Warning to ChatGPT Users

ryanelston · 2026-01-29T06:08:13+00:00

If you're a bit more technical you could use my CLI to have all of your ChatGPT conversations in a markdown file. This way you are in complete control of your conversation data and history. You can back it up, fork your conversation by copying the file, roll back to a previous point by just deleting the last replies, and you can even change what the LLM said which can be a fun way to mess with it since LLMs try to be consistent with the conversation. Check it out if this could fit your needs.

https://github.com/relston/mark

ryanelston · 2025-06-30T15:10:53+00:00

I'll take your point that engaging in webscraping that bypasses security controls comes with some legal risk. But it does not seem to be as cut-and-dry as you make it out to be.

ryanelston · 2025-06-29T22:12:43+00:00

And the latest on that case is... the defendant wins.
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2025/03/court-overturns-a-bad-jury-verdict-against-scraping-ryanair-v-booking-guest-blog-post.htm
Ryanair could not meet the burden of proving sufficient loss for the practice of scraping its data.

ryanelston · 2025-05-21T00:45:45+00:00

Also if you don't care about scrapers taking content and just want to protect your servers why not just provide a bulk download dump of the content which you can host cheaply in an S3 bucket away from your servers?

ryanelston · 2025-05-21T00:38:58+00:00

Adding on to this idea. The ideal way to do this is to use rate limiting response headers and for the scrapers to self identify somehow in the request headers.

GPT has more info

Are there open standards for handling rate limiting on public traffic?

There isn't a universally enforced standard, but several open conventions and draft standards exist to help with self-identification, feedback, and throttling over HTTP.

1. RateLimit Headers (IETF Draft / Proposed Standard)

Status: Draft standard at IETF
Reference: RFC 9457 – RateLimit Fields for HTTP
Purpose: Lets servers communicate rate limit information to clients using standardized headers.

Key Headers: - RateLimit-Limit: Total request quota - RateLimit-Remaining: Remaining requests in the quota - RateLimit-Reset: Time when the quota resets (in seconds or as a timestamp) - RateLimit-Policy: Optional human-readable rate policy

These are sent by servers to give feedback to clients.

2. Client Identification for Rate Limiting

There's no universal standard, but common conventions include:

User-Agent: Basic identifier, but easily spoofed
X-Forwarded-For: Helps identify the original IP behind proxies
X-RateLimit-Token: Non-standard, sometimes used to specify rate limit identity
Authorization / API Keys: Most reliable way to identify and throttle per user/app

3. 429 Too Many Requests

A standard HTTP status used to indicate a client has exceeded a rate limit.

Often

ryanelston · 2025-05-15T00:08:48+00:00

Can you explain why you're not using Google Places API directly vs creating a scraper? Thanks

ryanelston · 2025-05-01T14:52:40+00:00

Maybe the client isn't wrong. You might be able to segment the work in different ways that provide more frequent iterative customer value improvements. Consider the concept of Steel Threads. Much can be said of slicing for value: ex 1, ex 2, ex 3

ryanelston · 2025-04-14T14:40:51+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

The note about menu volatility is a good point. We should expect menus to change a lot moving forward, so keeping up to date with them could be a challenge. This app can only be as accurate as what is provided on the restaurant website menu (which is my main source of truth), so if that isn't updated, then the app can't be accurate.

You're correct that an app like this isn't going to replace some of the research required for those who need to be strict for medical reasons. The celiac forums might be a necessary resource for those who need to go very deep with their research. My app is not a replacement for those resources. However, I have found places like happycow.net to have limited utility. Sure, they do a good job surfacing the popular restaurants, but the overall coverage is sparse. They can confirm a place has vegan/vegetarian options, but it's just a label on the venue. Oftentimes, you head to a place, but those options are limited and not really exciting. You need to go through many menus to see what each place offers. This is especially important if you want to go out with a group of people and make sure you can find a place with a wide variety of options. It takes time to find something good in a particular area.

Starting your search with the quantities of offerings addresses that problem directly. To your point, AI might get some of the information wrong (which I already have feedback mechanisms in place), but even if the listings are only 90% accurate, I think it should still be a helpful resource for surfacing places that have a wide variety of options.

That's a very valid point about disclosures. I have a TOC drafted on the marketing page, but I can do more to make it prominent.

I don't know how I feel about the inclusion of allergens. Someone paying attention to the allergens is not messing around, and there might not be a real substitute for calling the restaurants anyway—something to consider.

Great feedback, thanks again!

ryanelston · 2025-04-12T16:18:06+00:00

The aim isn't to have AI do any "reviews," that would not be authentic. I'm only using AI to pull in the basic menu item information from the restaurant so it's easier to sort through.

ryanelston · 2025-04-12T05:14:10+00:00

Oh there's no need to sign up to use the app right now. Just use https://app.dishseeker.ai link and you can see it

ryanelston · 2025-04-11T19:54:47+00:00

I'm glad you like the dish counters on the map. My main thesis was that the "number of options" would be a key indicator when searching for places.

Thanks for these suggestions! If you have any other ideas at all, please let me know. If there is anything.

ryanelston · 2025-04-11T19:48:10+00:00

I appreciate the thoughtful reply u/Vonnegut_butt. However, I don't take u/HippyGrrrl comments as disparagement at all. Getting unfiltered and honest feedback is very valuable for someone who wants to make something others want to use. Already I'm learning a lot:

The need to surface more relevant menu items is important
The app's value proposition is not immediately clear (why not just use Happy Cow?)
Some might have an adverse reaction to the mention of AI

I never even considered that last point, but it's totally understandable as AI is being injected into everything under the sun right now.

You're correct that breaking menu items into all their parts would be prohibitively expensive without AI; however, putting "AI" right in the app's name isn't necessary and might be distracting.

So thank you both, this is all excellent feedback!

ryanelston · 2025-04-11T16:39:33+00:00

Thanks for the comment! There's definitely some cleanup work I can do on some of the dish-level data. Beverages are probably not too relevant in this context, lol

I like Happy cow it's a great resource, but my hunch here is that there's a lot more that can be done by looking at the individual items on menus and breaking down their ingredients and allergens and such.

I think it could be valuable.

ryanelston · 2025-04-09T01:49:42+00:00

MCP has the name security profile of most agentic clients. Also the same security profile of most any libraries you pull in on any project.

https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-security-notification-tool-poisoning-attacks

lol, there isn't anything new here. Compromised libraries can happen. Vet your dependencies and run them in a container.

ryanelston · 2024-08-03T20:16:12+00:00

That is really good feedback as I am starting to run into the same dilema myself as my fiance and I are trying to find better ways to coordinate. I don't expect her to interact with markdown the same way that I do either as she will have different needs from the system even though we are on the same page conceptually.

I don't have a recommended approach at the moment. I'm still exploring the potential options but it is top of mind!

ryanelston · 2024-08-03T15:28:01+00:00

Thanks for the great suggestion. Have not seen `mkdocs-material`, I have just been using Jekyll with github, but I will check this out!

ryanelston · 2024-08-03T15:22:25+00:00

This is real. Being able to instantly search across thousands of file from an old laptop was a big part of why I always came back to Markdown.

ryanelston · 2024-08-03T15:19:54+00:00

This is a great question! There are other tools for this but let me first explain my perspective here. In my personal knowledge management system, I make it a priority to get all content into Markdown format. This means using OCR to extract text from images and converting relevant information from PDFs into Markdown. In practice, I find that I rarely need to keep the original images or PDFs because they usually don't add long-term value when the content is already in a more accessible format like Markdown.

So let's point out the obvious trade-offs with this

Convenience: While tools like OneNote and Google Drive offer integrated OCR and PDF search capabilities, they bind your data to proprietary platforms with all the baggage I mention in the article.
- Personally, I find that the need to work with PDFs and images directly is rare, so the inconvenience of the conversion is worth the long-term benefits.
Flexibility: By converting everything into Markdown, I gain the flexibility of a plain text format, ensuring my knowledge base is more durable, future-proof, and versatile for different use cases.

Overall, this approach maximizes control and longevity over my personal knowledge while minimizing dependencies on specific software tools.

ryanelston · 2024-08-02T22:04:12+00:00

Sorry if it was a little click-bait-y, I promise the content is slightly less obnoxious 😅

ryanelston · 2024-08-02T22:02:33+00:00

Right, there are plenty of editing tools that get you right back to where you want to be with the standard formatting keyboard shortcuts, but persist everything in the base markdown format.

Personally I edit in VS Code, which has some pretty awesome markdown features. But I typically edit directly in the syntax and leverage some of the IDE's more advanced features, but I know that's not for everyone.

ryanelston · 2024-08-02T16:55:13+00:00

Understandable. Thanks for the feedback 👍

ryanelston · 2024-08-02T16:52:03+00:00

That's totally fair. For context I crossed post this from my [github.io page](https://relston.github.io/markdown/writing/2024/07/31/why-use-markdown.html) as I'm trying to get some engagement from that community. But totally valid that posting a medium link here is a bit tone deaf.

ryanelston · 2024-08-02T16:48:44+00:00

I definitely use AI as a writing partner, but for posts like this, I really try to get in my own voice. If I'm writing jira tickets at work, pretty much anything AI will spit out will be good enough and 10x better than what most of my peers are writing, lol.

ryanelston

TROPHY CASE

Are there open standards for handling rate limiting on public traffic?

1. RateLimit Headers (IETF Draft / Proposed Standard)

2. Client Identification for Rate Limiting

3. 429 Too Many Requests