klu9
@klu9@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Approving US-made cars would make UK roads less safe 16 hours ago:
I remember this same whole “Wahhh! You don’t buy our cars!” palaver playing out with the US and Japan back when that cunt was first expressing his love of tariffs. (Late 80s/early 90s)
Sure, Japan had some trade barriers. But Japanese automakers absolutely worked their arses off with market research, design etc in order to succeed at selling in the US market. US automakers couldn’t even be arsed to install coin holders that fit Japanese coins, let alone put the steering wheel on the right side of the car.
And even if US automakers nowadays showed even a modicum of nous for foreign markets, practically their entire production line has been geared to churning out ever more monstrous pickups and 4x4s, thanks almost entirely to their fucked up tax rules on vehicles.
- Comment on What efforts would it take to strip the name Americans from the folks inhabiting the US? 17 hours ago:
I mean, “Yanks” is right there.
Or “septics”, if you wish to be politically correct.
/jk
Writer H. L. Mencken collected a number of proposals from between 1789 and 1939, finding terms including Columbian, Columbard, Fredonian, Frede, Unisian, United Statesian, Colonican, Appalacian, Usian, Washingtonian, Usonian, Uessian, U-S-ian, Uesican, and United Stater.
- Comment on Which Browser Should I Use In 2025? - Hackaday 2 days ago:
Used to use Floorp, then Zen, now on Firedragon, a mod of Floorp with many features from Librewolf.
- Comment on Couldn't be worse than what we have now... 4 days ago:
Narf!
- Comment on 390 Million Faces: Clearview AI's Secret $750,000 Attempt To Buy Your Mugshot 4 days ago:
Clearview buys photo-ID-for-porn database in 3… 2… 1…
- Comment on Should a movie released in 1995 be considered an "old" movie? 5 days ago:
- Comment on Should a movie released in 1995 be considered an "old" movie? 5 days ago:
[OT: watch “Shadow of the Vampire” after watching the OG Nosferatu.]
- Comment on EU considers tariffs on digital services Big Tech 6 days ago:
- Comment on UK government says anyone working in Britain for the Russian state will have to register and declare what they are doing or face jail 1 week ago:
Broken link
- Comment on Virginia Giuffre, who accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault, says she has days to live after car crash 1 week ago:
Fediverse version: “I’m dying… let me just make a quick Pixelfed post about it.”
- Comment on UK government says anyone working in Britain for the Russian state will have to register and declare what they are doing or face jail 1 week ago:
Presumably due to all the Russian donors enabled and ennobled by the Tories for the last two decades.
- Comment on UK government says anyone working in Britain for the Russian state will have to register and declare what they are doing or face jail 1 week ago:
Finally, a way to unite George Galloway and Nigel Farage.
- Comment on Cheapskate's Guide: Nuking web-scraping bots 1 week ago:
I believe using a CDN would defeat the author’s goal of not being reliant on third-party service providers.
- Comment on Cheapskate's Guide: Nuking web-scraping bots 1 week ago:
A problem with this approach was that many readers use VPN’s and other proxies that change IP addresses virtually every time they use them. For that reason and because I believe in protecting every Internet user’s privacy as much as possible, I wanted a way of immediately unblocking visitors to my website without them having to reveal personal information like names and email addresses.
I recently spent a few weeks on a new idea for solving this problem. With some help from two knowledgeable users on Blue Dwarf, I came up with a workable approach two weeks ago. So far, it looks like it works well enough. To summarize this method, when a blocked visitor reaches my custom 403 error page, he is asked whether he would like to be unblocked by having his IP address added to the website’s white list. If he follows that hypertext link, he is sent to the robot test page. If he answers the robot test question correctly, his IP address is automatically added to the white list. He doesn’t need to enter it or even know what it is. If he fails the test, he is told to click on the back button in his browser and try again. After he has passed the robot test, Nginx is commanded to reload its configuration file (PHP command: shell_exec(“sudo nginx -s reload”);), which causes it to immediately accept the new whitelist entry, and he is granted immediate access. He is then allowed to visit cheapskatesguide as often as he likes for as long as he continues to use the same IP address. If he switches IP addresses in the future, he has about a one in twenty chance of needing to pass the robot test again each time he switches IP addresses. My hope is that visitors who use proxies will only have to pass the test a few times a year. As the whitelist grows, I suppose that frequency may decrease. Of course, it will reach a non-zero equilibrium point that depends on the churn in the IP addresses being used by commercial web-hosting companies. In a few years, I may have a better idea of where that equilibrium point is.
- Comment on Cheapskate's Guide: Nuking web-scraping bots 1 week ago:
You’re welcome.
I believe I found it originally via the “distribuverse”… specifically, ZeroNet.
- Submitted 1 week ago to selfhosted@lemmy.world | 32 comments
- Comment on Pretty Cool Project to Show News That is Licensed Under free License (free to read and republish in whole, aka Creative Commons). 1 week ago:
Their logo is even a variation of the RSS logo.
- Comment on What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase. 1 week ago:
I remember seeing a doc about Wall of Death motorcycle riders. The bikes they used? Century-old 1910 Indians.
Why? Because when lives depend on it, you want a solution with the absolute fewest possible things that can go wrong. Not the latest fancy thing with all the bells and whistles.
- Comment on What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase. 1 week ago:
My proudest achievement! 😁
- Comment on What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase. 1 week ago:
I used to teach ESL to some banking IT people, COBOL programmers whose skills were still in demand half a century after COBOL came out. Because the banking systems written half century ago still work, and when it comes to handling other people’s money, breakages, mistakes and downtime are absolutely not an option.
If Musk really wanted to run government like a business, he’d do like the banks and leave a working system damn well alone.
Of course, he wants to run government like one of his businesses, into the ground like Twitter or soon Tesla.
PS The only bank they knew of implementing newer tech for handling the money was a brand new one with no existing systems the new tech might break.
- Comment on What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase. 1 week ago:
“If it ain’t broke, break it.”
Motto of the Department Of Ultra Cool High Efficiency.
- Comment on Why did/do sites such as the pyramids in Egypt or the Roman colosseum end up in an abandoned state, only to be "rediscovered" later? 1 week ago:
I don’t know but my speculation:
- Europe’s economy (from which the Church’s income was largely derived) didn’t go into overdrive until the Renaissance / Columbus landing in America.
- That growth being offset by the Reformation, with a lot of Europeans leaving the Roman Catholic Church.
- The somewhat decentralized nature of the Church, with a lot of assets in the hands of monastic orders and semi-autnomous archbishoprics.
- Perhaps an absolutist theocratic monarchy is not the most conducive form of government for economic and population growth.
The population started to tick up with the Renaissance, but when Italy essentially unified under a more modern constitutional monarchy in 1861, ending the Pope’s temporal power over the city, Rome’s population growth went stratospheric.
- Comment on Always guard against living in the world of fantasy rather than undeniable facts 2 weeks ago:
g - Comment on Why did/do sites such as the pyramids in Egypt or the Roman colosseum end up in an abandoned state, only to be "rediscovered" later? 2 weeks ago:
In addition to the points others made, Rome has not always been a bustling city.
Its population declined from more than a million in AD 210 to 500,000 in AD 273 to 35,000 after the Gothic War (535–554) reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins, vegetation, vineyards and market gardens.
The city’s population declined to less than 50,000 people in the Early Middle Ages from 700 AD onward. It continued to stagnate or shrink until the Renaissance.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Middle_Ages
Thanks to multiple sackings, power struggles, plagues etc.
It only surpassed a million again in 1936. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome#Demographics
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Musk probably has his own Night of the Long Knives coming sooner or later.
As in, he will be the target, not the perpetrator.
- Röhm = Musk
- Hitler = Trump
- Himmler = Vance? Patel? Other?
- Comment on How Gamergate foreshadowed the toxic hellscape that the internet has now become. 2 weeks ago:
MAGA:
- Make
- America
- Gamergate
- Always
- Comment on China bans compulsory facial recognition and its use in private spaces like hotel rooms 2 weeks ago:
Given that the US government has recognized how unprotected technology (like unencrypted messaging) leaves its individual employees vulnerable to Chinese snoopers, I wonder if China is starting to realize just how vulnerable its pervasive unencrypted tech could leave it to US snooping.
- Comment on China bans compulsory facial recognition and its use in private spaces like hotel rooms 2 weeks ago:
Chinese fintech giant Alipay has for some years now had the “Smile to Pay” system: Alipay users can pay for something by just smiling into the camera in an Alipay “Smile to Pay” POS terminal. IIRC KFC was the first place to have it.
In China, many operators of public toilets seek to prevent theft of toilet paper (I shit you not 😉) by having some kind of rationed dispenser (a certain user can only receive a certain amount of paper in a certain amount of time) or a vending machine.
Public toilet + toilet paper vending machine + “Smile to Pay” = facial recognition in toilets.
- chinahandsmagazine.org/…/your-toilet-knows-non-su…
- scmp.com/…/facial-recognition-toilet-paper-dispen…
In fact, I think a few wanted fugitives have been caught (out?) by the cameras on toilet paper vending machines.
- Comment on Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains 2 weeks ago:
In 8 years, anyone not mainlining Truth Social through their compulsory Neuralink will captured and euthanized.
- Comment on Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains 2 weeks ago:
So… Zuck stans the guy who ended the Republic and turned it into a monarchy that pretended to still be a republic?
Well, that’s not concerning at all.
