NegativeK

I've never had a landlord come into an apartment or house I'm renting.

(Except when the landlord also lives there.)

It's a code violation, not insurance fraud.

I read about this often whenever I'm looking at guidance for one of my hobbies, and often people are dealing with it in their garage. Some jurisdictions are more okay with DIYing than others, but it's all too common that someone is taking 240V, 30A and going to an enclosure that they built to get 3+ HP/2+ kW at 240 or 480V, three phase.

The common refrain is that your insurance will deny your claim.

The response that people get when they call their insurance is "you pay us to cover you even when you do the wrong thing". Just like how your auto insurance covers you when you rear-end someone while drunk as hell, when you drape way too many lights on your crispy dead Christmas tree, or when you fall asleep and light your drapes on fire with a cigarette.

Intent is when you set out to cause an accident.

(You should probably read your actual insurance policies before considering my not-a-lawyer American-centric comments.)

> Human vetting is not much of a defense.

The issue I keep seeing with curl and other projects is that people are using AI tools to generate bug reports and submitting them without understanding (that's the vetting) the report. Because it's so easy to do this and it takes time to filter out bug report slop from analyzed and verified reports, it's pissing people off. There's a significant asymmetry involved.

Until all AI used to generate security reports on other peoples' projects is able to do it with vanishingly small wasted time, it's pretty assholeish to do it without vetting.

I know sandboxes for wasm are very advanced, but decades of file formats with built-in scripting are flashing the danger lights at me.

To your point, the large airport I worked at was annoyed at small, slow aircraft landing because it jacked up the spacing and slowed down the customers who paid the vast majority of the bills. But the feds required the airport to allow it for a low (relatively) fee, so the airport could only be annoyed.

How do we have political topics in this forum without the discussions devolving into quick quips and rhetoric?

I suspect, strongly, that we disagree on the fundamentals of what DOGE's aim was.

I've seen meatspace communities start to break into factions and have a rise in drama because they've gotten too big; I think that internet communities have the exact same problem. It's worsened by the fact that companies have a hard time properly moderating at scale and that companies can profit from the views from increased drama. All of the fundamentals and incentives seem to work against large scale communities.

So the "old" web that I fondly remember is smaller communities. Some of course had abject shittiness, but the communities were contained -- so shitty groups (every community can figure out what shitty is on their own) are less likely to invade your conversations.

There are, of course, significant forces working against this. Small communities require active administration and moderation. Someone technical has to maintain and pay for the service; someone has to define what an asshole is and give them the boot. And since people seem averse to paying for privacy, I don't think there are enough volunteers for this to scale. There are also huge undeniable upsides to large communities that you simply can't replicate at the small scale.

But it's the web I remember and like. Where I feel like I can get to know people and don't feel like I'm shouting into the void. Where I don't feel like my conversations are constantly interrupted by jerks that have nothing to keep them away.

I assume they were referring to outbound.

But ideally it'd be blocked and all traffic would go through an internal caching resolver, right? To reduce internal latency and load on outside servers, but also to have records if needed and to block whack requests or responses if needed.

I agree with the quoted commenter's point that sometimes shit matters enough to put up with the suck, but I also agree with your point that people need to understand that walking away might be the right thing to do.

Finding that balance can be very hard.

Long live RSS.

Thanks for linking this! I've never heard of Gemini before now, and it definitely appeals to a lot of what I want in on the internet.

I appreciate the advice at the bottom, but I'd love to hear more about what other people suggest for finding content that isn't algorithm based.

Relatively niche but traditional bulletin board forums are good. Recent posts to the top do tend make some threads be attention hogs, but there's a human mod in the loop if the forum is small enough.

I suppose chats (usually Discord) also fall into this as well. A smaller community there can be similar to a smaller community on Mastodon, forums, etc.

Any other thoughts? How do people discover new blogs?

Side note, I think I realized or came to the belief about 10 years ago that large groups of humans suck. Moderation becomes impractical or ineffective; content discovery becomes manipulated like this post is talking about. Similarly, large communities on a monolithic platform have to be monetized -- which results in clickbait of a sorts to maintain engagement.

The minimum wage is often not a fair wage.

If tipped employees are just earning that standard minimum wage and nobody tips them, then they just get the minimum wage. I can see situations where they'd be pretty mad -- there are a lot of restaurants where tipped employees make more than the standard minimum wage.

All of that said, I believe that tipping is horseshit and should go away. But I can't protest it by refusing to tip unless I want to punish the wrong people.

Is it a state where the minimum wage is no different? Or that they require traditionally tipped wages to actually be paid fairly?

I'm concerned that you're not familiar with EDR and organizations who flat out can't build a full 24/7 SOC. Which is the vast majority of businesses.

EDR is a rootkit based on the idea that malware hashes are useless, and security needs to get complete insight into systems after a compromise. You can't root out an attacker with persistence without software that's as invasive as the malware can get.

And a managed SOC is shifting accountability to an extent because they are often _far_ cheaper than the staff it takes to have a 24/7 SOC. That's assuming you have the talent to build a SOC instead of paying for a failed SOC build. Also, don't forget that you need backup staff for sick leave and vacation. And you'll have to be constantly hiring due to SOC burnout.

If all of this sounds like expensive band-aids instead of dealing with the underlying infection, it is. It's complex solutions to deal with complex attackers going after incredibly complex systems. But I haven't really heard of security solutions that reduce complexity and solve the deep underlying problems.

Not even theoretical solutions.

Other than "unplug it all".

That's not okay. If reef safe sunscreen isn't sufficient for what you need, then you should find a different way to protect yourself than one that damages reefs.

I have a 300 mile range EV, and some of my friends also downplay charging on road trips. It seems to be a common narrative. I find it patently false. When I drove long distances in an gas car, I didn't take breaks to stretch my legs. I want to get to my destination earlier and have the driving be done.

I find EV charging on road trips to be annoying, and I can't wait until technology improves to the point where I don't have to worry about missing a charging station and being hosed and I don't have to worry about adding an hour to an hour and a half onto a road trip.

I think that gas vehicles are irresponsible for most uses and the charging at home makes having an EV great, but gas vehicles are better at road trips if only for the fact that those of us who don't want to take longer don't have to.

I'm fairly certain you've never lived in Chicago or spoken to the people in areas affected by gang violence.

> I think maybe the current AI scraper traffic patterns are actually what "the internet being the internet" is from here forward

Kinda my point was that it's only the internet being the internet if we tolerate it. If enough people give a crap, the corporations doing it will have to knock it off.

As a first and very pessimistic guess, the pages getting DoSed are maintained by people or groups with pretty minimal resources. That means time or money available for lawyers isn't there, and the monetary impact per website is small enough that LE may not care.

Also, they might share the common viewpoint of "it's the internet; suck it up."

I really appreciate you giving a shit. Not sarcastically -- it seems like you're actually doing everything right, and it makes a difference.

Gating robots.txt might be a mistake, but it also might be a quick way to deal with crawlers who mine robots.txt for pages that are more interesting. It's also a page that's never visited by humans. So if you make it a tarpit, you both refuse to give the bot more information and slow it down.

It's crap that it's affecting your work, but a website owner isn't likely to care about the distinction when they're pissed off at having to deal with bad actors that they should never have to care about.

I've heard this point raised elsewhere, and I think it's underplaying the magnitude of the issue.

Background scanner noise on the internet is incredibly common, but the AI scraping is not at the same level. Wikipedia has published that their infrastructure costs have notably shot up since LLMs started scraping them. I've seen similar idiotic behavior on a small wiki I run; a single AI company took the data usage from "who gives a crap" to "this is approaching the point where I'm not willing to pay to keep this site up." Businesses can "just" pass the costs onto the customers (which is pretty shit at the end of the day,) but a lot of privately run and open source sites are now having to deal with side crap that isn't relevant to their focus.

The botnets and DDOS groups that are doing mass scanning and testing are targeted by law enforcement and eventually (hopefully) taken down, because what they're doing is acknowledged as bad.

AI companies, however, are trying to make a profit off of this bad behavior and we're expected to be okay with it? At some point impacting my services with your business behavior goes from "it's just the internet being the internet" to willfully malicious.

I'm largely in line with where a lot of the comments under these political posts are coming from, but there's no discussion in them. It's rhetoric, outrage, and oversimplifying things.

The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.

I'd be super happy if the local government managed the infrastructure and shared spaces of our neighborhood. But they can't raise the taxes to do so, so HOAs end up being the smaller government that people say they want but, in practice, get zero participation from the residents and can turn into shit shows.

Every HOA I've lived in had an elected board.

And everyone I've ever heard complain about HOAs has never tried to serve on the board. They're not universally volunteer orgs, but a _lot_ of them are -- which means that if you run, you'll probably be elected, because nobody else wants to deal with that.

HOAs are small governments, with plenty of the problems of larger governments via unhappy but nonparticipatory voters.

I grew up with this belief (not your belief; it's a common one) and it hindered me from realizing I needed help.

I regularly have people doubt my diagnosis to this day. If we talk about it more, a lot of them _continue_ to doubt me even after I explain masking.

Again, it's not just your belief -- I grew up hearing radio jockeys calling ADHD "bad parenting disease" -- but this belief is harmful. It ostracizes people and discourages help for a disability that causes measurable harm.

The World Anti-Doping Agency, who defines what a performance enhancing drug is and if it's banned in sports, grants Therapeutic Use Exemptions for methylphenidate and its siblings. This is despite some countries using other medicines as first-line treatment for ADHD that aren't banned by WADA.

The justification is that treatment for people with ADHD markedly reduces accidents and suicidality, and that banning the drug outright would do more harm than would come from liars getting the drug and harming sports.

Respectfully, my experience is very different than yours -- and I'm somewhere in between you and people who have it really bad.

ADHD can absolutely be a handicap. It might be that it's exacerbated by modern life's demands, but I frankly can't be bothered to care -- I live with these symptoms that I wish would go away, and I can't switch to some world that would work well with them.

And it's not rejecting myself or trying to be someone I'm not. I spent quite a while before diagnosis doing that. Getting treatment for and acknowledging the issues of ADHD is being more aware of who I am and what I need than pretending that things will work out. They don't, and they didn't.

And I know my experience isn't unique.

There are quite a few businesses that made a lot of money selling net harmful goods. Tobacco and Oxycontin come to mind.

But even selling things that help people doesn’t absolve or prevent someone from doing evil things before or after they hit some specific valuation.