2,491 karma · joined June 2, 2018
But for a small operation, AKA just me, it's one more thing for me to get my head around and manage.
I don't run just one one website or one service.
It's 100s of sites across multiple platforms!
Not sure I could ever keep up playing AI Crawler and IP Whack-A-Mole!
And my image CDN blocked ByteSpider for me.
For a while I also blocked the entirety of Singapore due to all the bots coming out of AWS over there!
But it's honestly something I just dont need to be thinking about for every single site I run across a multitude of platforms.
Having said that, I will now look at the options for the business critical services I operate for clients!
Those TikTok AI crawlers were destroying some of my sites.
Millions of images served to ByteSpider bots, over and over again. They wouldn't stop. It was relentless abuse. :-(
Now I've just blocked them all with CF.
and my alarms are going off my and support line is ringing...
I cant even login to my CF dashboard to disable the CDN!
Edit: It's back. Hopefully it will stay up!
Edit 2: 1 Hour Later.
Narrator: It didn't stay up :/
And amusing to myself how many people actually remember or know what WebObjects was!
Star Trek TNG is here!
Consumer protections are a very real thing in the EU, UK, Australia and elsewhere!
If you make promises about the features a product will deliver, then you are obligated to deliver those features.
If not, the consumer is entitled to a refund.
Similarly how odd it would be to be in a closed office talking to a computer… at least until we got to startrek levels of AI.
Finally, in my experience, I cannot talk and perform complex thinking at the same time.
I can type and mouse around and stay on a flow state, where I can hold a conceptual model of something in my head and write code for it. But as soon as I begin talking that flow state begins to decay. The longer I talk the harder it is to get back into that state.
I’m happy to ask my phone questions in other circumstances, but I don’t feel it’s something I need on my computer.
Happy for history to prove me wrong!
The TikTok Byte Dance / Byte Spider bots were making millions of image requests from my site.
Over and over again and they would not stop.
I eventually got Cloudinary to block all the relevant user agents, and initially just totally blocked Singapore.
It’s very abusive on the part of these bot running AI scraping companies!
If I hadn’t been using the kind and generous Cloudinary, I could have been stuck with some seriously expensive hosting bills!
Nowadays I just block all AI bots with Cloudflare and be done with it!
I'm just asking the question.. ;-)
They did note that it’s only good for manual cars. Automatics were not standard in the UK in the 80s.
All from memory, so might be mangling the details :-)
*Or could have been the Australian version.
Doesn’t require SQLite.
Works with other DBs:
Small suggestion - work on the semantic structure and SEO.
It's all H1 Tags as far as the eye can see!
I just want me to able to remotely login!
Having to physically login to a remote Mac that has FieVault enabled to get it online after a power outage is not ideal!
So will I be able to actually remote into the GUI now after a reboot?
I've looking at getting a Mac mini for my homelab again, but thinking I'll need one of those remote enable KVM devices!
We need, as a society, to bring back generational communities.
Our workplaces are not our families!
I'll also add, that once you have children, owning your home is a very welcome level of stability.
Nothing worse than looking for a new rental and potentially being forced to upend all your routines and find new schools for the kids as you cant rent in the same area anymore!
Does Google Search open up Ad placement to different Ad Tech companies?
In which case, wouldn’t the Google Ad Tech business end up being the highest bidder anyway?
Much like they are for the default search engine on Apple products by having the deepest pockets.
I view it as much like having an appreciation of Steam Trains and older aircraft!
Still interesting and the best are machines worthy of our ongoing attention.
FWIW I own an old Porsche 911 and an alarmingly fast EV.
I love them both.
When I get back in to the old 911, I think to myself, how the bloody hell was this even legal! It feels dangerous and exciting all at the same time. It's an event every time I turn the key and it starts making noises and the gauges spring into life and lights and switches start glowing. Then you turn the key from a cold start and listen to the sound, and you get to know exactly the state of tune. You dont even need to drive it very fast or very far and it makes you feel alive in a way my EV never does!
Now when I get in and drive my EV, it works in an astonishingly safe and effective way every time. When you stamp on the accelerator it will immediately rocket forwards in a way that makes the occupants of the car feel sick LOL
The acceleration in an EV tapers off, whereas in an older performance cat the performance builds in a more exciting way I think.
But as I say, it's like being a Steam Train enthusiast. They are what they are, from a time when they did what they did.
Copyright infringement is generally a civil offence in Australia.
Whereas theft of physical goods is generally not.
Penalties for copyright infringement differ between countries as well.
You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf...
Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boost circulation. In fact, they still do.
You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight.
This idea that parents should have to be the gatekeepers for everything doesn’t work.
We work better as a community, and we have democracy so we can elect people to take care of things that are good for all of us.
Broadly, as a society we have taken to blaming individuals for not being perfect at everything.
Parenting is traditionally a group activity. The individual consumer capitalist parent is a recent, mid 20th century onwards, construct.
> Because they're told to.
This is largely it.
Consultants rule the earth!
Anecdotally, I recently find myself building a simple enough Android app for a client based on an iOS app I have already built.
I don’t really know Android dev, but know enough to get started having patched an App somewhat recently.
So started from scratch and having heard that the Android SDK had something similar to SwiftUI that’s what I went for.
In building the App I have found that Gemini is far more useful than Googles own documentation and tutorials.
The tutorials for basic things like NavBars is just wrong in places, maybe due to being outdated.
I’ve reported issues using the feedback tool. But still….
All the Tailwind building and so on is done using common JS tools, which are mostly standard out of the box Rails 8 supplied scripts!
Sprockets used to do the SASS compilation and asset bundling, but the Rails standard now is to facilitate your own preferences around compilation of CSS/JS.
It was more a quick promote Rails comment as it can get dismissed as not something to build fast website in :-)
FWIW I optimised the heck out of my personal homepage and got 100/100 for all Lighthouse scores. Which I had not previously thought possible LOL
Built in Rails too!
It's absolutely worth optimising your site though. It just is such a pleasing experience when a page loads without any perceptible lag!
Why is that?
Why Python for AI?