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rozab

4,227 karma · joined March 23, 2019

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rozab··on End of an era for me: no more self-hosted git
I had the same issue when I first put up my gitea instance. The bots found the domain through cert registration in minutes, before there were any backlinks. GPTbot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others.

I added a robots.txt with explicit UAs for known scrapers (they seem to ignore wildcards), and after a few days the traffic died down completely and I've had no problem since.

Git frontends are basically a tarpit so are uniquely vulnerable to this, but I wonder if these folks actually tried a good robots.txt? I know it's wrong that they ignore wildcards, but it does seem to solve the issue

rozab··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
What am I missing? According to this, the only difference is you get a warning popup when someone new DMs you, right? And they can't send you images flagged as porn?

How does this impact you in any way?

rozab··on Guinea worm on track to be 2nd eradicated human disease; only 10 cases in 2025
>The eradication program works by offering cash rewards for reporting cases in areas where the worm is present.

I wonder how they prevented a cobra effect[0] here? Clearly they did avoid it since there were so few human cases. Or maybe some of the animal cases reflect this?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Effect

rozab··on Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features
It's incredible that even vscode had this before Firefox. How could they misjudge their audience so badly?
rozab··on The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]
This guy has incredible videos on hiking gear, examining common claims scientifically and rationally. He never gave any hints as to his professional background, so as not to taint his arguments with appeals to authority. It makes perfect sense that he grew up in this environment, doing engineering work for NASA as a kid!
rozab··on Sins of the Children
The idea of taking ONS to an extreme is cool, and also feels very old-school. The concept of complete monodominance of an ecosphere is a bit unfashionable since Lynn Margulis upended thinking here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontogenetic_niche_shift

rozab··on The Olivetti Company
I restored a beautiful 1946 Olivetti last year, having had nothing to do with typewriters beforehand. I just happened to see it on marketplace and pulled the trigger.

It needed a good clean, and some parts needed bent back into shape, but after that it worked like a dream. The mechanism for the tab stops is fantastic.

rozab··on Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout
These are new electric power plants. The US is still ramping up oil and gas production, and is now producing more than ever before. No signs of transitioning away from fossil fuels for transport, industry, export.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fossil-fuels/chart-the-...

rozab··on FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home
ICE just summarily executed a US citizen in the street with the full support of the administration.
rozab··on Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout
It's the firehouse technique. The films of Adam Curtis touch on this, I'd recommend HyperNormalisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

rozab··on Welcome to Gas Town
>It’s also 100% vibe coded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause. ‘Course, I’ve never looked at Beads either, and it’s 225k lines of Go code that tens of thousands of people are using every day.

225k lines for a cli issue tracker? What the fuck?

rozab··on It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
Similar discussion on similar blog post from last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
rozab··on The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves
This really is a fantastic piece of writing, one of the most entertaining I've read on HN
rozab··on Finger-Nose Stylus for Touch Screens (2011)
Since smartphones became too large to reliably use with one hand, I've been an avid nose user. It helps to naturally possess a pointed proboscis not unlike the one pictured.

I wonder if the clever interaction designers at Google had this in mind when they put a bunch of key gestures right at the top edge of the device?

rozab··on Python numbers every programmer should know
I wonder why an empty set takes so much more memory than an empty dict
rozab··on What an unprocessed photo looks like
Another low tech example - those telephoto crowd shots that were popular during covid. The 'deception' happens before the light hits the sensor, but it's no less effective

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/13/pictu...

rozab··on Maybe the default settings are too high
In one of his essays, Philip Pullman suggested reading Paradise Lost out loud which was a revelation for me. I never considered reading anything out loud for myself but it changes the nature of the experience entirely.

Tolkien recorded some passages of LoTR on a friend's tape recorder while it was still unpublished, I'd highly recommend checking them outz particularly the Ride of the Rohirrim.

rozab··on I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me
I've noticed for a while these bizarre and sometimes inaccurate AI summaries of pages showing up in Google search results where matches to actual page content used to be. I assumed it was Google generating them, not the 3rd parties themselves. Why does Google even allow indexing on text that isn't really on the page?
rozab··on Making Google Sans Flex
Curly braces can be really hard to distinguish from parens because they appear in the same sort of place in e.g. JS, and IDEs and highlighters often render them in stupid low-contrast colours. I hate it aesethetically, but I get the usability need.
rozab··on Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
All of the Google Docs icons are really thoughtfully designed, with distinctive silhouettes. Instead of making 5 tiny illegible variations on inserting a row/column/etc, they just use the + symbol. Because the symbol is the same, your eye is then drawn to the differing text on the right.

Some of the Apple ones really are ridiculous, like the ones around window management and copy/pasting. Even blown up to fullscreen size, you wouldn't have a chance of guessing what they do. But at display size, they are just plain illegible. Having them there is just a visual distraction.

rozab··on “Boobs check” – Technique to verify if sites behind CDN are hosted in Iran
More concretely, a bunch of Scottish nationalist accounts were unearthed as Iranian by the recent X location switch-on
rozab··on G0-G3 corners, visualised: learn what "Apple corners" are
I think she's in the mines working on her Blender/Maya alternative, Half Edge.

https://half-edge.handmade.network/

rozab··on NTSB report: Decryption of images from the Titan submersible camera [pdf] (2024)
What's with the entire dev board crammed in there? Is that... normal? What board is it?
rozab··on HP and Dell disable HEVC support built into their laptops' CPUs
That seems like the opposite of what the quoted Reddit post says:

>those with newer machines needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled

From this it sounds like it's been disabled at a lower level, but Windows still expects it to be there and so fails to decode streams unless hwaccel is disabled

rozab··on Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
The source of this claim, which you helpfully did not provide, is Rupert Lowe, a far-right UK politician and shite-merchant who is so toxic he got kicked out of Reform. He does not give any indication as to where his number came from.

https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/1987100209185181958

This reciprocal scheme only applies to certain countries: the EU/EAA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, etc.

I think when you are blaming things like headlight brightness on those bloody foreigners, it's time to do some self-reflection.

rozab··on Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication
That doesn't mean the process is happening naturally as asserted. For instance, wild black wolves in the US got this trait from hybridization with domesticated dogs.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2903542/

rozab··on SanDisk launches dongle-like Extreme Fit USB-C flash drive with up to 1 TB
SanDisks are very frequently fake, even in brick and mortar stores. Could it be you had a fake one?
rozab··on Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
The recent YouTube updates made me disabled my adblocker for a bit. Almost every ad I got was a scam. I reported one to YouTube, a deepfake investment scam. They actually got back to me and said they had removed the ad.

2 days later, I got the same ad again.

rozab··on Solarpunk is happening in Africa
Lowtech magazine recently had an article about cooking with solar power:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2025/10/how-to-build-a-sol...

rozab··on Most expensive laptops
Where do you live? Here in the UK, a company called Klarna has managed to wriggle their way into almost every single online storefront and offers plans for sub-£5 purchases.
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