It's been a few hours. These particular bots have completely stopped. There are still some bot-looking requests in the log, with a newer-version Chrome UA on both Mac and Windows, but there aren't nearly as many of them.
Config snippet for anyone interested:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Chrome/\d{2,3}\.\d+\.\d{2,}\.\d{2,}") {
set $block 1;
}
if ($http_accept_language = "") {
set $block "${block}1";
}
if ($block = "11") {
return 403;
}
Thank you very much for the observation about headers. I just looked closer at the bot traffic I'm currently receiving on my small fediverse server and noticed that it's user agents of old Chrome versions but also that the Accept-Language header is never set, which is indeed something that no real Chromium browser would do. So I added a rule to my nginx config to return a 403 to these requests. The amount of these per second seems to have started declining.
Don’t exaggerate the level of control required. For all that things are bad and getting worse, Russia has not reached the North Korea percolation point where every facet of government control is tied to every other one. (Neither has Russia reached a NK-style total war economy, partly through bureaucratic dysfunction and partly by design; but I digress.) The things that it does are still pretty modular and don’t require $YOURCOUNTRY becoming Russia in its entirety. Hell, London had more outdoor surveillance than Moscow until after Covid. As far as Internet censorship, here’s what the playbook was:
1. Have a dysfunctional court system. (Not a powerless one, mind you; it’s enough that it basically never rule against the government. It would probably even be enough if it never ruled against any of the following.)
2. Mandate page-level blocks of “information harmful to the health and development of children” (I wish I were joking) for consumer ISPs, by court order; of course, that means IP or at least hostname/SNI blocks for TLS-protected websites, we can’t help that now can we. The year is 2012.
3. Gradually expand the scope throughout the following steps. (After couple of particularly obnoxious opposition websites and against an unavoidable background of prostitution and illegal gambling, the next victim, in 2015, was piracy including pirate libraries. Which is why I find the notion of LibGen or Sci-Hub being Russian soft power so risible, and the outrage against Cloudflare not being in the moderation business so naïve.)
4. Make sure the court orders are for specific pieces of content not websites (as they must be if you don’t want the system to be circumventable by trivial hostname hopping), meaning the enforcement agency can find a particularly vague order and gradually start using it for whatever. Doesn’t hurt that the newly-blocked website’s owner will be faced with a concluded case in which they don’t even have standing.
5. Ramp up enforcement against ISPs.
6. Use preexisting lawful intercept infra at ISPs to ramp up enforcement even further. Have them run through the agency-provided daily blacklist, fine the offenders. Any other probe you can get connected to the ISP will work too.
7. Offer ISPs a choice (wink, wink) of routing their traffic through agency-controlled, friendly-contractor-made DPI boxes they will need to buy, promising to release them from some liability. (First draft published 2016, signed into law 2019.)
8. Mandate the boxes.
9. It is now 2021 or so and you’ve won, legally and organizationally speaking, the rest is a simple matter of programming to filter out VPN protocols, WhatsApp calls and such. Pass additional laws mandating blocks of “promotion” of block evasion if you wish, but the whole legal basis thing is a pretence at this point. For instance, you can de facto block YouTube absent any legal order by simply having the DPI boxes make it very slow, a capability not mentioned in any law whatsoever, then cheerfully announce that in the national press.
See how very easy it is? How each legal or technical capability logically follows from very real deficiencies of the preceding ones so even a reasonable court would be disinclined to rule against them? Understand now why I’m furious when reasonable people on this forum defend the desires of their—mostly good and decent!—governments to control the Internet?
(See also how most of this happened before “Russia bad” became the prevailing sentiment, and how most of it went largely unnoticed in the EU and US, aside from a couple of reputable-but-fringe orgs like RSF to whom very few listen because they cry wolf so much? The ECtHR didn’t even get to the cases, IIRC, before the trap snapped shut and Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering, making the matter de facto moot.)
You know that road. You know exactly where it ends.
I've been searching for something that would be able to show me all the stats I care about (cpu, memory, disk and network usage) on a single screen, and btop so far has been quite good at this role. It has a bit weird controls to my taste, but reading the manual works I guess :)
I loved the idea of QNX. Got way excited about it. We were moving our optical food processor from dedicated DSPs to general purpose hardware, using 1394 (FireWire). The process isolation was awesome. The overhead of moving data through messages, not so much. In the end, we paid someone $2K to contribute isochronous mode/dma to the Linux 1394 driver and went our way with RT extensions.
It was a powerful lesson (amongst others) in what I came to call “the Law of Conservation of Ugly”. In many software problems, there’s a part that just is never going to feel elegant. You can make one part of the system elegant, which often causes the inelegance surface elsewhere in the system.
I read, ages ago, this apocryphal quote by William Gibson: “The most important skill of the 21st century is to figure out which proper keywords to type in the Google search bar, to display the proper answers.”
To me, that has never been more true.
Most junior dev ask GeminiPiTi to write the JavaScript code for them, whereas I ask it for explanation on the underlying model of async/await and the execution model of a JavaScript engine.
There is a similar issue when you learn piano. Your immediate wish is to play Chopin, whereas the true path is to identify,name and study all the tricks there are in his pieces of art.
This is also related to the philosophical definition of bullshit[1]: speech intended to persuade or influence without any active intention to be either true or false.
This is written for the Linux-on-the-Desktop crowd, and good for them. But tmux really shines for folks using MacBooks with iTerm2. Its tmux integration is so good that it simply disappears into my workflow.
With this in my `~/.ssh/config`, I can just type `ssh tmux` to get back to my remote dev box whenever I wake my computer or change connections.
Host tmux
HostName 1.2.3.4
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/etc.etc.etc
RequestTTY force
RemoteCommand tmux -CC new -A -s 0
With iTerm2's tmux integration enabled, this will pop open a new window where the remote tmux tabs and scroll buffer look and act just like native, local iTerm2 tabs and scroll buffer. I don't even know any tmux commands.
I've worked around this problem on each mac laptop I've owned over the years by configuring "hibernate on lid close."
When I open the lid of the mac it takes maybe 20-30 seconds to resume. I consider this a small price to pay in exchange for reliable sleep and less battery drain with the lid closed.
If you want to try this, run in the terminal:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25
If you don't like it, you can restore defaults with:
Back when I was doing academic publishing I'd use a regex to find all the hyperlinks, then a script (written by a co-worker, thanks again Dan!) to determine if they were working or no.
A bit different, as it's mainly for voice - but I made an app 'Murmur : Bluetooth Group Calls' - that lets you hold group voice calls and message via a mesh of Bluetooth LE connections. It's available on Android and iOS. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/murmur-bluetooth-group-calls/i...
Doesn't really get any downloads, so not sure there's much demand for this - but I use it with some shokz bone conducting headphones for talking to my wife when we're cycling (also for wrangling our two small girls)
As a Spaniard who was about to take a well-deserved siesta, I found these points so blatantly inaccurate that I had to get up and address them.
>>3% tax on my global wealth every year (in effect it's more like 4.5% because there is also significant capital gain tax)
This only affects multi-millionaires, and even then, your numbers are wrong. The national wealth tax only applies to net worth over €3M. The top rate of 3.5% is only for assets over €10.7M. And some regions like Madrid and Andalusia offer a 100% exemption from the regional tax.
>>60% tax on a semi-decent tech salary
False. The top income tax bracket is ~47% on earnings over €300K, which is far beyond a "semi-decent" salary here. More importantly, as a foreigner, you can use the "Beckham Law" to pay a flat tax of 24% on your first €600K of income for six years.
>>25%+ capital gain tax for my investors (if I find any)
You're cherry-picking the highest rate again. It's a progressive tax starting at 19%. It only exceeds 25% on gains over €200K. Besides, if your investors are not in Spain, they are taxed in their country of residence under its tax treaties with Spain.
>>people don't speak English, many of them are proud of it
We are not French, we won't scold you for trying to speak English. While not everyone is fluent in rural areas, people will genuinely try their best to help you, even if it's through Google Translate.
>>scheduling anything with anybody is impossible, the concept of being on time doesn't exist
You're confusing social life with professional life. Yes, we might be 15 minutes late for a beer, but in a business context, being late is just as unprofessional here as it is in London or New York.
>>Bureaucracy is slow, full of paperwork, can't be done online, can't be done in English, the result depends on clerk's mood on a given day
Spanish bureaucracy is as slow as in anywhere else, but it is indeed digitized. You are required to file your tax forms (available in English btw) digitally, and you can register a business, get your SSN, etc., with a digital certificate from your computer. I've only had to show up in person once in the last five years to register my address after moving to a new city.
>>if someone comes to my house when I am away I can't kick them out, need to find another house and keep paying bills for the new occupa(s)nts
This is just rage bait. What you are describing, someone entering your primary home, is trespassing, a criminal offense. The police will have them evicted within 48 hours. The infamous "okupa" issue applies to properties that are clearly abandoned or second homes left empty for years, not your actual residence.
The first time I saw a model like this, I assumed that randomness would eventually balance things out. But that is not what happened. The rules were completely fair, yet the system still ended up producing significant inequality.
That stuck with me. Sometimes, all it takes is time and a bit of randomness for imbalance to emerge on its own. Inequality does not always come from someone doing something wrong. It can simply be the long-term result of randomness playing out. So the real question is, once we understand that, what do we do with it?
I think they meant:
窃钩者诛，窃国者侯
qiègōuzhě zhū, qièguózhě hóu
He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord.
For music on iOS I can't recommend foobar2000 [1] enough - and I tested ALL of the alternatives. You can import ANY folder (probably what OP is looking for) or use your "iPod Library". [2]
Personally, I sync my music via Synctrain (a Syncthing client). [3]
It's too bad we didn't go down the XHTML/semantic web route twenty years ago.
Strict documents, reusable types, microformats, etc. would have put search into the hands of the masses rather than kept it in Google's unique domain.
The web would have been more composible and P2P. We'd have been able to slurp first class article content, comments, contact details, factual information, addresses, etc., and built a wealth of tooling.
Google / WhatWG wanted easy to author pages (~="sloppy markup, nonstandard docs") because nobody else could "organize the web" like them if it was disorganized by default.
Once the late 2010's came to pass, Google's need for the web started to wane. They directly embed lifted facts into the search results, tried to push AMP to keep us from going to websites, etc.
Google's decisions and technologies have been designed to keep us in their funnel. Web tech has been nudged and mutated to accomplish that. It's especially easy to see when the tides change.
As someone who built an IT career on Microsoft’s entire suite, only to recently (past six years or so) migrate wholesale to macOS (endpoint) and Linux (server), I can definitely say MS’ best days are behind it. 2000 was rock solid, Server 2003 had some growing pains (mainly the transition to x64 and multi-core processors), and 2008 fully embraced the long march into irrelevance even as it tried to shake up the hypervisor space. Now the company is so obsessed with arbitrary and unnecessary feature creep and telemetry-as-surveillance that I’m loathe to recommend it when I don’t have to.
Honest to god, if an IdP like Okta made an Active Directory replacement that ran via container instead of a full-fat VM or appliance template, I’d gladly toss ADDS out the window with all its stupid CALs. Basic directory functionality in 2025 shouldn’t require a bloated ADDS/LDAPS virtual machine to run, especially with the move to cloud providers for identity. If you make it easier to do identity without ADDS, you remove Microsof’s major trojan horse into the enterprise - and M365’s as well.
Specifically for cuneiform, there are multiple efforts, covering roughly the time period you mentioned. There is this post, [1], and [2].
There are probably around 1-2 million cuneiform tablets that have been found so far. Many of them complete, but even more of them as fragments. Those fragments mostly just sit around in store rooms. It's a giant puzzle few people even have enough knowledge to attempt.
It works - amazing - with Calibre actually. I set up Calibre-Web-Automated last week and setup my Kobo Libra 2 to sync with my Calibre server (swapping one url in a config file), and now my Kobo acts like my self hosted Calibre server is the actual Kobo Store, meaning I can browse and download all of my books. I think it syncs reading progress too.
<3 This has been a work of passion for the past two years of my life (off and on). I hope anyone who uses this can feel the love and care I put into this, and subsequently the amazing private beta community (all ~5,000 strong!) that helped improve and polish this into a better release than I ever could alone.
Ghostty got a lot of hype (I cover this in my reflection below), but I want to make sure I call out that there is a good group of EXCELLENT terminals out there, and I'm not claiming Ghostty is strictly better than any of them. Ghostty has different design goals and tradeoffs and if it's right for you great, but if not, you have so many good choices.
Shout out to Kitty, WezTerm, Foot in particular. iTerm2 gets some hate for being relatively slow but nothing comes close to touching it in terms of feature count. Rio is a super cool newer terminal, too. The world of terminals is great.
I’ve posted a personal reflection here, which has a bit more history on why I started this, what’s next, and some of the takeaways from the past two years. https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
No, "Satoshi Nakamoto" does not translate to "Central Intelligence" in Japanese. Here's a breakdown of the name:
- *Satoshi* (さとし) is a common Japanese given name, often meaning "wise" or "clear-thinking."
- *Nakamoto* (中本) is a common Japanese surname, with "naka" (中) meaning "middle" or "center," and "moto" (本) meaning "origin" or "foundation."
While "Naka" could be loosely interpreted as "center," and "moto" as "origin," this does not equate to "Central Intelligence." The name does not directly relate to any specific phrase or concept like "Central Intelligence." It's a common Japanese name with meanings unrelated to intelligence agencies or organizations.
Config snippet for anyone interested: