binaryturtle

I can't access gnu.org, because their extreme measurements against the AI bots blocking my slightly older browser.

I have to admit I don't think it's visually very appealing like that. It looks more like some sort of error/ glitch. Maybe my old Firefox does it weirdly?

It used to be possible to use GitHub via svn too (but I think they removed that feature a while ago.)

I use Subversion w/o a server too. You can have your repositories locally (file:///Path/to/repository). All my own (single man) projects are in local SVN repositories. For my use case git is just too much extra friction, and I still love to have my one single unique global revisions number that is linearly increasing with each commit. :)

This is just sad. Luckily I do not use any of the listed programs. I threw out Homebrew many years ago when they started this nonsense.

The only tool I have installed currently that does %/"($& like this is Deno (required for yt-dlp now). It phones happily home even if you wrap it into a wrapper script that forces the env variable (in no way I'll pollute my default environment with stuff like this):

    $ cat /usr/local/bin/deno
    #!/bin/sh
    exec env DENO_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 /usr/local/packages/deno/latest/bin/deno "$@"

I wish bad dreams to whoever puts such crap into their software! Thankfully I have Little Snitch to catch most of those kind of invasions of my privacy.

No, "grass always looks greener on the other side" is a perspective thing. If you stand on your own grass then you look down onto it and see the dirt, but if you look over to the other side you see the gras from the side which makes it look more dense and hides the dirt. But it's the same boring grass everywhere. :)

I have a simple rule: I won't pay for that stuff. First they steal all my work to feed into those models, afterwards I shall pay for it? No way!

I use AI, but only what is free-of-charge, and if that doesn't cut it, I just do it like in the good old times, by using my own brain.

I used GitHub's Copilot once and let it check one of my repositories for security issues. It found countless (like 30 or 40 or so for a single PHP file of some ~400 lines). Some even sounded reasonable enough, so I had a closer look, just to make sure. In the end none of it was an issue at all. In some cases it invented problems which would have forced to add wild workaround code around simple calls into the PHP standard library. And that was the only time I wasted my time with that. :D

Wouldn't telemetry solve this problem automatically? I mean: they should get some signal back when people opt-out no? :)

How about computers to have replaceable SSDs? There's no point you can exchange the battery when the hard-soldered SSD dies first. (I had more dead SSDs than batteries)

Once I played a similar prank to a computer science teacher. Back in the Windows 3.x for Workgroups era this was. I made a screenshot of the desktop (showing a window), and put it on as wallpaper. Took the man a little while to figure out why that window couldn't be closed (after a hard reboot later when the window popped back up :) )

It's probably for "agents" that want to make websites for other agents. This has nothing to do with us humanoids.

I'm getting a lot, and I mean A LOT, spam recently from various "<IP in reverse notation>.bc.googleusercontent.com" domains. Not sure what can be done about that. But the uptick is very noticeable.

I always force myself to do this too. The only 3rd party python library I regularly use is "requests" basically —a dependency that comes with its own baggage, see the recent controversy about "chardet"— but I go out of my way to grab it from pip instead installing it via pip. :-)

Something like this:

    try:
        import requests
    except ImportError:
        from pip._vendor import requests

I thought it was only me. Or it's temporarily down because some HN overload or something.

I guess you really need to unpack each and every extensions before installation and carefully inspect the code manually to see if it only would be doing what the extensions is advertising.

Darn…

and I thought that the JSLibCache extension was forcing every site into UTF-8 mode (even those that need to run with a legacy codepage) was a critical issue. A problem I encountered yesterday… took me a while to figure out too.

I never used the ~/Documents folder. Lots of apps just trashed their stuff in there over the years making that folder entirely unusable for my actual document files. I would have to dig through the mess to find them. So I have to admit that I don't really understand the extra "care" Apple is doing to this particular folder. Same for the ~/Downloads folder: all my actual downloads go to some other disk, since the system disk is so small. Protecting this two folders would be entirely useless here.

IMHO where it really needs to be protected from when iCloud suddenly starts grabbing everything w/o the user's permission to upload it to some random Apple servers.

Looks like it needs a meta account? As soon you hit enter it wants to log-in. I guess I won't try this any time soon. :)

I recall we could dial up a super slow connection over telephone lines, get all our mails into such client in less than 4 minutes over said slow line, just to dial off again.¹ Afterwards we would read all our mails offline with all the time in the world, carefully crafting replies and put those into an "Outgoing" folder for the next time we could dial up a connection again (usually the next day). :)

¹) back then you paid Internet by the minute, or in case of the Deutsche Telekom it was a 4 minute tact in the evening, so you had to wait until after 21:00 to get the cheaper prices.

Macs that no longer get reboot-requiring updates by Apple usually have long(er) uptimes. :) My record here with my primary Mac mini was a bit over a year. Only to be forced to reboot because of a power outage.

Generally it feels like sometimes you boot into a stable "session" that can go on forever, but often enough you boot in a "session" and something goes wrong quickly and you'll have to reboot after a week or two. But I do experience the same with my Raspberry PI. :)

It's more fun? :)

/edit

And you can combine both approaches: XOR'ing the code first for good measurements. :)

When I wrote my own brainf*ck interpreter (in C) at the start of the year I was really struggling to find a use for the language. Eventually I had the idea to obfuscate emails on my websites with the language.

Basically each email gets written as a brainf*ck program and stored in a "data-" attribute. The html only includes a more primitively obfuscated statement "Must enable Javascript to see e-mail." by default which then gets replaced by another brainf*ck interpreter (in JS) with the output of the brainf*ck code. Since we only output ASCII we can reduce the size of the brainf*ck code by always adding 32 to each value it outputs. The Javascript is loaded from what seemingly looks like a 3rd party domain. There we filter basing on heuristics and check if the "referer" matches before sending out the actual interpreter code.

Of course all this would not help if a scraper properly runs things through Javascript too.

Recently I read you soon will be able to run DOOM via CSS, so certainly it should be possible to have a brainf*ck interpreter in CSS? That would be the next step… just to get rid of the Javascript, but then I'm okay with all the downsides of using Javascript just for the e-mail obfuscation.

Anyway… I also regularly (at least once a year) rotate those public contact addresses.

It's going on since quite a while. Want to update some GNU software, or look up something? I have to switch the user agent to "curl" to be able to visit the sites.

Sounds interesting. I always wanted to use a Raspberry PI as router (to have one as backup in case the OpenWRT Linksys goes down), but couldn't wrap my head around properly how to overcome the single network port (I think the usual recommendation is to use an extra USB network card/adapter). Can you elaborate more about this VLAN stuff (you would put your modem, your router, and all your machines on the switch... and in the switch you tell the router connection to double use the connection for WAN and LAN separated via VLANs? And put the modem into the "WAN VLAN" too?)

Ideally the PI also should to what the extra DSL Modem does… but I guess that's where the dram must stop. :D

I'm with a slightly older Firefox and can't use many websites at all anymore because the Cloudflare cancer.

Of course then you got sites like gnu.org too that block you because your slightly outdated user agent.

Needs a recording of an Amiga reading in a floppy disk... and the floppy drive just waiting to be feed. Those were the sounds! :)

(The interface on the website is a bit confusing to use, IMHO)

I still can check the SPAM folder, if needed.

But most SPAMs are HTML, so you'll have a good default last-stage in-client filtering in place in case some SPAM actually makes it through the other setup on the server (greylisting, DNS based filtering lists, policy-based filtering, etc.) :)

Any "HTML emails" get filtered straight into the spam folder here. I think I'm not part of the target audience here.

I run a setup like that on my (outdated) Yosemite machine to provide multiple private TLDs for local deployment/development needs.

I set that up in like 2014? Even back then it was known already that the quick /etc/resolver way was the deprecated way to do things. So I guess they finally killed that feature off?

The proper (more awkward) way is to use scutil directly (which then stores the settings in some binary plist somewhere, I assume).

Maybe try this and see if it still works afterwards?

It would be less hypocritical if that critique of the situation wasn't posted on a website that itself loads unnecessary 3rd party resources (e.g. cloudflare insights).

Luckily I use a proper content blocker (uBlock Origin in hard mode).