I suppose there’s plenty of applications where the power consumption of half the average vacuum cleaner running constantly can be justified, but I’m not sure personal entertainment is one of them.

Even if I didn’t care about the environmental impact, electricity costs around here would be more than a little prohibitive.

I won’t deny that something like Cloudflare’s “WAF” is useful. My issue is with the number of false positives I’ve run into with Cloudflare over the years. And because they have a virtual monopoly, when they cock up, suddenly half the Internet is inaccessible to the people caught up in it.

Or look at it another way: Suppose I was running a website and experiencing issues with automated access (some of which may be entirely legitimate). I choose to use Cloudflare’s services to mitigate the issue, and immediately see a - say - 10% drop in traffic. I wouldn’t be able to tell whether half of those where legitimate users filtered out by CF, unless those people take initiative to inform me of the issue - and even then I’d have no way of even estimating the ratio of false positives.

At the very least, it’d the nice if site-owners took a more nuanced approach to their implementation of these kinds of services than just gatekeeping general site access. Allow all reads of data (if you don’t want people to consume your data, putting it on the Internet was a bad move in the first place), but bot-protect all writes.

Cloudflare is an Internet plague.

I have no idea why Milei and Trump though that play would work, but I guess you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Of course, geopolitics isn’t a sport, and misses tend to permanently piss other people off.

Anyway, what’s left on the list of places and peoples Trump hasn’t tried to fuck over yet? Belize?

I’m pretty sure that level of weaponized adorableness violates the Geneva Convention, but I can’t say I mind it.

Le Monde caught up with the primary investigating detective as he was enjoying a chocolate croissant and a double espresso at a charming little café. He had the following comment on the case:

“Yeah, we’ll be getting right on that. Everybody wants to find the culprits, and it’s totally not to hand them the nice gift basket we absolutely didn’t put together for them.”

I don’t disagree, but my problem is the ways in which it clearly isn’t Fallout. Specifically, FO has some deep lore that justifies the existence, mannerisms and internecine postures of the various factions, but here it’s apparently just… Waves of nutters take the first opportunity to move into a radiological quarantine zone and set up shop as conveniently thematic gangs for… reasons.

“Just think about it lads! Not only can we live in a place that’ll kill us on the cellular level, but we can wear theatrical facepaint - don’t ask where we’re getting a steady supply of that - like a 24/7 Kiss revival concert! It’ll be awesome! There’ll be matching top hats for everyone. Millinery is a real growth industry in here. Mind the mercury.”

But other than that, it looks fun enough.

Edit: Spelling.

“They kept calling us oblivious idiots for some reason.”

Hah, okay. That’s pretty cool. If people are going to be writing farming bots anyway, one might as well make it the formal objective.

I’m fine right here, thanks. Although I’d been using Reddit for some time at that point, I permanently left Digg as part of the Great Exodus. I don’t see any particular appeal to going back to a centralized service, especially in the current climate.

Somehow, that managed to make her more feminine.

It’s hardly surprising. He’s always wanted to be Tony Stark, e.g. simultaneously a nerd and one of the cool kids. Unfortunately for Musk, Stark could pull that off because A) He’s neither real nor a realistic character and B) was a bona fide world-class genius. Musk - who’s so far from being a genius that you need the JWST to resolve ‘smart’ from his location in intellectual phase space - characteristically just managed to concurrently fail at both.

Setting aside all considerations of Trump and his Russian entanglements for a moment, it’s interesting how machine learning mirrors our own preconceptions back at us. It can be nice and validating, but not necessarily insightful when applied to public opinion. All it means is that Trump being subordinate to Russian interest is the common expressed perception. That doesn’t make it wrong (at all, in this case), but we didn’t need an LMM to tell us that.

It’s far more useful when applied to seeking out trends or patterns in scientific datasets where those are considerably less apparent. We really shouldn’t use this technology to build echo chambers for ourselves.

Somehow I don’t think that’ll draw in customers.

I have a confession to make: Unless shell script is absolutely required, I just use Python for all my automation needs.

There’s a lot of things that could be included in such a program that would be useful for the general population to know both in times of war and in peace. Civil defense and emergency response. First aid, evacuation of wounded/incapacitated people from dangerous areas. Basic firefighting, shelter locations and evacuation protocols etc.

That might have made more sense if polygraph testing actually performed better than a dice roll. The US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and the National Academy of Sciences could’ve told DHS that, but I guess they didn’t think to ask.

Or think in general.

The MMR vaccine is the sixth most common global immunization. I’m sure they could find some additional doses if they tried just a little.