Blass Rose

There’s a lot of things. Some scrapers aren’t smart and will grab every link they see, just in case. Those links will often be redundant, but the scraper might not know that until it’s done downloading it. A 1MB download doesn’t seem too hard on the server, but do that a thousand times a minute and that’s a decently heavy load on any small website. I saw a creator talking about how they noticed AI bots scraping their website since they had literal decades of code that was well documented and guaranteed AI free. The bots could easily grab the git files and have all of that code with every commit message for about 4GB. But instead the AI was asking the Website to render each and every commit as a webpage which took a 0.5KB change and rendered it as a 5MB webpage since it showed all the code before and after, all the formatting for a webpage, etc. This meant that each scraper was downloading TERABYTES of data from his website when all it wanted was in a nice, single download that was in a very computer-friendly format to parse. None of these scrapers were made smart. If they were, we wouldn’t notice them. It’s because they’re dumb, but spending a lot of time and money on “avoiding detection” that it’s dangerous.

Legit I had a website give me a 403 on an API request earlier. They had changed their API to block anything trying to masquerade as a browser. They actually just wanted legit API users to send a user agent that had a username and a project name. If you pretended to be a browser, you got blocked. On the 403 page, they had a direct link to download their whole database in one go if that’s what you wanted. They had links to the database on megaupload that was updated every 24hrs, and then a patch database that listed all the recent changes to keep you up to date. Literally they don’t care if the data is taken. What they cared about is wasting their bandwidth and trying to be sneaky about it.

Basically “put it in your checked bag unless it’s under 3.4oz and in a quart baggie”

Makes me think of many Medicat tools (and others like Macrium Reflect) that boot up a tiny windows installation just to run a single piece of software.

I’m used to Linux being used for that, so it’s funny when it’s Windows.

And didn’t use a single drop of water to do so. This sort of natural language processing was just done on-device, so there was no need for an Internet connection or waiting around for your slow Internet to catch up.

I’ve seen so many game jam entries where the code is like this. Delicately balanced and using so many assumptions to just get the thing out the door.

It’s funny when they decide to make a full game out of it and realize that it’s gonna take them 6 months just to undo the tech debt of the original “demo”

It was a very limited run thing. It was a celebration for them being top-sellers. Only 10k were ever made.

And oddly enough, these celebration pieces tend to increase sales further by amplifying their advertising.

I saw one like this where a guy hired a hacker to get into his encrypted wallet device because he was sure it had like $100k in it. Guy broke in, pulled up the Bitcoin wallet and… It was empty. Dude had forgotten that he sold all his Bitcoin YEARS ago.

Oh I’m glad this tech went somewhere useful! I remember reading the paper and toying with the models they released as a proof of concept like… 8 years ago? It was really powerful back then. The ability to do TTS of someone’s voice given literally 3 seconds of training data?! (In fact I found that it worked best with short, nonsense audio clips than actually saying anything. Saying “test test test” worked way better than reading an actual sentence.) But now it looks like it can actually handle tone well. It’s also probably way better now, and less… Asthmatic sounding.

Listen, I’m totally down for bioplastic straws. They’ve got a different texture and are far more brittle, but still compostable and lasts more than long enough for me to enjoy my drink.

I don’t get why customers at my work hate them so much. To the point some will bring their own straws if we don’t have the regular plastic milkshake straws. It’s weird…

And here I am glad that my savings account interest pays for my phone bill+90% of my car bill. Meanwhile I could just be buying a new car every month, instead, with a small loan of $6M

I don’t care unless I’m drinking the Kool aid and actually really wanted the feature. If it’s not something I personally use: who cares? Bit of a bummer that feels like it was all for nothing, but ultimately I still got paid for that time and effort, which is all I’m really going for anyways.