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?

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.

Yeah, basically unsubbed from AvE over this too.

I can’t remember who this was, but there was another engineering YouTuber who, during the pandemic, basically twittered about being frustrated with the lockdowns from business perspective and whingled about being scared talking about his political beliefs because apparently being anything anything right of a model leftist is a crucifiable offence in the bird site, according to him. And how the horse paste actually works. I was like “…oh shit, maybe this dude is a magahatter?”

I used to watch iilluminaughtii several years ago, probably because I’ve been grabbing popcorn and enjoying watching someone dunking on multi-level marketing since, uh, 90s at least. Then I watched some video that was about some topic that I was kind of in middle of a deep dive, too (I can’t remember which exactly. Elan School, probably?). And the video was bland as hell. And then I was like “yeah, most of these other videos are kind of forgettable shallow pap too”.

…and this year we found out about the whole landlordy corporate town fancier backstabby financial abuser helicopter-CEO situation. And the content mill situation. And the plagiarism thing. Can’t forget the plagiarism thing. …I was like, “oh this all just makes sense now.”

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.

My theoretical answer is this: in an ideal world, there would be no copyright at all. This is an artificial contrivance that was once dreamed up to serve physical-copy economy, and it was rendered obsolete by the digital age. Shit would be so much easier when we got rid of this shit and everyone could share everything by default without any profit motive. (Caveat: This will not work unless literally every jurisdiction on the planet gets rid of copyright laws all at once, otherwise this is way too exploitable due to power imbalance. So I don’t think this is a practical proposition. *cough* unless we all decide Anarchism is a good idea after all *cough*)

My practical answer is this: Welllllll we’re kinda damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. My personal feeling is that AI creations aren’t really copyrightable, and even suggesting they are copyrightable is kind of opening a huge can of worms regarding what exactly counts as “creativity” in the first place. The best we can do under current copyright regime is to regulate how the AI datasets are curated, because goodness knows the current datasets weren’t exactly ethically obtained.

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?

Basically, it’s the same thing as buying a “permanent” ticket to a local sports team’s home matches. What? Your local team doesn’t sell “permanent” tickets? Exactly.

One of the perks of owning these NFTs was that you could attend exclusive events. What those events were going to be about was anyone’s guess. Eye burn, apparently.

You wanted deregulation, and ya got It, biiiachezzz

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.

There’s been plenty of recent developments on plastic-free coffee cups. Even ones that have very thin layers of biodegradable plastic. A few years ago someone came up with fully carton based cups that hold coffee.

But I think that reusable cups are probably more viable. The €2 deposit sounds pretty hefty, so it’s going to strongly encourage people to bring their own cups and actually return the reusable ones. Mini-thermoses are cool, I like them.

That’s not weird at all. Here’s how neo-nazi mindset works:

“We should label these other people nazis, because the public knows that the nazis were the bad guys. It’s a powerful analogy that resonates with the public.”

…

“Why are you calling us nazis? Are you saying we are the direct political continuation of the NSDAP? You, sir, are factually incorrect!”

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.)

Twitter for me was always just a place to shout random ramblings to void. It didn’t help that I barely followed at all what other users were saying. Always felt like I should, in fact, not just speak my mind, because in the recent years the site was really terrible at banning dipshits and the Musk takeover was a clear signal that things will never be getting better in that regard.

When Musk took over, the fact that the site started experiencing creaking at the seams when devs were laid off was a huuuuuuge red flag. My biggest IRL friend decided to leave Twitter after the Musk takeover. With nothing else to genuinely follow, I decided to GDPR-dump my past stuff and leave the site too.

I like Mastodon. It’s like Twitter and Identica back in early 2010s when you could actually see random strangers posting random shit. Can see fellow shouters-in-the-void. And they’re usually not dipshits.

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.

Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said that plan displayed “moral idiocy”

Musk: “Moral idiocy? Moral idiocy?! I’m not a moral idiot! I’m an immoral idiot! Besides, chess is a kid’s game! 1v1 me in Polytopia, bitch! Bet you can’t understand fog of war, noob!”
Kasparov: “…very well. Please show me how these pieces move.”
[15 minutes later later]
Musk: “I can’t BELIEVE I fell for that.”