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danrlon Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record

> they would likely obey robots.txt

If only... Despite providing a useful service, they are not as nice towards site owners as one would hope.

Internet Archive says:

> We see the future of web archiving relying less on robots.txt file declarations geared toward search engines

https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

They are not alone in that. The "Archiveteam", a different organization, not to be confused with archive.org, also doesn't respect robots.txt according to their wiki: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt

I think it is safe to say that there is little consideration for site owners from the largest archiving organizations today. Whether there should be is a different debate.

danrlon Docs Deserve More Respect

As and engineer, sometimes getting started is the hardest part. But there are high quality, open source templates for almost anything in the documentation process available. I wish initiatives like The Good Docs Project would be more popular with engineers.

https://thegooddocsproject.dev

danrlon After a brutal stretch, cryptocurrencies are surging

I really tried to be open minded and clicked your link. You lost me at:

> By combining Web2 (community interfaces) and Web3 (smart economies), we can launch the next generation of applications — which we refer to as Web5.

This is not how versioning works. It looks more like marketing coming up with the highest number possible without a meaningful increase in value delivered. (Remember the old PC magazines with 999+ games on a CD Rom?)

danrlon Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles

Have driven in Waymo and Cruise quite a hit. Don’t wanna beat a dead horse, so let’s talk about Waymo only: It improved every time from when I first got access to today, where a lot of people can use it now. I even had my visiting parents riding in Waymo cars a couple of times and they felt saved and loved it, and they are not really early adopters of anything :) When in SF I always prefer Waymo over any other form of ride service or ride share.

Disclaimer: Google LLC employee. No relations to Waymo, just a fan of self driving in general.

danrlon How to Escape a Container

I genuinely thought this link was about escaping a standardized steel shipping container, something I recently had to seriously consider. In that regard a disappointing click.

I also wrote my own docker-like containerization code for educational purposes a while ago, so container has both these meanings for me. Yet, me brain was expecting a physical escape story. Brains are funny!

danrlon Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds

Here in the U.S. west coast mountains some land owners started controlled fires on their property to get rid of the stacking fuel naturally while preserving the bound minerals and helping the large redwoods and sequoias to fend of contenders. I have no idea how they managed to get a permit in this area where officials and population ate crazily scared of these natural processes given that uncontrolled fires make the news every year.

Also, a second generation redwood forest looks very different from an undisturbed one I recently learned from a forest guy who walked with me. He was reading the forest like a book. Very impressive. Turns out, my forest is a second generation and I should maybe take down a few redwoods, something I considered morally wrong before the walkthrough.

danrlon Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

http://youtube.com/@danrl/videos

Thanks for your interest!

danrlon Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

Building an off-grid home on a piece of land me and my wife bought. We are documenting our progress on YT.

danrlon Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video] (1990)

I can second that. I published a Copperfield illusion analysis and got approached to take it down from other magicians (not Copperfield himself). I left it out there in the open. For me, trying to crack the puzzle is part of the fun and why I spend money seeing magic shows multiple times.

My blog post which they asked me to take down: https://danrl.com/magic-mail

danrlon Memories from old LAN parties

this!

danrlon Distributed Consensus

Shameless plug for my educational focused Paxos implementation: https://github.com/danrl/skinny

Easy to follow talk teaching Paxos: https://youtu.be/nyNCSM4vGF4

danrlon Jira can’t stop people from using it incorrectly

No, I really do not like Jira. My manager great.

danrlon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://danrl.com - the occasional essay

danrlon Show HN: SpaceBadgers – Free and Libre SVG Badges

Great project!

Nit: Personally would prefer rounded corners.

danrlon What I want from the internet

Agree on the lack of style. I think it would be nice to give the user agent at least a hint in the form of a color map.

Images can be inlined by the user agent.

danrlon How to do distributed locking (2016)

Did a simple Paxos implementation a while ago which I turned into educational code, well documented and coming with a talk and a workshop. May it be useful for anyone wanting to learn about distributed locking from first principles.

Code: https://github.com/danrl/skinny

Talks: https://youtu.be/nyNCSM4vGF4 and https://youtu.be/gAGGPaFDfwE

danrlon What I want from the internet

Gemini:// is a protocol that currently feels a lot like the geocities-era web. It is not yet September there. You’ll find how to get in if you try hard enough.

danrlon Sensenmann: Code Deletion at Scale

You seem to assume Sensenmann is the only code deletion tool used at Google and/or that it is fully described in the blog post.

danrlon Not Forgotten: ChatGPT isn’t the only important trend in technology

"but projects like the State of California’s effort to put auto registration on a blockchain are likely to simplify the painful process of dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles."

A surprising number of tasks can be performed online already at the CA DMV w/o any crypto or blockchain involvement. The few painful bits include an in-person driving test (“behind the wheel”) which is unlikely to be blockchained away. Then there is photo taking and vision test and some admittedly annoying paperwork if one goes for verification (RealID). How exactly is blockchain helping here?

danrlon Xylazine, a dangerous new drug fuelling Canada’s opioid crisis

I doubt most addicts would have the means to buy high quality substances. And of those who had, some may still chose the cheaper street stuff. And this is where society often is asked to pick up the bill. With guaranteed payment out of tax dollars the pharmacy company producing the substitute now has an incentive to get people on it. The problem will never be solved but now it is even more expensive. This is a misallocation of tax money in my opinion.

Singapore doesn’t seem to have a huge drug problem, and they went all in on what you call “the war on drugs”. So maybe there is a winning strategy there, at least for Singapore?

danrlon EU will require Apple to open up iMessage (2022)

A convenient first step for European governments towards killing effective end-to-end cryptography usage in everyday messaging. It used to be checks notes „terrorism“ and „child safety“ and now the hot new thing is „interoperability“. Who would have thought, that of all the above, „interoperability“ would be the one that makes it into legislation.

danrlon 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

there are tons of these videos on all kinds of topics. Unfortunately, without a captivating thumbnail view counts are extremely low and click through rate is laughable. Yet some creators refuse to A/B test crafted thumbnails that have often nothing to do with the video but drive views. Similarly, I keep my videos short and concise as I see viewer time as at least as valuable as mine and so do plenty of other creators. Unfortunately, viewers don’t appreciate this en mass. My sad conclusion is that people don’t value their time high enough to immediately leave a video that is wasting their time or, as so often, has almost nothing to do with the title or thumbnail. People forget why they clicked on a video within seconds of watching it.

Source: I am a creator myself, releasing a mew video every Friday. I have read the engagement guides from YouTube and other creators and decided to not take part in this landgrab for viewer time. People have more important things in their life than my videos and I should be mindful of how I use their time.

danrlon After Snowden, we quit our jobs to build privacy software. It reached 1.0

For everyone trying to find out what the main product is: Portmaster seems to be a local Pihole kind of thing which injects itself into the DNS resolution locally.

The website could be better at explaining that and general discoverability.

Kudos for full IPv6 support.

danrlon No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health

I scrolled almost through the entire conversation. This is the first sane comment. Thank you.

danrlon Ask HN: How to Prepare for the AI Apocalypse?

I use a parallel approach:

1) I bought a vacant piece of land that is legally buildable. This is my starting point to build a house. A 5-10 year project. But, I didn’t learn programming in a day, so these seem to be common timespans for learning complex skills (welding, carpentry, paving, concrete pouring, …)

2) I take courses at maker labs which have heavy equipment and then build all the small things to better get to know the machines. Kitchenware, furniture, cups, etc. The less prefabricated parts the better. My next picture frame will be made from wood I cut on my property.

3) I share with the world honestly, including my stupid mistakes and all the layman stuff I do. The feedback I get from experienced people seeing me struggle and having the need to chip in is pure gold. Saves me a lot of time and money as long as I can take their criticism. I have a thousand teachers (I’m exaggerating but you get the idea).

My channel, if you want to see examples: https://youtube.com/@danrl

danrlon Ask HN: How to Prepare for the AI Apocalypse?

The LLM you played with has no real problem solving skills because it lacks a sufficient model of reality and planning capabilities.

Highly recommend this 1h interview with Yann Lecun to put things into perspective. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/big-technology-podcast...

I myself learn construction and the trades on the side. In the US this is quite a safe bet. And I wanted to build a house anyway, so why not do it myself and learn?

I’m also not scared of losing my job to a LLM. I do so much detailed problem solving that I wouldn’t mind assistance that 10x my work by taking away all low and mid hanging fruits.

YMMV

danrlon MacBooks from 2020 Are Being Sold for Scrap Because of Activation Lock

WAI. Reduces “second market” value of stolen devices. This is good news.

danrlon Mazda has tested a synthetic fuel in an unmodified MX5 on a 1000-mile road trip

> The oil market is a fully globalized commodity and there is no "American picture"

I agree that this is the current state. However, this can quickly change at the whim of the US president and doesn't even need congressional approval. In fact, we have seen increasing request from within the US to decouple from the global market and hence have a "domestic" and a global oil price. I don't know how this would play out if it ever happens. But all the legal groundwork is there and the US president can impose an oil export ban at any time if he wishes to do so.

Examples of requests to do so (without success so far):

* https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/141...

* https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycomme...

The saddest part is, that the US has great solar and wind potential but the least incentive for a mass transition given the opportunity to decouple from the global commodity market at any time (elections anyone?)

danrlon Mazda has tested a synthetic fuel in an unmodified MX5 on a 1000-mile road trip

Just to add to this: You seem to be referring to the global picture. If we look at the US in isolation it is a different story. 30 yr low was ~4M barrels of crude oil from fields. We were at ~12M Barrels in 2022.

It is true that no major field has been opened recently which I blame on the (legitimate) push against fossil fuels and the rising cost of capital for projects that won’t pay off until at least year 5-8 of an investment. Furthermore, the shale revolution made smaller fields competitive and distributed production. Major oil fields opening are not a good indicator anymore for the industry’s state of business. For example, the Bakken formation was already open but only saw its peak extraction relatively recently.

Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.

(Just one example: German chemical plants are moving to the US where LNG is cheap and abundant. They are rebuilding entire, enormous industrial processing plants. The US attracts fossil fuel based industries without even opening new major oil fields. Just by what is already there. )

danrlon No one wants to have kids anymore

> Are you really making an argument for why we don't need more babies to be brought into this world? That is a bit on the side of fucked up if you ask me.

Great argument. About as great as the rest of the article which misses any nuance.