Yup. The robots.txt file is not only meant to block robots from accessing the site, it’s also meant to block bots from accessing resources that are not interesting for human readers, even indirectly.

For example, MediaWiki installations are pretty clever in that by default, /w/ is blocked and /wiki/ is encouraged. Because nobody wants technical pages and wiki histories in search results, they only want the current versions of the pages.

Fun tidbit: in the late 1990s, there was a real epidemic of spammers scraping the web pages for email addresses. Some people developed wpoison.cgi, a script whose sole purpose was to generate garbage web pages with bogus email addresses. Real search engines ignored these, thanks to robots.txt. Guess what the spam bots did?

Do the AI bros really want to go there? Are they asking for model collapse?

I’m using Finnish keyboard layout (same as Swedish basically).

I like how AltGr+7/8/9/0 gives me { [ ] }, it’s a very nice grouping. The key next to Z is < > and you get | with AltGr, which is very handy.

Only thing that’s mildy annoying from programming viewpoint is that for tilde and backtick, the keys do diacritics - you need to press the diacritic key and space. Backtick is especially fun, because it’s shift+acute, space. Meanwhile, the key next to 1 does § ½, which aren’t that handy most of the time. I often just stick backtick on that key if I’m particularly assed to customise keyboard keyouts. Similarly, shift+4 is ¤, which is another not a particularly useful character (but I don’t mind that, because £ $ € all need to be produced with AltGr, which is at least consistent).

Oh content from this blog has been popping up in random places. Methinks it’s le epic trole.

So yeah, Xfce looks the same as it did 10 years ago.

And?

Desktop environment is meant to launch apps and give me windows and maybe have a file manager. Xfce does that. It’s a desktop environment.

Hey, “modern” desktop environment enthusiasts, if you bring Compiz back from the dead, give us luddites a call, will you? Ohhhh you kids should have seen it back in the day. Windows and Mac users saw Compiz in action and were, like, “wat.” You don’t get them to react that way to modern Linux desktops, no. And all that is lost now. Thanks Wayland.

I love watching Let’s Plays of Telltale games and similar games like Life is Strange. But usually, the first episode is hardest to watch through, because in these types of games, the first episode also serves as a very drawn out tutorial and has the most of the lore dumps.

Yeah, there’s an important distinction. Just because you could use Linux doesn’t mean you can at any particular moment.

I don’t really do music production; I’m more into writing and visual arts and photography. I could do all of those things on Linux and be perfectly productive. But there’s a difference between being productive and being optimal. My current process happens to be based on software that runs on Windows. (Heck, a lot of the software I use already runs on both Windows and Linux, anyways.)

The key here being that you shouldn’t lock yourself too much to just one tool and one approach, and that actually goes both ways.

And that there is the real crime. It’s a real shame no one’s making a tape drive at the consumer market price point. Tapes are a hell of a lot more convenient for backups and archival than the giant weird pile of storage formats we’ve seen over years.

Turtles are such underrated creatures and most people don’t realise how important they are to computer science. Turtle robots! Turtle graphics! Not to even mention the very concept of shell access! And yes, turtles are probably very happy that Secure Shell was invented.

Yeah, basically unsubbed from AvE over this too.

I can’t remember who this was, but there was another engineering YouTuber who, during the pandemic, basically twittered about being frustrated with the lockdowns from business perspective and whingled about being scared talking about his political beliefs because apparently being anything anything right of a model leftist is a crucifiable offence in the bird site, according to him. And how the horse paste actually works. I was like “…oh shit, maybe this dude is a magahatter?”

I used to watch iilluminaughtii several years ago, probably because I’ve been grabbing popcorn and enjoying watching someone dunking on multi-level marketing since, uh, 90s at least. Then I watched some video that was about some topic that I was kind of in middle of a deep dive, too (I can’t remember which exactly. Elan School, probably?). And the video was bland as hell. And then I was like “yeah, most of these other videos are kind of forgettable shallow pap too”.

…and this year we found out about the whole landlordy corporate town fancier backstabby financial abuser helicopter-CEO situation. And the content mill situation. And the plagiarism thing. Can’t forget the plagiarism thing. …I was like, “oh this all just makes sense now.”

Probably some other NPC that does some highly specific thing. Like the name rater, or whatever.

Not important in the grand scheme of things, but people all over the world come for that one weird task I can do, and that’s enough for me.

Yeah, the thing is, “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors” is kind of a meme among non-Haskell developers. Personally, I think Haskell is a very interesting language. The mathematical jargon, however, is impenetrable, and this particular expression is kind of the poster child. I’mma go look at Erlang if I want my functional language fix without making my head hurt, thank ye very much.

It’s a thing! Sadly it won’t rewrite Haskell codebases for you, though.

I literally just looked at Reddit for the first time in ages.

What the fuck.

Here’s the thing: Reddit’s UI design has always been shitty. Old Reddit was fucking garbage, so admins cheerfully asked RES folks to fix their shit. (Instead of, you know, hiring them.) New Reddit? Always been shit, and nobody’s going to fix it.

This Newer New Reddit? I… I don’t think they even know at this point. What. What’s going on.

If they ask critique from the community, some AI bot will AI-pat the admin’s arse and AI-splain the remaining AI-users that things will be just fine. (Now, “things actually getting better” has literally never happened as far as Reddit or its user interface has ever been concerned, as you should well know if you’ve ever been a human Reddit user.)

This is literally the old EA stratagem. Give the “independent” developer basically an impossible goal and then go “well you failed to meet the goal, looks like you need a little bit of help from us, and by little help, we mean from now on, you do exactly what we tell you, or else”. EA pulled this off with Origin Systems and (to a different extent) BioWare to name just a few examples. It ended with complete sadness.

To EA’s credit, that charade usually took a long time to come to completion. Sony is trying to pull this this so soon after acquiring Bungie.

My theoretical answer is this: in an ideal world, there would be no copyright at all. This is an artificial contrivance that was once dreamed up to serve physical-copy economy, and it was rendered obsolete by the digital age. Shit would be so much easier when we got rid of this shit and everyone could share everything by default without any profit motive. (Caveat: This will not work unless literally every jurisdiction on the planet gets rid of copyright laws all at once, otherwise this is way too exploitable due to power imbalance. So I don’t think this is a practical proposition. *cough* unless we all decide Anarchism is a good idea after all *cough*)

My practical answer is this: Welllllll we’re kinda damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. My personal feeling is that AI creations aren’t really copyrightable, and even suggesting they are copyrightable is kind of opening a huge can of worms regarding what exactly counts as “creativity” in the first place. The best we can do under current copyright regime is to regulate how the AI datasets are curated, because goodness knows the current datasets weren’t exactly ethically obtained.

I was about to comment on this, but my Android phone spontaneously rebooted.

Anyway. Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was about to say: Firefox. It is a thing. An awesome thing.

Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.

If Chrome is known for one thing, it’s absurd User-Agent strings. Why not make it even more absurd???

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (Ahahaha; Fuck you Google; This is actually) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0

Oh you fancy PC people and your fancy syscall instruction.

I still don’t know why I could remember jsr $ab1e. I didn’t even write that much assembly.