DamnInteresting

It's been interesting to see the changes in the audience over time. In 2005, 100% of our audience was desktop browser readers. Somewhere around 2011, mobile readers became the dominant group. Today, our biggest audience by far is podcast listeners. We'll probably need to start creating videos soon if we don't want to get left behind. And what comes next? AI-enhanced immersive binaural VR experiences? The future is weird.

I am an author who is able to earn a modest income from my body of work, but only because I have spent almost 20 years creating a diverse collection of writings, and copyright law mostly protects me from having to compete with other people selling my writings. I say "mostly" because I find my work plagiarized once in a while (often with the word-for-word copies of my work earning more money for the plagiarizers than it does for me).

On a surface level, I understand the critics of intellectual property. I concede that all art is derivative to some degree, and nothing springs from a vacuum. I acknowledge that even greater art can be achieved if something can be iterated upon by a diversity of artists. But the harsh reality is that most of the people who want to repurpose art aren't doing it to create something new and distinct, they just want to profit from hard work without doing any themselves.

For months it's been hard to get any response to an application, let alone an interview. And when I do get responses, they are often strange. One company where I would have been a perfect fit claimed that my code sample had "scary" SQL injection vulnerabilities. It did not, I have been doing this for decades, and I know how to sanitize my inputs.

I asked for specific file name and line number, and they sent back a vague non-response on how to identify vulnerabilities, so I stopped pursuing it. It was a lost cause, even if I showed them how they were mistaken, it wouldn't work out. I suspect they were using some kind of automated scanner that flagged some false positives.

I don't want to stop making software professionally, but that decision may not be in my hands.

• Interplanetary travel, involving the production of a substance that will produce more energy per pound than is required to lift that pound out of the Earth’s gravitational field.

• The end of visiting; people will stay at home and call on their friends by television.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/

It's not mobile-friendly, unfortunately. I made it in the same year the first iPhone was released. Some day I'll update it for smaller viewports. Some of the default settings are also too low, for example we now know that exoplanets are very common.

Edit: Oh yes, it slipped my mind that there is a totally stand-alone version here: http://astro.nomical.info/drake/

But then one day the LED ring on the top of the Echo was flashing yellow, and when I asked Alexa why, it responded with an ad. I haven't used it since.

A long-term coding contract recently ended for me, so I have been looking for some new full-stack web dev work. Everything I encounter now is tangled in over-engineered dependency hellscapes. Simple sites that could be vanilla HTML/CSS/JS are instead built and rebuilt on whatever tools and frameworks are currently trendiest. Technology is selected because it is cool instead of appropriate. I don't mind learning new tech if it's useful and fitting, but I loathe the 'disposable skills' of dumping frameworks every 2 years.

I've watched this tendency gradually growing in web dev circles for about a decade, but in just the past few years it's gone bananas. It's so much unnecessary faffing, it's got me looking into other fields for new work.

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: PHP, Python, Javascript, SASS/LESS, HTML, MySQL/MariaDB, web design, illustration, writing, voice work, sound design, music composition.

Résumé/CV: https://alanbellows.com/

Email: alan@alanbellows.com

The rub is that I am seeking part-time work, I want to spend half of my daylight hours writing. It seems to be really hard to find part-time work for a programmer.

There is good evidence that layoffs conform to social contagion.[1] In other words, layoffs are trendy right now.

[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-la...

Perhaps so, but the legality of an action is immaterial if it is left unprosecuted.

Rather than simply blocking them, whenever I detected a card tester, I started sending them random results that mimic real-world results. About 98% of the time, I sent a false "card failed" error, with varying reasons for the failure. And about 2% of the time I sent false "donation successful" messages.

It went on like that for weeks. I was giving them complete garbage data that they seemed to be accepting, so I assume I was completely wasting their time and effort, and possibly getting them in hot water with the shady clients who buy the lists of "working" cards.

I finally got sick of the ongoing DDoS and started replying to them with SQL injections, like:

> '; DROP TABLE users; --

> '; DROP TABLE user; --

> '; DROP TABLE credit_card; --

...and so on. My thinking was that they might not be sanitizing the inputs on their end, replies from a CC processor would be an unexpected vector for SQL injections.

The card testing stopped just after that, either because the change tipped them off, or because I managed to guess one of their table names and caused hilarious destruction of data.

The email never arrived, I checked the spam folder and all that. After a while I clicked "Send a new code" and got the error "Select a valid choice. 0 is not one of the available choices." Oooooookay. I cleared cookies etc and tried again, and it continues to demand, while failing to send, a confirmation code. But this second login attempt did cause them to send me an automated "New login to Instagram" email.

Lastly, I clicked the Get Support link, and it just pops a dialog that says "If you’re unable to get the security code, you need to use the Instagram app to secure your account." I do not have the Instagram app, and newly installing it while my account is locked would be pointless.

So, I guess that account is unrecoverable now. Great work, Meta.

https://feelers.online/

The idea is to give content creators (authors, YouTubers, webcomics, bands, etc.) a way to inform their fans when new content drops. It also gives the fans a lot of control over how the notifications arrive.

I made this to address a problem I experience myself. I operate a website that publishes on an irregular schedule, and it can be hard to let readers/listeners know when we have something new.

They are an ad company that once used a nice search engine to serve ads.

To date there are well over 100 of his videos that appear to be "inspired" by my content. For example:

Me, 2008: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-diabolical-... Simon, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP4RQ783lk

Me, 2005: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-man-who-was-a-dwarf-and-... Simon, 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpdMolMlDzw

The list goes on and on. I've been writing online long enough that I've been poached and plagiarized six ways from Sunday, but no one else has come close to leeching so long and systematically as this unoriginal, abject freeloader. Simon Whistler is downright seaward.

A WordPress-based site I established way back in 2005. It's all non-fiction stories from history and science, plus I curate links to other interesting content.

edit: Also, I should point out that the "basket" form factor of the air fryer is helpful. In the convection oven things tend to lie flay on a sheet, and cooking is less even. Granted, I could put a basket-like container in the convection oven, but it would still be much slower to heat.

For my desktop: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09224KKPV

For behind my desk (which doubles as a recording space, so the disorganized cables bugged me): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014BMTQ34

I also used a lot of Velcro cable ties, and this monster of a power strip which fits inside the behind-desk box: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099NB3TTY

A couple of things that I haven't yet seen mentioned:

A LifeStraw Home water filter. It removes the slightly metallic taste from my home tap water.

Cable management boxes (multiple brands). These allow me to hide away the unsightly power strips, power bricks, hubs, excess cords, etc, and make my desk/office much more organized.

My site has recently been the target of some extremely aggressive "card testers" (criminals who have huge lists of stolen credit cards; they use bots to stuff small donations into donation forms to test which cards are still working). At first I just blocked the offending IPs, but they kept finding new IPs, creating a lot of annoying work for me. So I pivoted--instead of blocking their IPs, I started feeding them randomly generated false responses with a statistically accurate "success" rate. They are trying to build a list of working cards, and getting absolute garbage results.

It is still ongoing, but so far they have run ~50k card tests in over a week, and 99.9% of the data they have collected from us looks legit, but it is totally bogus. It pleases me to know that I am polluting their data, and ultimately wasting a lot of their time and effort. Consume excrement, evil-doers!

I recently had to employ such a strategy against some extremely aggressive card testers (criminals with lists of stolen credit cards who automate stuffing card info into a donation form to test which cards are still working). Instead of blocking their IPs, I started feeding them randomly generated false responses with a statistically accurate "success" rate. They ran tens of thousands of card tests over many days, and 99% of the data they collected was bogus. It amuses me to know that I polluted their data and wasted so much of their time and effort. Jerks.

Well, one does want one's vacuum to suck.