the, like, the playback rate, and whether or not

• 7:32Wes Bos?

  the user has captions on or off. I'll throw that in local storage. And, and you assume, I've, I've assumed in the past, that those things will always parse out to like a Boolean or an object with a, with a rate property on it. But for whatever reason, maybe they changed it themselves, maybe you saved it improperly. If it's not there, then the, the website will break if you don't have error handling in there. So, what you'll want to do is, is A, catch those exceptions, and then you can send like a snapshot of what that data looks like along to, to your sentry, something like that. And that's like, the kind of the one, like, scary thing, because you can't just like, refresh. Your code is assuming something is going to be there. But that's more of a coding problem, not just a local first problem.

• 8:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, totally. Exactly.

• 8:18Wes Bos?

  Question from Will. I'm a freelancer and I have a few customers have done okay, but not well enough to quit my job to live off freelancing. I gave up applying for tech jobs over a year ago and decided I needed to build something significant with my skills to build my portfolio. One of my projects was to build a CRM I could use for myself with freelancing. One thing followed another and suddenly a customer wanted to pay me for my CRM. So this is very common thing. You build a product to scratch your own itch and then realize, oh, other people actually want this thing as well. So suddenly I went into build fast and break things mode. I used chat GPT and Claude to help me write

• 8:58Wes Bos?

  it. And now I have a decently early version of a CRM that's working well with the basics and the customer is happy with the direction that's going. Using AI, I wrote the whole base site in like two months and I've been adding polish for the last three months. It's complex enough. Like I feel like in times of 2022, it would have taken me over a year to build it and would have been a significant accomplishment for a solo dev. But this was supposed to be a portfolio project and now I have an app that's 95% written by AI. And while I was just a babysitter and code reviewer. In your opinion, is this the world that we live in? Should I use this as a portfolio project? The backend is Python

• 9:38Wes Bos?

  and I can 100% go over everything and talk about what it's doing, how and why. The frontend is React and honestly, there is some JSX components that I know what it is doing and why. But the how is a little sketchy. I feel like it could be a gotcha moment in an interview. What should I do? So should I be putting this thing as a portfolio project? So there's two camps that I'm in here right now, right?

• 10:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Wes Bos?

  First of all, I am so excited that we live in a world where you can build something. That you previously could not have have possibly ever done in in a sane amount of time or or even at all, just not having this skill like, hell, yeah, I love that. But on the flip side is you just generated like a whole bunch of of technical debt where you I don't think you should in good faith, put customer data in something where you have admitted that things are a little bit sketchy, right? Yes. There's been tons of stories every week you hear about a new thing where there's a database has been left open, something gets deleted, there's security issues, there's all this type of stuff.

• 10:47Wes Bos?

  So I think what's gonna happen is that these apps, like I've certainly built my fair share of like vibe coded apps and then I'm frustrated like right now, I'm I'm working on this LED grid thing with the ESP32 and I vibed a little bit too hard. Nah. Point where I just scrapped so much of it because it was such a mess and I I felt like I couldn't get out of it, you know? So I just scrapped it and rewrote rewrote it mostly by myself. So those things get really hard to maintain. It gets really hard to solve bugs, performance problems, and I do think AI will get better at those things, but at least right now, it's gonna be a very hard thing.

• 11:31Wes Bos?

  So the question, that really wasn't the question, but the question was, should this be a portfolio project? Hmm. I don't know that this necessarily matters or is not going to matter for much longer because people, people are gonna lie about this stuff regardless, right? People are already using AI to to do interviews, to be able to nail questions to to the take home exam is is pretty much a dead thing right now. The the coding assignments, all of these things, I'll say, I think are are dead because everybody can spoof them and it's really hard for people hiring to be able to suss out who is real and and who is not.

• 12:12Wes Bos?

  So if you are looking to get a a job from this type of thing, I would probably say that it was partially done with AI. AI, but I don't know that the portfolio is going to be a huge push unless you can clearly prove that you know exactly what's going on. And if they were to bring up your code base and say, hey, explain how X, Y, and Z, or explain like a problem that you hit, or explain how this React component is handling drag and drop. And if you're not able to do that, like I think a lot of people are moving back to in-person interviews specifically for this because you can suss out the people that don't actually know what they're doing.

• 12:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, that is a whole thing with with AI that I think people who have a long career in programming will will notice much faster than people who don't know what they're doing or have much less time is that things can appear fine on the surface, but there can be such a rat's nest of code brewing if you don't know what's happening. If you're not like, if you get too much into vibe mode, as you said, like you're Weekend at Bernie's-ing it. I think that that's like, that to me is like the you vibe too hard and now you are Weekend at Bernie's. You are

• 13:34Scott Tolinski?

  Lomax. You are getting carried around. You have no idea what's going on in your application and it's just kind of gotten out of control. Like I see that all the time with with apps that people have pushed that are clearly AI and you can see it sometimes as like, oh, this is a weird overflow text issue or something on their landing page.

• 13:54Wes Bos?

  Or the purple. Have you heard about the purple problem?

• 13:57Scott Tolinski?

  Where it's just using the same purple color or what?

• 14:00Wes Bos?

  You just like you ask AI to make any website and it's always purple. It's and I think a lot of that comes from like the Tailwind examples. But it's very hard to make it not build a website that either looks like Bootstrap or is very, very purple.

• 14:18Scott Tolinski?

  I can spot those those layouts a mile away, too. And like, You can tell if something, if someone has no experience because they'll push stuff live and it's just like, yeah, you got it done, but at what cost? So there's, an important thing to know is if you are going to be using these tools and you want it to be a portfolio project, you can use AI still, but you gotta baby it, you gotta monitor it very closely. You gotta be like, you have to act as that code reviewer and know exactly what's happening. The thing that I noticed the most in my own work when I use agents or anything like that is like,

• 15:01Scott Tolinski?

  they'll slightly add some CSS here that might already exist here and that CSS drift, or that duplicating that, uh, repeating yourself.

• 15:09Wes Bos?

  The duplicating is the worst, yeah.

• 15:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Wes Bos?

  I've had a problem recently where it does fall back. You tell it to do something differently and it keeps the old code around.

• 15:19Scott Tolinski?

  Totally.

• 15:19Wes Bos?

  And then it just, it says, okay, well, if that doesn't work, we'll fall back to that. And then, and then, and before you know it, you've got so much of this just spaghetti code that you, it's very hard to maintain.

• 15:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, or even bad UI choices. Look, let's make this a modal or something like that. So you have to keep a, a close eye on it. The CSS drift is a big one. The, the duplication is a big one. And to me, like, being on top of those things is what takes it from being, I dumped out some, you know, slop to,

• 15:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Scott Tolinski?

  this is something that I, I, I created with the help of AI, not AI created while I, I babysat it, kind of, you know, make it work.

• 16:05Wes Bos?

  From a business point of view, I, I think it's, it's kinda awesome because like what you did is essentially you just found product market fit for something that you may not have been able to do. And, and now maybe, maybe this is a potential business where you'll go down the road and obviously there'll be a bit of pain of, of this thing that you gotta clean up, but people are gonna be paying you. Maybe you can start actually like rebuilding it and doing it properly and potentially even hire someone at one point, so. That's pretty cool.

• 16:34Scott Tolinski?

  Cleanup is not impossible either. Cleanup by hand, yeah. If you want to add it to your portfolio, I would clean it up. You know, cuz I'm gonna judge your portfolio by the quality of the code. And if you don't know what's happening and I look at that and I see these are a lot of crazy choices being made in this thing, then I'm going to assume, uh, you don't know what you're doing, uh, and that's not going to look good on you. Even if like I use the app and I'm like, oh, this is kinda neat. I go in the code. I'm like, what the hell? To me, that that would, uh, look poorly upon you.

• 17:10Wes Bos?

  Even if it's like a, like an open source project as well, like if you throw that thing up on GitHub, somebody is, uh, someone would be able to like look, uh, at the issues and all of the commit history and, and see, were you just adding, adding, adding, adding features? Or was there, like, is there some commits where it's simply just like, like the, oh, I forgot, no wait here, or like some very simple, some of those times of those very simple fixes where it took you half an hour to figure out or an hour to figure it out and it was just a little tweak.

• 17:43Scott Tolinski?

  You know, it's also wild too, is I think there's a class of developer and I want to say, I don't even know if I'm calling these people developers. They're like more like the maker type of person. I mean, not a maker, but like the serial, the indie hacker type who's gonna say, who cares as long as it works? I'm using it. It works. It's got users. Well, folks, uh, it matters, you know, code quality matters, security matters, all these things matter. And you know, it for matters for a long term, it matters for the reputation of your work. It matters for the reputation of your company. Next thing you know, you're pushing on an app that has, uh, some sort of security hole

• 18:27Scott Tolinski?

  that leaks sensitive information, perhaps like what driver's license photos of all of the users of your dating app, like that one happened. So you never know. You, you, it matters, folks, and don't let these indie hacker types who are just all about, uh, wanting to sell their book about how I made $10,000 by, uh, shoving some slop into the App Store. Don't let those folks influence you. Next question from E. I'd love to hear Scott's take on Instant DB and how it stacks up to other local first DBs. I just built a prototype with it and love it, but I want to know the pros and cons compared to others such as Xero or Electric. Instant DB instantly

• 19:12Scott Tolinski?

  made me pre-stoked when I use it because I got a lot done very quickly with Instant DB. And people who have used something like Firebase or those types of things where it does a lot for you will really like Instant DB. It's got realtime stuff. It felt like, ooh, this is like very meteor-like in terms of how easy it is to get up and running. The thing about Instant DB is that they're new and when you are saying, "I'm going to use Instant DB," what you're saying is, "I'm going to bet, I'm placing a bet that Instant DB will

• 19:55Scott Tolinski?

  be around as long as my project will be around." So if your project is just something you're hacking together or whatever, hey, Instant DB is probably going to be there. How long is Instant DB going to be around? What happens if they don't get enough paying customers? It's, you know, 30 bucks a month. What happens if that doesn't happen? And then they shut down. Then you got to figure out, "My entire app is engineered around this paid service that exists in the cloud." Now, I have heard that you can host your own Instant DB. There are no docs for that. I just checked somewhat recently. So if that's changed, it's changed

• 20:35Scott Tolinski?

  to very recently. I've been told it's possible, but you have to figure it out yourself. So there's that. Maybe there would be a community of people kind of self-hosting this thing at that point. But the big concern is that their funding runs out, they don't hit their targets, they get pulled, they shut down, and now all of a sudden you're like... What do I do? Where with something like zero, it sits in front of a normal ass Postgres database. Zero stops being developed. Well, one, you could just continue to use the latest version of it. Two, if you want to move off of it, you don't have to export or manage

• 21:18Scott Tolinski?

  your data, put it into a new database or something. You just have your Postgres database and you own that. So to me, you have to weigh, you know, is the ease of use and that kind of stuff worth it? Now, like I said, I really liked it when I used it, but it depends on, you know, I was just building a demo with it and, and, you know, just something to think. Not that instant is bad. It's great. But yeah, that's what you have to, to think about.

• 21:46Wes Bos?

  This next one's really interesting. It's about kids and, and being on computers. So my fiance and I are expecting our first born this November. Congratulations. It'll be a while before he's touching devices and L L Ms. It's a while to me that we're even talking about kids touching L L Ms. But I was curious to hear what has worked for your families when it comes to digital hygiene? How do you teach them about devices as tools versus toys or manage screen time and our network controls? What vibes do your partners come up with? What worked or definitely did not work? Man, I could, I could talk about this all day because I was certainly wrong about a lot of

• 22:25Wes Bos?

  stuff. It's a constant battle. So all of our kids have iPads and they, they love going on their iPads, but it's, it's a constant battle. First of all, I've, I've said in the past how much I like my kids watching like interesting YouTube videos. Very wrong about that. YouTube is awful, awful, awful, awful. It is so bad. There, what happens is you, we, we gave them like the YouTube Kids app and you're like, yeah, you can watch like a thing on like how to build X, Y, or Z. And then before you know it, you just, there's like these like Russian kids playing with toys and these obviously parents just milking their children for these videos. And then there's like these

• 23:05Wes Bos?

  crazy YouTube shorts that are like meant to just control their brains on. And they're just, there's so much awful stuff on YouTube to a point where we're like, No, none, none of it. We can watch Mark Rober on the big TV.

• 23:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 23:22Wes Bos?

  And then that's it, you know, because it just, it starts getting away from you. And then before you know it, they're watching just like the most awful, like brain rot YouTube stuff out there. And I absolutely hate it. So that Apple's, Apple has a screen time on their app, which is also awful. It do not think that anybody at Apple has kids because the management around what they can access, which apps they have, what webs, the, the being able to

• 23:52Scott Tolinski?

  Dude.

• 23:52Wes Bos?

  To show you what websites someone can visit. It's literally a list of domain names. That's it. There's no other tools and it's on your iPhone, like buried nine levels deep and it drives me nuts how awful the screen time.

• 24:09Scott Tolinski?

  I've, I've found I couldn't even get the kids to be able to turn on Netflix with their kid profile. If they had like parental controls on, I, I, I was like searching everywhere. I'm like, how do I get this? They can watch Netflix kids? While they're on the airplane, if I have the parental control setting and it was like, you just can't, you gotta turn it all off. Look.

• 24:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Who?

• 24:32Wes Bos?

  The amount of times that I've just rage turned it off or like the, the ability to install an app and then the ads. I think I'm going to turn on the like DNS level ad blocking. What's that?

• 24:44Scott Tolinski?

  I need to do that too. Pie hole. Yeah. I need to do that. Yeah.

• 24:47Wes Bos?

  What happens is they have these games and then there's, there's like ads in the games, which I understand because like some of these games are like, like, like a $40 a month or whatever. So some of the, the free ones we can watch, but then they put ads that are games and they let the kids start playing the game in the ad. And then it's like, we gotta download this thing. This is awesome. Motorbikes driving over candy hills. And then they're like, we, I want this. And then, and then you're like, oh, well, maybe that's a kind of a cool one. Then you download it. And then there's just aggressive, dark tactics trying to get you to buy the app for like 79 bucks a month for, for this. So I would say be, block everything by default and just permissively add in things and don't.

• 25:31Wes Bos?

  Don't just be like, ah, whatever. It's, it's probably fine because it's, it's none of it is, is fine. They've got their whole lives to, to go on the internet and, and to watch all of this stuff. But I just, I'm so exhausted with trying to have to manage this stuff and be able to like let things through and, and whatnot. It's, it's a pain in the butt. So I would say if I were to go back, I, I don't even sure if I would buy an iPod if, if, if we went back.

• 25:57Scott Tolinski?

  An iPad or an iPod?

• 25:59Wes Bos?

  An iPad, you know, I don't, I don't know if I would, if I would give them those.

• 26:05Scott Tolinski?

  No.

• 26:05Wes Bos?

  It's like, a part of it is awesome. It's nice. They just chill and they play games together. They, they play Roblox. Um, and to make sure you turn off all the chat and everything like that. And I, and I, I think it's fine. But then there's games inside of Roblox that are called killing people with poop. And then we're like, you can't play that game inside of Roblox. You have to play dress to impress. And that one is okay. But then like those other ones are not fine. And then it's just like, why do I have to spend all of my time managing this? Like every single thing, like, and I understand they're my kids. I have, I have to manage it. But there's just every single time you give them something, you realize, oh shoot, there's a whole world inside of this Roblox.

• 26:47Wes Bos?

  With all this awful stuff in there. And now we gotta make sure that you're not, my kid was driving buses into trains, you know?

• 26:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. You know what? We've avoided Roblox and, uh, I don't think my kid even knows what it is. Thankfully he's probably going to find out about it at school sometime.

• 27:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Scott Tolinski?

  But, uh, yeah, no, I, here's how the iPads work in our house. We have one, which is my old, old iPad that lives in an up cabinet they can't get to. And when they want to use it, it's typically, or when they get to use it, it's typically like on airplanes. Or like right now, my son got invited to. Uh, go to the theme park. And so our daughter's really bummed out. So we're like, all right, we'll give you some iPad time. We'll give you some Nintendo Switch time, whatever, as a way to, you know, make you feel like you're getting to do something special. But for the iPads for us, we pretty much like turn them into media consumption devices only, like watching Netflix.

• 27:45Scott Tolinski?

  Or there's PBS games or like a handful of games on them. But they are distinctly like very kid games or educational games, which uh, they can't install anything. So that's why they exist. And our kids have taken up, if they're gonna play video games, it's on the Nintendo Switch. And that's great because he can't install anything. He can't buy anything. He can't access the internet on it. But he can play Pokemon and my daughter can play Mario Party and you don't have to worry about that. I mean, it's Mario. You don't have to worry about Mario uh, playing games where they're killing people with poop or, you know, uh, violence or that kind of thing. And they, and they'll go nuts.

• 28:27Wes Bos?

  Same thing with Netflix. Netflix is so much easier than YouTube because it's like, like there's lots of really good stuff on there. My kids watch like baking competitions and stuff.

• 28:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, it's all kids stuff. And, and so, and, and so as long as I can keep them in that lane, it works for me. And so, I, there was a moment where our kids were like, really like, latched onto YouTube kids and they found out how to install the app on the TV. And like, I would delete the app. They would come downstairs early in the morning and reinstall the app and then turn on YouTube. And I'm just like, I, Samsung's not giving me the tools to be able to prevent people from installing stuff. So we just had to have a real big talk with them. It's like, you know, um, and luckily they, they've, they've kept with it. But yeah, it is, this is the tough part. So for, for me, it's like the internet usage with them is like kind of,

• 29:17Scott Tolinski?

  currently very media consumption, playing games and learning things. And otherwise they just don't get access to any of it. And yeah, it's working out for us right now, but we're getting to the ages where our son is learning how to use an actual laptop and he is good at typing and um, you wanna have those tools, but at the same time, yeah, it's a tough stuff.

• 29:41Wes Bos?

  You want, you want them to be able to, to create things. You want them to do all the research. You want them to look it up like. My daughter asked the other day, like, like, how do porta potties get cleaned? I was like, yeah, let's look it up. Let's watch video. There's like a whole TikToker, the porta potty prince on TikTok.

• 29:57Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, wow.

• 29:57Wes Bos?

  And he just like details, that's interesting stuff, you know? And like, I grew up with unfettered access to the internet. And look at me now, look at me now, you know?

• 30:07Scott Tolinski?

  I didn't know.

• 30:08Wes Bos?

  Okay, well, look at me now.

• 30:09Scott Tolinski?

  My parents had to lock me into dial up.

• 30:11Wes Bos?

  I owe my career to that, you know? I owe so much of my life because I was a curious kid that wanted to know how stuff worked. And I had access to absolutely everything that I wanted. And like, I even think that about the iPads is like, this, this thing is just not as good of a creation tool as like a desktop computer is. But like, the kids don't seem to want to go on it. We have like a whole desktop computer. They don't seem to want to go on that as well. And I want them to build stuff and I want them to research stuff, but it's, it's a, it's a delicate balance.

• 30:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know what, you know what? The, the other app my, my son has on the iPad, other than media consumption stuff is Bamboo, Bamboo Labs.

• 30:53Wes Bos?

  Oh, man.

• 30:55Scott Tolinski?

  He could 3D print whatever he wants and I'm fine with that. I showed him, he goes down there and he changes all the filaments. He knows how to do it all. He can get four of them set up and print his Pokemon or whatever he wants to print. But yeah, it's like, that's okay.

• 31:07Wes Bos?

  I gave them access to Maker World to, to be able to search for the things there. And then I also gave them access to Shaper 3D. And they have, they have the iPad pencils and, and they're learning how like, make, make, they're doing the tutorials and whatnot. And, and those are, those are kind of fun. And we're also dipping in, one of my daughters did a coding camp. And she's like, I really like this. Is this what you do? I was like, yes, I've been, I like, I've been waiting for this moment. People always ask me, how do you teach kids to code? And I think we're finally there where we're starting to dip into kids wanting to, to learn how to code stuff. So we're, we're going through all the apps right now, trying to figure out, like, you know, there's like Scratch, but it's like a little bit too babyish for her. She wants something a little, she's like, no, I want to actually see the code.

• 31:52Wes Bos?

  But then like, she can't write the code directly. So there's delicate balance. Tweet me your tips or email me your tips about kids coding, because I think I'm about to get into that.

• 32:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, interesting. I, I made Landon do his 3D project in Fusion, so.

• 32:10Wes Bos?

  That's great.

• 32:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, he used the mouse. I made him use. I'm like, I'm not touching the computer, but I will help you with the math. I will tell you what to do, but you're doing it. Either way, Digital Dad, it's a tough one out there. I'll tell you that.

• 32:22Wes Bos?

  My one more tip is iMovie. We give our kids.

• 32:25Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, to make movies?

• 32:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we do not put a limit on iMovie or the camera. And that means that if they're ever bored, they are allowed to make movies. And they'll, they'll like, they'll make hilarious things, you know, and they, they do all the sounds and we go to YouTube and download like the, what is it? The SpongeBob? Three minutes later.

• 32:46Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 32:47Wes Bos?

  You know, just all the meme sounds. Like I make sure that they have all the meme sounds and then they make these hilarious videos and they can send them to their friends.

• 32:54Scott Tolinski?

  I love it. All right. Next question from Bloom. Related to a question from my potluck question. Last week about AI being the primary way people browse the web and what that means for the original creators and their revenue. Yes. What do you think of CloudFlare's announcement on July 1st about blocking AI crawlers by default? It's basically a setting in CloudFlare that you then have to go in and turn on to allow AI crawlers to crawl your, your stuff.

• 33:25Wes Bos?

  No, this is, hold on. Let's, let's stop it right there. This is not on by default.

• 33:30Scott Tolinski?

  I thought it was on, okay.

• 33:31Wes Bos?

  There was a couple of people on Twitter that said it was on by default for theirs and I'm not sure what came of that. I think that was a mistake, but it is not turned on by default for all accounts. I went into my own account because I was like, I think, I think I want AI.

• 33:46Scott Tolinski?

  Man, I got misinformationed there. I got, man.

• 33:51Wes Bos?

  But that's the problem is that like these, these people on Twitter will just post that because it like, it does numbers, right? And then you get the whole like, the, I don't know, all these companies hate each other. So all of them are retweeting it being like, CloudFlare is blocking your, your site by default.

• 34:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's, yeah. That's a genre I'm getting a little tired of is the, uh, the CEO flaming each other on Twitter.

• 34:17Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Scott Tolinski?

  Maybe it's just grumpy, yeah.

• 34:20Wes Bos?

  No, no, that's, that's very, there's, it's very, well, let's say it, it's very evident that Versal and Cloudflare had a breaking up over the past year because they were, it used to be very worked together. Lots of Cloudflare products were in, in Versal and whatnot. Um, and then about a year ago, it seems like Versal, it was like, we're gonna do this all of ourselves. And then there's lots of, lots of flame wars between them all.

• 34:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no thanks. So what do we think about Cloudflare's announcement about being able to block AI crawlers? And so like you said, it is apparently not by default. As this comment and my assumption says. So what do we think about it? I guess it changes if it's not by default. If it's not by default, then my opinion on this changes. Uh, which I honestly don't know if I have an informed, intelligent, deep opinion on this. For me, I get it from both perspectives. I, as somebody who has spent a lot of time creating YouTube videos, creating my own content

• 35:32Scott Tolinski?

  that I've worked really, really hard to make over my entire career, would be extremely bummed out if an LLM is all of a sudden scooped up everything that I've ever said and then used that. But that said, I don't know if there's anything that we can do to generally stop that from happening.

• 35:53Wes Bos?

  So on that podcast she's referring to, I asked, I said, you know who? I want to get their opinion on this. And I said, I want to hear about Chris Coyier.

• 36:01Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 36:02Wes Bos?

  What he thought, because he built his entire career writing stuff and putting it out there, right? And he actually wrote a blog post in response to me asking, like, what are his thoughts on, on AI and content creators? And I'll, I'll link to the blog post because I think it was really well informed. But one of the things- He said is all it'll stop when there's no longer any incentive to do so, which is referring to creating content. But those incentives are various. Money is one of them. That was a partial motivator for me, being able to support myself and my family, partially through advertising content was important. But I also found it to be fun and mentally rewarding, like it gave my life purpose, even if the money wanes, those incentives may endure for many. And that's a

• 36:47Wes Bos?

  really good point is that like, I love this stuff, obviously, because I can, I can make money doing it. But like, I didn't, I didn't get into this stuff because of the money. I got into, I want to share because I'm excited about it, you know, and it's really fun to be able to share and other people can can enjoy that content, you know, like, I post bazillion TikToks and I don't make a dime from them. And I do that because I literally love showing people about this type of stuff.

• 37:19Scott Tolinski?

  I first made my very first YouTube video on Drupal, because I was pissed off that I was in an IRC channel and talking to somebody. And I was like, why is this happening? And they're like, oh, you just need to do it like this. I'm like, where's the documentation for like that? Well, there isn't any. And I said, how are people supposed to know this? They gotta go to IRC to figure this out? Like, what's the deal? What's the deal? Yeah.

• 37:47Wes Bos?

  I want to help other people. He says, as long as there are incentive to create technical content, people will and AI will continue to train on it. That does frame it as an adversarial relationship, which is a bummer. Go read this. I think that that was really interesting. I think that you certainly should have, just like you should be able to block search engines from accessing your site, you should also be able to block AIs from accessing your content. There's a whole nother camp of people who think that this is a stupid idea, because. Why would like, it's like blocking search engines. You want AIs to know about your content so that they can, they can send it. And I think that that's more if you're asking a business like,

• 38:29Wes Bos?

  what coding podcasts should I, should I be reading versus like, I just spent $20,000 researching X, Y, and Z, and now I just slurped it all up and summarized it. So I think it's a great thing that you can be able to block it. Will I turn it on? I don't think I will, because at the end of the day, I just love being able to share this type of stuff. And as, as a user, I certainly love when an LLM can slurp all this stuff up and give me the thing without having to read somebody's life story.

• 39:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I know. There's different classifications. And I think my opinion on it definitely will waver into the territory of somebody who simultaneously wants it and doesn't want it at the same time for various reasons. And unfortunately, I think it just depends on the, the problem that I find myself in and how I'm feeling in that particular day.

• 39:27Wes Bos?

  One thing I'm, I am curious about is like, what does the cost of these things look like? Because you, you do, you ask ChatGPT one thing, it slurps out 50 websites, you know? And, and if that happens, you look at any stats, you look at stats to a website.

• 39:46Scott Tolinski?

  You're talking about your bandwidth. Yeah.

• 39:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah, bandwidth or compute, all of that type of stuff where it will simply just, it's, it gets more expensive as, as you do. Look at NPM, look at any graph on NPM. It's like they've all doubled in the last year or so, you know? GitHub's footing the bill for, for downloading all of that, that type of stuff. It's, it's costing somebody at some point to do this type of stuff. Your database reads, your compute, your, if you're not caching a page, it can get expensive. So like, and then think about video and whatnot as they're, they're slurping up the video. Like this is costing real people real money. And I don't know if it's significant yet, but I think we'll probably get to a point where.

• 40:30Wes Bos?

  It is significant and is does is there any benefit to that?

• 40:34Scott Tolinski?

  It is weird how the AI companies, they kind of like bypass all these IP laws. They kind of bypass, they're just putting the bill on other people for all kinds of stuff. And it's just like, we're all like, yeah, this is how it is like, yeah, very weird to me.

• 40:49Wes Bos?

  I even asked Adam Wathon that, I'm like, how does it feel to have? Like he wrote Tailwind and all these L L Ms are cranking out Tailwind code all day long, making billions of dollars or making millions at least of dollars being able to generate it. Right. And then just something he created and that's, that's open source in general, I guess. But I would feel a little bit cheesed, be like, hey, can I just have like, like a one billion for making this thing that every L L M does?

• 41:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Could you just hook me up like, yeah, just, I know.

• 41:26Wes Bos?

  Cool bill.

• 41:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I always thought about that. It's like, oh, man, it'd be really cool. If anybody that you ever did something nice for, then they ended up getting ultra wealthy at some point, we're just to like, send you a check for, here's just a million bucks. I got enough of them. Like, yeah, I'll take it. Thank you. That'd be great.

• 41:44Wes Bos?

  Pretty sweet. Yeah.

• 41:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Wes Bos?

  Next question from John Ray. What is your view on source code and public backend API data obfuscation? Is JavaScript minification sufficient or should I also add the code? I'm not sure what he means there. Regarding the backend API, suppose I run a food recipe website with no user login where the front end fetches the data directly from the backend API. Should I obfuscate or otherwise protect my data returned from the API? I'm worried that other consumers will essentially steal my data. What are the best practices in this scenario? Yeah, this is, this is a tricky one because. You run an API with data and you do that for your own website or for people who

• 42:31Wes Bos?

  pay you to have access to it. But anybody can pop open DevTools and reverse engineer. And I've got plenty of videos on how to do that. I've done it myself quite a bit. And some websites don't want you doing that because they don't want you simply just scraping all of their data or using their APIs in your own application, right? Twitter is aggressive, super aggressive against it, although I got around it. And Instagram, very, very aggressive. Again, I got around that one as well. But like, it's a constant cat and mouse game, both because of the data, but also because of like, if they're like writable APIs, people use those to spam, unfortunately.

• 43:10Wes Bos?

  It's really hard. So I would probably say, don't do it until it becomes a problem, until you realize, oh, somebody is actually using it, using this API without my permission or LLM is using it to slurp up all of the recipes and put it into their own. What can you do? You essentially need to just create like session tokens where when somebody tries to view something, the token has to come along with it. And in order to get a session token, you have to like load the page properly. So often if you'll try to like, even accessing like JPEGs or something that live on like an AWS bucket, you have

• 43:54Wes Bos?

  to first get, like load the page and then that sends off a request to get a token and then the token comes back. So you have to make it a multi-step thing in order for someone to get it. Data obfuscation on an API, I don't know that you could do that because it's, you'd have to de-obfuscate it on the client and the client code is going to be visible.

• 44:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Wes Bos?

  Public.

• 44:20Scott Tolinski?

  The problem is, John, is that if anybody wants to slurp, they're gonna slurp. I mean, you can't stop the slurp is really what is the problem. So if, yeah, slurp slurp, you can't stop it. I mean, if anybody wants to do that, they're going to. So can you protect your data? Yeah, you can try, but there's no, if it's, if it's available on the internet publicly, it is.

• 44:48Scott Tolinski?

  Available. Yeah.

• 44:50Wes Bos?

  Brian from Little Rock. Will y'all ever bring back portfolio critiques? We used to do something called a syntax highlight where we would critique your website. And we stopped doing it because A, sucks on audio. Like you can't see what we're talking about and B, it just kind of got repetitive. I think, you know, kind of the same thing. People will still send me their portfolios and I don't mind doing a quick little, hey, this looks good. Or if there's like things that are like very clearly pointing out like kind of cringey or like huge red flags. I'll throw my screen recorder on for two seconds and be like, hey, you should, you should change this. What do you think? I, I, I think they weren't very good.

• 45:33Scott Tolinski?

  I think we should, now that we're on video, we should at least do one and once a year or something. But I don't think we need to do them regularly. So will we bring them back? I think we should do one again sometime, but I don't think it needs to be a regular segment or anything. For the reasons that you mentioned, also a do a massive portion of our audience still listens only on audio. So that would.

• 45:56Wes Bos?

  It would be a YouTube only video if we did it. Also, I, I much prefer doing like, check out this cool thing that somebody did. I think that those are really interesting, you know? Go through a whole bunch of websites and find little tidbits of neat CSS techniques or performance things. Those are, those are kind of fun to do.

• 46:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And perhaps it would work well as a live stream. I was on a live stream doing resume, resume grading and stuff like that. And I think that worked really well. So, you know, maybe that's the type of thing that would work well for.

• 46:31Wes Bos?

  All right. That's the potluck. Please keep the questions coming. Go to syntax.fm in the URL bar, there's or in the nav, there's something that says potluck cues. Hit that button and fill out your potluck question, send it to us. We will answer it on upcoming episode. Let's move into the next section, which is sick picks and shameless plugs. You got a sick pick for me today?

• 46:52Scott Tolinski?

  I have a sick pick for you, Wes. I. I've jumped into the world, the might, many will call it premature world of Wi-Fi 7. Whoa. I have gotten an Amazon Eero router that is a Wi-Fi 7 mesh router. And there's a whole bunch of them of various different sizes on Amazon for whatever you need. And I got this for many reasons. My current routers were fine, but my Ethernet was pretty slow throughout my house in general. I do have enough Wi-Fi 7-based devices that I thought it would improve my life.

• 47:35Scott Tolinski?

  And it was on the big time sale when I got it. And I have got to say that I was very cautious about the Amazon Eero router. Given that you have a lot of people being like, all right, they're trying to nickel and dime you with this. There is like a subscription thing that gives you access to pie hole-like functionality. I could roll my own, so it's like, it doesn't bother me. None of the paid feature, like all of the paid features are stuff that would be nice to have in the app. But none of them are things that I'm like dying to have, or I feel like that I need to pay for the app for some reason. Um, so yeah, some people will be turned off by that.

• 48:18Scott Tolinski?

  But as far as routers go, I was able to set up this router and change my entire setup. While my father-in-law sat like right next to me in about 15 minutes. And I was so shocked because when you're dealing with especially like fiber and fiber networks, when you're dealing with the, whatever those, they lock down the routers. I forget what the codes are. You need certain codes and stuff. Oh, yeah. It shocked at how easily, one, I was able to get everything all linked up so that the router could be authorized with my fiber provider. But two, um, all my settings just came in automatically. The app is really super good.

• 49:03Scott Tolinski?

  And as somebody who's been using a Amplify-based system, the app is so much better.

• 49:10Scott Tolinski?

  And I was just so like, man, this is actually what's up. That's what's up right here is is this app was super good. So I'm happy to report that the speeds are tremendously fast. The Wi-Fi seven, the distance it travels is crazy fast.

• 49:29Wes Bos?

  Really?

• 49:29Scott Tolinski?

  Or crazy large.

• 49:30Wes Bos?

  How fast can you get? Cause I've I've got Wi-Fi six and I never hit anywhere close to what they're telling me you can get on Wi-Fi six.

• 49:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, on Wi-Fi, well, with the Wi-Fi seven router, I was getting uh 700 up and down over Wi-Fi.

• 49:48Wes Bos?

  Fast. Holy smokes.

• 49:50Scott Tolinski?

  Pretty much anywhere in my house, it extends out into my office a lot better. Um, yeah, you can get faster than that. When I uh, when I get the next iPhone, I should be able to get like 900 or gigabit on my phone via Wi-Fi.

• 50:08Wes Bos?

  That's nuts, man.

• 50:10Scott Tolinski?

  We were running into issues with our Wi-Fi six mesh where there were so many dead spots in our house. And I was like, okay, I either got to get another Wi-Fi router, but also the the routers that we had didn't support wired backhaul. So um, that was a huge pain in the butt and I, these ones support wired backhaul.

• 50:31Wes Bos?

  Oh, so it's just it's just mesh, right?

• 50:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so you can have essentially like a wired mesh uh instead of a wireless mesh as well. And man, it it's it's it was a great experience. So someone who's very cautious about buying something like this that's owned by Amazon for some, you know, for this type of thing. It's been a really nice experience and it's removed like all of the pain points I've had in Wi-Fi in my house. So uh, yeah. I I did a lot of research on on uh Wi-Fi seven routers and um, nothing really brought the amount of features that the Aero ones did, so.

• 51:07Wes Bos?

  That's great. I'm going to sick pick a. Plastic welder. This thing is fantastic. So if you've ever had something that is plastic and it cracks, you probably have done the whole like try to super glue it back together and then it just immediately cracks or like you can epoxy it and it never works properly, right? So I got this thing that it was like 30 bucks or something and it takes my dual batteries. I don't have it right now because my dad took it because he had a whole bunch of stuff he needed to fix as well. But the way that it works is it's a little like gun and there's two prongs and you get these little staples that are

• 51:48Wes Bos?

  like squiggly. I'll have the editor throw up a photo of it right now. I just linked to a tweet I have and then you just you turn it on and it immediately gets super hot and you press it into the plastic and then you let go and you pull it out and then there's this like this like plastic staple embedded in the plastic and it works so well. We had a a plastic wheelbarrow that had a massive crack on the bottom and I put like eight of them all along and it's been holding up all summer and then we had the bins in our fridge have cracked and like you can't buy these bins anywhere, you know, you have to like go through the like you go to like these websites and they're $700 for a bin, buy a new fridge, you know, couldn't find them anywhere, not even for 700 bucks.

• 52:33Wes Bos?

  So I just plastic Welder the whole thing back together. It's it's more of like a plastic stapler and then you can get an attachment for it that is like kind of like a soldering iron smoothing tip that you can you can put plastic over top. So you can also make it watertight if you need to. Man, it's it's been a game changer just for, you know, kids, kid stuff, plastic crap always breaks.

• 52:56Scott Tolinski?

  It always breaks. How's your brain feel after using it? You

• 53:01Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. You should not breathe. The it depends on like the kind of plastic it is, you know, same thing with the 3D printer as well. Some plastic is is fine, but like lot of it, like a lot of his ABS and that stuff stinks. So yeah, I don't know. Don't breathe it in. Just

• 53:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Wes Bos?

  Brilliant.

• 53:23Scott Tolinski?

  I love it. Cool. Well, that's all we got for you today, folks. I hope you enjoyed this one. You can join us on Wednesday for part two of this, dare I say, I don't ever use the word epic, so I don't want to start right now. This awesome potluck-a-thon where we have two incredible potluck episodes back to back for you. Let us know what you think about that stuff and we will catch you in the next one. Peace.

• 53:47Wes Bos?

  Peace.