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wiredfool

6,553 karma · joined July 6, 2009

eric@wiredfool.com
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wiredfool··on Small programming tricks
You might not need find due to advanced globs, but it's too easy to run into expansion limits when you match hundreds or thousands of files, so you're back to find for that.
wiredfool··on It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis
IP blocks don't work, because they're using proxy networks so that you see an ip address 1 or 2 times within 10 minutes. They have effectively infinite ip addresses. (actually, looking at my data from today, I think this relationship holds over ~3 hours, where we're seeing ip address cardinality at about 1/2 of the hits.)

  * Sometimes there's a pattern to the country. Oftentimes, not. 
  * User-agent, rotated between common, valid, current web browsers.
  * Other headers, sec-*, accept, etc, generally valid and rotating. 
  * Bots will load the site to saturation in a denial of wallet attack.
The only thing that's specific is:

  * urls have a pattern.
  * it's obviously invalid traffic. 
(non-bot traffic on my sites does not go from 0 to 200r/sec on the search interface in seconds. It does not go away that fast either)
wiredfool··on Creepy Crawlies
I’d love to, but I’m a bit limited in what I can do from a reputational damage POV. They’re my sites, in that I’m responsible, but they aren’t something where I can return incorrect responses.
wiredfool··on Creepy Crawlies
Seeing the exact same thing on (somewhat high profile) open data sites I run.

The crawlers get stuck in a loop requesting the dataset listing page with every. single. combination. of. facets. At essentially as fast as it can be pumped out or blocked.

Had one bot super interested in a single organization to the tune of 1000 r/min for 24+ hours. Realistic rotating user agents, realistic sec-* headers, no ip address seen more than a couple times in 10 minutes. The only commonality was the route.

wiredfool··on Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants
I don’t think I’ve noticed gym socks smells, but I can certainly smell kerosene basically every time when outdoors at the airport, and often in the plane.
wiredfool··on A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava
When I did it, I closed the door at nautical twilight. The key is that you need to close the door after the chickens roost but before the nocturnal predators come out.
wiredfool··on My two year old taught me constraint solving
Had something similar to this with the kids with Lego Duplo tracks, similar topology but the switches gave the system state. Going "backwards" through a switch set the train to return that direction when coming the other way.

So we had a goal to make the train do interesting behaviors, like cover the entire track autonomously, pushing the switches itself. The biggest run I remember was a 4 bit counter.

Kid is now entering his last year of CS + Maths degree, so I guess it checks out.

wiredfool··on A full body MRI earns you a year of smoking
Depends on if you’re wearing a wing suit or not.
wiredfool··on An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation
What’s more, they will scale up with increased resources on the site.

If you redline at 20 searches a sec, and put in 4 more workers, suddenly you’re serving 100r/sec to the bots, paying 5x for it, and your users are still seeing shit qos. I've seen multiple cores of nginx saturated just dealing with one dos/crawl run on a somewhat high profile site.

wiredfool··on The tech of 'Terminator 2' – an oral history (2017)
I think Jurassic Park was pretty similar craziness. Definitely pushing the CGI aspect, and super super popular.
wiredfool··on My favorite keyboards
First generation powerbooks, the 140/170, were amazin keyboards. The 100, not so much.
wiredfool··on My favorite keyboards
I bought 2 M13s (one black, one beige, the one with the builtin track point) in Seattle thrift stores in the early 2000's, one was $5 and one was $10.

At one point, other copies were both $300 plus on ebay.

Sadly the black one has an intermittent issue with some of the keys where hits are doubled, but the beige one is still a daily driver.

wiredfool··on Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
From my son's experience in calisthenics and looking around at the group he sometimes trains with, there are definitely a lot of overload/overuse injuries, at a range from just needing rest to bicep tears.
wiredfool··on The Boeing 747 begins its final descent
One time I got an entire center row of 5 seats going from Seattle->Heathrow overnight.
wiredfool··on The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision
And there are a lot of middling bakeries in Europe.

Haven't spent much time in Belgium, but I was disappointed in the average quality of the bread in small bakeries in France. There was one awesome organic bakery in Paris near the catacombs tour, and one hypermarche (forget where) that somehow had an absolutely incredible rustic baguette. But the little shops in towns, eh. And most of the hypermarches. Germany is also kind of average, the Reve bakeries are reliably on the good side of middling, but nothing that I'd consider incredible.

wiredfool··on The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision
The whole obsession about measuring giving exact hydration percentages is strange to me.

Assume you have 100g of flour at equilibrium 20% ambient humidity, and the same 100g of flour at 80% humidity.

I don’t know how different the effective moisture content would be, but measuring the weight of the flour to the gram seems like you’re including the moisture in the weight of the flour. Maybe one packs denser on a scoop. I don’t know. But I don’t necessarily think it’s more accurate.

On the other hand, it’s really easy to just pour in 540g of flour, mix in a shy tablespoon of salt, 280g of water, and a good glop of starter. Far easier than trying to get consistent scoops or measure to the meniscus in a liquid measured.

wiredfool··on The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision
Eh, I found the Seattle artisanal bakeries (Fremont, Grand Central) to be better than all but the best I’ve found in Europe.
wiredfool··on The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs
It is/was legal on rural interstates in Washington. I've cycled down I90 in roughly the North Bend area (in the late 90's).
wiredfool··on DuckDB Internals: Why Is DuckDB Fast? (Part 1)
Few different use cases, other than just a general swiss army knife for vaguely tabular data.

* fastapi + duckdb + parquet for the backend for a relatively high profile website

* wasm duckdb + react for a few visualization websites

* yaml driven ETL from lots of sources, principally ugly spreadsheets, into usable data. More T than E or L really

wiredfool··on Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
Saw this before the evening bus commute, trying it. 15 min in, not sure it’s working for me.
wiredfool··on Cloudflare CEO is lying to you about the bot traffic jump
I run some moderate profile gov and ngo opendata sites, and I’d say that bot like traffic is 99% of the requests we’re seeing on some sites.

Mostly current valid user agents, lots of ip addresses, but the traffic patterns are not organic. I’m not clear if it’s bad ai scraping or dos, but at some level it’s indistinguishable.

wiredfool··on I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
Unschooling works for a fraction of kids, and at some stages of their life.

How big is that fraction? In my experience being around a bunch of home schoolers (and adjacent, and school system), some of whom were more in or out of unschooling, I think it's small enough that it should be a rarely considered option.

There are some kids where it will work _really_ well. I've interacted with a couple. There are a lot of kids where it really doesn't work, especially in a distraction rich environment.

wiredfool··on Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)
Unfortunately, digeridoo playing is just as disruptive to partner's sleep as snoring is. Perhaps they should try bagpipes?
wiredfool··on Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart
Apple 2 was often az/,. .
wiredfool··on New Nginx Exploit
Ubuntu has patched as of this morning. Debian doesn't look like they've patched trixie yet.
wiredfool··on California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply
I paid the equivalent of $12.50 a gallon for diesel at the peak price a month or so ago.
wiredfool··on IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
Personally I’d look for the coveted 5 eights uptime.
wiredfool··on Troubleshooting Email Delivery to Microsoft Users
I've seen issues last week onboarding a new employee, where emails from Jira and Slack and lastpass just weren't getting through.
wiredfool··on US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
I doubt it. The spanish (really tetra pack) wine was dry, and after double distilling it was basically moonshine. The Hungarian one was more in the mixing back into the undistilled wine -- making something akin to port+ strength that drinks like wine. It's the same idea behind pineau, first distilling + the cheap young white wine of the region.
wiredfool··on US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
The best I’ve ever done was a double distilled Spanish box wine we picked up for 1eur/l. The wine was undrinkable, but the brandy was sooooo smooth.

Next best was cheap tokaij furmint, distilled once and then mixed back into some of the undistilled wine. Basically the same thing as pineau de charante, but Hungarian and on the kitchen table.

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