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?

If musk pulled the same kinda shit, he’d be mocked for it too

Yes, it is funny how more people are not calling out the Electric Car Jesus for swooping around in private jets and single-handedly undoing any positive effect his customers can have…

I’m, like, OK, nuclear power isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
But power plants like that should probably serve wider municipal needs.

Building a private nuclear power plant just to power a data center? Well that’s clearly stupid.
Building a private nuclear power plant just to power a data center focused on a niche application? Well you know how that goes.

Also, look up SL-1. Disturbingly few Americans I’ve talked to have heard about that. Generally a good argument about why not every single thing should be powered by a tiny dedicated nuclear reactor.

In middle of a couple of worldbuilding projects. Haven’t really had much good ideas for the fantasy project lately.

Ah HA! Maybe I’ll do some mild subversion of expectations.
Maybe one of the most famous sites in this world, where people come to visit from far and wide, has a tiny old withered tree.
…I mean, there could be a lot of legitimate logical reasons why this site could me important. Maybe the tree has a really fascinating story behind it.
Heck, there’s probably many such places on our world too! Can think of at least one from the top of my mind.
I should write this down.

Last year I felt really crappy as far as my writing projects go, but in the last few months, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that even smallest ideas can sometimes break the writer’s block. Keep writing them down!

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.

Personal homepages. What we used to call 'em in the nineties.

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.

There are a lot of people who go “I tried to learn X through Duolingo and failed”. Sure, that’s probably true, because staring at the app is not how language learning works. Much like 100 years ago, people would have said you can’t learn a language by reading a single book.

Duolingo is great for basics of the language, vocabulary and constant daily lessons. But you always need more. There’s a whole language sphere out there. People actually using the language and whatnot.

I started studying French through Duolingo and about 6 months later I was like “I really need a grammar book and a dictionary, dammit”. Year in, I was like “I should try reading news in French and maybe try a book.”

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.

Back in the day, I had an application that could decode teletext from a TV capture card. And there are PC based DTV receivers that can also do that.

And over here in Finland, the national public broadcaster has the teletext on web. (Yle is the last network to put any effort in teletext - the commercial channels like MTV3 and Nelonen used to have a whole bunch of teletext stuff like premium SMS based chats, but those aren’t really all that profitable these days. I think MTV3 still has that, but they’re shutting it down next year.)

What comes to the conclusion of the video: Maybe it’s just I’ve got some weird Spectrum Genes, but when I was a kid and early adult, I was fucking paralysed by the idea that all of my jokes were basically stolen. 20 years later, I think I’ve developed A Style, but in the off chance I remember a directly quoted joke, I’m fucking deliberately saying it’s a stolen joke, every time.

Also, one of the things that I’ve learned this year, as exemplified by this video, is that just because you’re in a marginalised community doesn’t mean you’re automatically a saint. Seen plenty of people just doing a dum-dum. Don’t do dumb things. Makes you look dumb. Makes your community look dumb too. Know what I mean? I’m looking at you.

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.

Well of course it has a picture of his parents fighting (???) in it. Dude’s a severely messed up right-winger.

Newspaper Nerds appreciation day! …Maybe. The dude’s political signalling was fucking all over the place.

Funny thing, in ISO 8601 date isn’t separated by colon. The format is “YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+hh:mm”. Date is separated by “-”, time is separated by “:”, date and time are separated by “T” (which is the bit that a lot of people miss). Time zone indicator can also be just “Z” for UTC. Many of these can be omitted if dealing with lesser precision (e.g. HH:MM is a valid timestamp, YYYY-MM is a valid datestamp if referring to just a month). (OK so apparently if you really want to split hairs, timestamps are supposed to be THH:MM etc. Now that’s a thing I’ve never seen anyone use.) Separators can also be omitted though that’s apparently not recommended if quick human legibility is of concern. There’s also YYYY-Wxx for week numbers.

32-bit software is still absolutely supported on amd64. Just go to C:\Program Files (x86) and be amazed.