umbraroze

Yup. The robots.txt file is not only meant to block robots from accessing the site, it’s also meant to block bots from accessing resources that are not interesting for human readers, even indirectly.

For example, MediaWiki installations are pretty clever in that by default, /w/ is blocked and /wiki/ is encouraged. Because nobody wants technical pages and wiki histories in search results, they only want the current versions of the pages.

Fun tidbit: in the late 1990s, there was a real epidemic of spammers scraping the web pages for email addresses. Some people developed wpoison.cgi, a script whose sole purpose was to generate garbage web pages with bogus email addresses. Real search engines ignored these, thanks to robots.txt. Guess what the spam bots did?

Do the AI bros really want to go there? Are they asking for model collapse?

“What am I supposed to do if 30-50 feral wolves run into my military base within 3-5 mins while my small soldiers are training?” - Putin

The only job I’ve commuted to by car was, um, the summer job I had when I had my learner’s permit when I was 18 or something.

I don’t have a car, I’ve not driven a car with my full driver’s permit, I think you need to renew it nowadays and I’ve not bothered with that for a couple of decades. We have buses here, why bother.

I love watching Let’s Plays of Telltale games and similar games like Life is Strange. But usually, the first episode is hardest to watch through, because in these types of games, the first episode also serves as a very drawn out tutorial and has the most of the lore dumps.

Personal homepages. What we used to call 'em in the nineties.

Probably some other NPC that does some highly specific thing. Like the name rater, or whatever.

Not important in the grand scheme of things, but people all over the world come for that one weird task I can do, and that’s enough for me.

Sssss, tail number SSS-55555

Back in the day, I had an application that could decode teletext from a TV capture card. And there are PC based DTV receivers that can also do that.

And over here in Finland, the national public broadcaster has the teletext on web. (Yle is the last network to put any effort in teletext - the commercial channels like MTV3 and Nelonen used to have a whole bunch of teletext stuff like premium SMS based chats, but those aren’t really all that profitable these days. I think MTV3 still has that, but they’re shutting it down next year.)

Error in Moderation

Could have been worse. Could have been an Error in Excess.

Depends on the type of account, but here are some of the common methods of how this might happen:

• The attacker could be straight up guessing the password. (One possible way to mitigate this: the website can go “wow, 10 failed login attempts from that source. I’m going to ignore all attempts from there for 24 hours.”)
• The attacker could be using previously exposed passwords. (One possible way to mitigate this: The websites should immediately require password reset for all users when that kind of data breach happens. For users: never use same password for multiple different services, certainly never reuse a compromised password even if it’s for a different service. Also: haveibeenpwned.com)
• The attacker, currently using the same network, could hijack the session. (This was a really huge problem back in the day. In this day and age, websites should be using HTTPS, which limits this very much. Still possible if the site doesn’t use HTTPS, and through some other vectors, e.g. malware or hijacked network hardware).

Also: Malware is a really scary big problem in that they’re rarely targeting you specifically. Why do that, when they can million people at the same time and sift through that stolen data for most valuable stuff, right?

The indoors aesthetics of sci-fi spaceships are really a topic that has not been studied enough. I loved it when Mass Effect series went full hard into captain’s quarters customisation and I was like “ooh! aah!”

Well, since it seemed to be a way to support the site and get to see new features ahead of time, so yeah, why not? I only decided not to renew my gold access when it became very clear Spez wouldn’t ban the hate subs he loved.

As for getting gold otherwise:

I’m an introvert, ok? I mostly only comment if I have something worthwhile to say.

So the only comments I ever got gilded by others were drunken shitpost. And in one instance some random off the cuff post. …I don’t get it.

Anyway. Basically, I didn’t want to post any Gold Baits™. because that way lies madness.

Been using a Suunto 5 Peak watch since May and it’s been absolutely great. Dunno if 250€ counts as inexpensive, but like we say in Finland, poor people can’t afford to buy cheap shit that breaks right away. (I think they have cheaper options?) Suunto watches talk to phone app which at least on Android is pretty great, and the app can talk to other services which can analyse stuff further.

I was a reddit user for ages. Reddit search always sucked. Heck, Reddit could barely make their own data available to the users (which is why their user histories are so limited and why the GDPR takeouts take a week). Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, used external search engines.

Do they want to block external searches? Literally enshittify their shit further? Are they willing to hold back progress?

Just today I was thinking of Reddit Gold - back when I actually paid for it, the marketing spin was “you get to test new features before we add them to everyone else!” Literally none of the Gold features I’ve ever used made to the unwashed masses. I take it back, saving comments did.

So yeah, they will hold back progress. In fact, progress isn’t on the cards. It’s just regress. AND you can be a premium user and PAY for it.

Technically, SQL is case-insensitive.

Practically, you want to capitalise the commands anyway.

It gives your code some gravitas. Always remember that when you’re writing SQL statements you’re speaking Ancient Words of Power.

Does that JavaScript framework that got invented 2 weeks ago by some snot-nosed kid need Words of Power? No. Does the database that has been chugging on for decades upon decades need Words of Power? Yes. Words of Power and all the due respect.

Here in Finland we have a really extensive and efficient plastic bottle and aluminum can recycling system. Every bottle and can has a deposit (0.40 € for large bottles, 0.20 € for small bottles, 0.15 € for cans) and you can cash them by returning them at any store. Just toss them in a machine.

There’s even some hypermarkets where you can just pour in a giant bag full of bottles or cans and the machine sorts and prices the things automatically.

It’s super annoying we still can’t really do the same for rest of the single use plastic, but at least trash sorting and recycling what can be recycled is a thing everywhere. We have a lot of projects that aim to reduce those. Probably the coolest recent thing was that someone came up with all-carton coffee cups. (I hope they catch on so we can get rid of the cups that have the Sad Turtle Warning. I don’t want turtles to be sad, they’re awesome.)

Well, Google Photos shouldn’t be considered a “backup” solution to begin with. Never mind that both Google and Apple scan the content in their respective services, but there’s just no guarantee that they don’t modify the data on cloud. “Oooh guys, we just invented a revolutionary new photo compression algorithm! Also hosting data is kinda expensive! So pay up if you want your originals.” …and there’s occasional reports that these services just straight up corrupted some old files while no one was looking at them. Good going.

I just treat my Android phone like any other camera I own and use. Copy the files from phone to PC and from there to my NAS, and I use ACDSee’s DAM functionality.

Ah ! TP-Link! Or, as I’ve always said, Toilet Paper Link.

[edit: sp] Hi! Also a trans girl. (But only high on caffeine, and not drunk because it’s end of the month and I’m broke.) Let’s get to the question that really, really defines the future.

What are the best and coolest locomotives? (don’t need to be the same! and often aren’t!) 🚆

PC: The laptop has a half a terabyte SSD, and 2 TB USB HDD for Steam games. (Plus a boatload of other storage for other purposes.)

Xbox Series X: 1 TB internal, two additional 1 TB storage cards for X/S games, a 4 TB HDD for Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, and a 2 TB USB HDD for cold storage of X/S games.

Nintendo Switch: I don’t remember how big the SD card is, but it’s too damn tiny anyways.

I have to say, despite having a bunch of space, I do spend time deleting and redownloading games. Meanwhile, my Xbox 360 has a 1 TB USB2 HDD, and… uh, it comfortably fits all of the digital purchases I ever made.

Funny thing, the other 1 TB card for XSX is taken almost entirely by Microsoft Flight Simulator and Train Sim World 3. And also The Sims 4. All of these simulators eat a buuuunch of space.