randomstring

The max legal length of URLS is 2048, but I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't plenty of non-compliant URLs longer than that in the wild. If you were limited to 2048 characters, and a valid URL format, I suspect it would be hard if not impossible to build a URL with the same MD5 of an arbitrary high ranking URL like "https://nytimes.com/" But what if you just wanted to piggy back the pagerank of any mid to high rank site? Is there a URL in the top million ranked URLs you could MD5 hash collide?

I doubt google would use a URL hash as strong and as slow as MD5. Maybe Page and Brin weren't even thinking about cryptographic hashes, and just a good mixing function.

And some other famous quotes: https://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/quotes.html

What if we could make every car $5-10k more expensive instead?

</satire>

I once thought that using AI to make all cars self driving might be the key to making pedestrians and cyclists safe. Self driving cars are playing a game of Russian Roulette. The systems will get it wrong occasionally, with LIDAR or without. Not if, but when. Whether or not someone dies depends on the situation.

Even back in the Open Directory Days when we powered part of search.netscape.com I estimated 80+% of all search traffic was automated. At least most of it self-identified with the same Java useragent.

Later when working Topix, despite being a news search engine, most traffic was bot traffic. Most included the word “mortgage” in the query. Topix specialized in localized content, and that was very popular for SEO scrapers.

Lastly at Blekko, I estimate 90+% of traffic was automated. By then maybe half or more learned to change the user agent. Most used HTTP/1.0, a dead giveaway as no browser still uses 1.0. This was a major aspect in Blekko's load shedding strategy. If the servers started to get overloaded, we'd start bouncing suspected bot traffic to a redirect that would show in the logs. If there was a human with a modern browser running javascript on the other end, would get redirect to a link that wouldn't get bounced. I would check the logs weekly to see if any humans got caught. None ever did. This was a huge monetary savings, you only need 1/10th the servers if you can safely ignore the bots.

Often it's endless repetition of the same keywords in a random order with a place name appended, or prepended, or inserted. over and over. Often variations on known monetizatable SEO keywords. However, much of it doesn't make any sense.

I don't have any insight into Google's numbers but I would conservatively estimate 95% or more of all their queries are automated bots and not humans. And the level of spy-vs-spy going on for Google CPU resources vs SEO bots is probably pretty evolved by now. I stopped tracking many years ago when Google switched to densely packed obfuscated javascript for page renders. Maybe this is part of why automated queries are so high across the web, maybe google is too hard to crack for most.

http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/ Cuil Theory

MOsquito Tracking and Heat RAy?

Dates from 1752 were in the test set.

The French Revolutionary Calendar was interesting. Ten days in the week, 3 weeks per month, with a extra "bonus" month at the end of the year with 5 (or 6) days. One reason it didn't last is that despite the change in the week length, workers only got 2 days off per week.

I used to dedicate a couple days every January to investigate new emacs tools. Read about the latest features or new modes, often from my org-mode TODO list where I bookmarked them. I have learned to never update emacs mid-project as I've on multiple occasions shattered my emacs config updating versions or moving to a new distros. MacOS brew install vs .dmg install? Aquaemacs? DoomEmacs? Oh, hello the malpa repo URL changed and is https only now.

"eldoc" error wrong-type-argument stringp number-or-marker-p

Googling that doesn't get you anywhere.

VSCode has a healthy extension marketplace, something emacs should adopt.

elisp is dead. Not because it is dead, or deserves to be dead, but because everyone "believes" it dead. Same goes for Perl.

I love emacs, it has been a rock my entire programming life, but it's a time suck to configure. I know there are some who have created a Sistine Chapel in their .emacs.d, and I'm jealous. There's a fine balance between spending time and effort optimizing and sharpening your tools and emacs is deep on the wrong side of the line for me.

I don't want emacs to ever die. But come on, if you're losing to vim in popularity, you are already dead.

A quick look on ebay shows they're typically selling for less than $100.

This toy is a good analog for a real record player and with grooves that move a needle and play sound encoded on the disk. Leading to understanding of sound waves.

This new toy is a mix of new and old tech. How can a per-literate child be expected to decipher binary encodings and how they map to individual songs? What deeper understanding of how things work are within the grasp of a child that cannot yet use a screwdriver, wire cutters, and a volt meter?

This new toy is boring. Once you learn how to turn it on, it can have no appeal to a child exposed to much better music players all around them: cell phones, iPads, computers, tvs. This is just a piece of plastic and e-waste destined for the landfill, purchased by some sentimental old timer who has fond memories of the original F-P record player.

It got it right. My first drawing didn't have interrobang at the top of the suggestion list, because I didn't have the top closed. So there is some bias from the font it was trained on.

One day I wondered why Verse took so long to start, i.e. time to first render of emails. So I profiled the startup using a browser performance profiler. It didn't take me long to discover there was a sleep(5) in one of the Javascript files. Every employee was subjected to a sleep(5) for every single login. Of course for security reasons your email session timed out every 12 hours or so, meaning that every employee is logging into email at least once a work day. Some napkin math: at the time IBM had almost 400k employees, so that's 555 hours per day of wasted employee time. Or 138,888 hours per year of wasted employee time. To be fair some large number of IBMers may not have had jobs that subjected them to Verse.

Or is it about having it all pre-built and pre-installed?

Both piholes are on different UPS power, different switches, in different locations. In theory the lights will go out on the main UPS and switch first (it draws more power), but this configuration did save me once.

I swear, some day, maybe even soon, I will find a use for all the Raspberry Pis, various Pi POE adapters, Pi cameras, and sensors I own.

They may not have been the first to invent the idea or implement it. I found this description of the same idea here: https://cerealnumber.livejournal.com/27537.html

and an online implementation and demo here: https://jan-martinek.com/etc/zeno/

It was a dark day for Bay Area Burritos when they tore down the building that housed La Costena and La Bamba. There was some Burrito magic on that corner of Old Middlefield and Rengstorff.

At blekko, under high traffic, we would loadshed obvious bot traffic first and prioritize searches from humans.

Unfortunately there system requires dialing "*701" or "*702" and dialing star on a true rotary phone isn't possible without some other system in place. Like this product from dialgizmo: https://www.dialgizmo.com/how_it_works.html Dialing two consecutive stars would still be annoying and slow.

I've been wanting to wire up an in-house "intercom" system using old phones. I'm a little surprised there isn't a "telephone HAT" for the raspberry pi that will interface directly with an old phone. A HAT that could interpret the DTMF or pulse dialing and drive even the old fashioned mechanical ringers.