dspillett

Now many (like myself) who tinkered to make their setup just so now just want things to work but perhaps with a few custom options (wallpaper, overall app chrome colours, a few tweaks to the syntax highlighting & folding in our editors), and most “general public” users care even less, so there isn't the demand to warrant maintaining the extra code needed to allow more complete customisation at the window manager or app level. For those that want that, fun tools like this pop up.

No MS, I don't want to ask co-pilot. Why don't you get co-pilot to draft some good documentation, that you then review and edit to make sure it is accurate, instead of expecting every individual to ask an AI for every question they have? That would be a lot more efficient in terms of energy use, I expect.

Most documentation is reference documentation, which as you find it not very useful for just starting out (it assumes at least a small base of knowledge about what it is documenting).

> _Good_ documentation should also teach the user how to use the thing

Good documentation usually comes in at least two parts: guide/introduction and reference. This is how some of the better ORA books were written, back when dead trees on shelves were a key source of learning for programmers - three sections: a small one for absolute basics (what you need to know before starting, many could skip this), the second an introduction to the concepts of the new thing (language, library, server, etc.) and what differentiates it from similar/related things, typically with worked examples, and at least the last half of the pages being reference material (split into meaningful subdivisions where that is useful). Sometimes they would split this in two and there would be explicit introduction and reference works (under the banner “complete reference”, though these would have a little introductory text in them too) for the same subject, but not always.

When you try to merge the two (guide and reference) too closely it all too often ends up either too basic or irritatingly long-winded for the experienced readers, while still being too opaque for those who are starting from scratch.

Sometimes a single good README is all that is needed for the guide part these days, sometimes you need that with branches (links) off to longer introductions to specific parts, it depends on the size of the project.

The best you'll get from just saying “doesn't work for me” is people like me saying “its fine here”, like so: it is working fine for me from here.

Also “in the last year” means only ~50% of that time is covered by when enforcement started.

Some countries have yet to pass any legislation too, this happens quite a lot if you look into past EU declarations, so companies there might be using that as a loophole to act as if not yet be effectively covered (in theory they could be taken to court over it, but that is can be complicated, or at least expensive, when there is no local legislation yet, so in practise it is far less likely to happen). What action will be taken by the EU to push things forward, I'm not sure, presumably there is some sort of fine for extended non-compliance? The question of who you are advertising to and where from can get a bit complex if you are a company in a member state that has not yet enacted anything, especially when you operate out of more than one territory.

Most of the jobs in that HN thread do give a salary expectation (though a few with a very wide range, which might be outside the rules, but they were US anyway so not covered), I don't think I saw an EU one in my quick scan that did not (at least one UK one, but again those are not currently covered by such rules).

[of course not having the credentials to leak does not protect us from this sort of bug, it is just one factor in a multipart security stance]

Current state (now we have been bought and are effectively more than an order of magnitude bigger): I definitely don't have opportunity to make a unilateral decision like that. Even though the larger company has a more “fair enough, feel free to go elsewhere” attitude when a small client says “if you can support × that is a dealbreaker for us” then we could previously afford to take as our stance, some of the bigger clients are definitely paying us enough, and do use passwords, that someone above me would overrule a keys-only decision.

I was thinking about interfering with existing sites.

The problem with this is you are adding a moving part to your DNS lookups. It might be worth adding two on separate VPS hosts and have your resolver fall back to the second if the first goes down.

Another, usually more minor, problem is that some services (like CDNs) use the source of your DNS query to modify the response so you get sent to a topologically near-by end-point. This means you might notice such services being slower as you are sent to a PoP near your VPN host not one closer to your actual location.

Other than respawning them as you scroll around, so one starts in an appropriate place as a test comes into view, and resetting them automatically, perhaps on a timer, there probably isn't a better way to properly show it off than that.

https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2026-98432#status still shows “work in progress”.

[I know the update is available in “proposed” if you are willing to jumpt through those hoops]

This is true. Even though I'm not much of a mouse user for it, I tend to edit curl commands of much length in a text editor when I'm doing things by hand, then pasting into the terminal.

> especially if the last command didn't do a final "\n" output

Or if your prompt outputs something to stderr instead of stdout so it doesn't get counted when the shell is trying to position where you are in editing the stream. Ubuntu's default prompt under byobu is a pain for this when I move to a different machine and forget to carry my tweaks for that.

For the missing final \n I just hit [enter] an extra time, but getting round the stderr thing isn't quite that simple.

And assuming you mean Google, the question is based on a false premise. They were an advertising company years before gmail was introduced, and an ad-tech company being able to trawl your mail to find ways to advertise at you is a very different proposition to a search company releasing the same product.

It'll take a particularly dumb and lazy AI to replace me.

Or both: the family names having been chosen originally from biblical names, but not continuing for that reason.

I'm a David, and there were many Davids in my University intake year, but I suspect that has less to do with the Bible and more to do with mothers of a certain age range having interests in the Davids Bowie or Essex (or both! - quite possible in my mother's case).

Oh, my sweet summery child :-)

Companies have been doing far more dodgy things, things that look objectively illegal where-as the clean-room reverse engineering thing looks to me (caveat: not a legal expert at all) to be legally defensible, for a long time, definitely pre-AI.

Even if a company operating in your jurisdiction, where you as an individual might have a cat in hell's chance of even trying to sort the situation to your preference, might not, you can bet your last <currency unit> that a company elsewhere will feel more free to do so if they wanted what you have without agreeing to your terms.

So basically: money, and their desire to have more of it, is demanding this.

Get one AI to describe what the code does, and another to implement based on that description. You might even get away with a human doing one of the steps. A variation of the classic “clean room reverse engineering” method that was used by Compaq to reimplement IBM's BIOS and start the clone PC market.

Some argue that “it doesn't work like that” but it certainly seems to be what some people are doing and as yet no one has been confident enough that their copyright extends through this mechanism that they've tested the theory in court.

Note: I'm not saying it is right, but that it might well be perfectly legal. It is definitely possible, practical even. I'd still release stuff under AGPL/similar for the same reasons stated above, but I'd not operate under any illusion that I'd be safe from someone using that method to copy everything they wanted to.

No worries, I'm happy to have very slightly reduced the amount of confusion in the world (especially if it might have been caused by my previous message not being as clear as I thought it was at the time of writing!).

The implication is that while they are waiting for the async loop to complete for one site, the bot can be scraping others that have already had the challenge completed (usually the one challenge stays in force for some time afterwards) or that have no such challenge.

Memory hard challenges will reduce the effectiveness of this, but not remove it completely.

Though that these methods are working at all implies that most (almost all?) bots are not bothering to use such async methods as there are sufficient resources not protected by them that this complication is not yet worth implementing.

Equating bot prevention measures with “please give us permission for 1,000s of companies to stalk you around the Internet, no? Here are some dark patterns to try make you accidentally agree” is rather unfair IMO. They are an inconvenience but for the protection of the sites rather than for the betterment-of-adtech-via-conning-you-the-viewer-with-malicious-compliance.

> Bots can use async or virtual threads and not even have to hold on to a stack while they are waiting for this bullshit

They could, but given these methods seem to work currently most (almost all?) are not. They will start doing so if the amount of resources protected in this way increases to the point where it is worth it, or course, that is why memory-hard processes are being worked on which will make that route less practical.

> cookie banners, and of the that crap should be an automatic F grade on WCAG and should make web sites immediately liable for ADA lawsuits

I can't disagree there, though that would be quite an inefficient process and requires a bunch of money up front from who-ever champions the legal challenge, so I doubt it would actually be at all practical.

I think many don't see the point of robots.txt as it will just be ignored by most bots anyway, so instead concentrate on more complicated measures.