I'm a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.
Maybe it's time to implement an AI tarpit. Each response for a request from a particular IP address or range takes double the time of the previous, with something like a 30 second cool down window before response time halves.
Would stop AI scrapers in their tracks, but it wouldn't hurt normal users too much.
Maybe I should start looking into it a bit more 🤔
Only systems that have framebuffer console enabled at boot I guess.
Recovery mode booting would probably be normal 80x25 text console in case there was something up with framebuffer initialisation.
There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.
If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend's comments and posts started to get intermixed with "other stuff" , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.
What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that's when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else's opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people's brains. And you can bet it's going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn't matter a fuck if what its handing out i's mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you're engaged.
And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it's crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.
These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can't stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.
In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there's anything left remaining after that is debatable.
I wonder how it goes with AI-generated receipts.
but are normal plebs going to be arrested for having Signal on their phone or with a Meshtastic/Meshiliscious device?
Are you deliberately trying to be obtuse?
The "criminal encrypted communications device" - whatever the hell that actually is 1 - is the very small cherry on top of the firearms and whatever other investigative legwork needed to identify, locate, and then arrest these people.
So no, unless you're also often nipping off in a taxi with a few guns to do a job for another crime group, I think you'll be relatively safe fooling around with meshtastic.
1Maybe it's one of those CrimPhones™ that had their security protections quietly broken in the last few years.
It can be a Cron job that runs every minute. Run a script that:
- Checks for the existence of a file, if it exists, exit.
- (Optional) ping your end, if it's up, continue, otherwise exit
- Touches said file.
- Runs SSH to try and connect to your end. If the connection is made everything halts here until the connection drops.
- Cleans up said file.
- Exits.
If you can arrange a fixed IP address externally (or dynamic DNS that follows your IP around) you can set up a reverse SSH connection instead.
Basically your server connects to your external computer via SSH and then sets up port forwarding so that when you connect to localhost:2222 or similar on your PC, you're actually connecting back to the server.
Ditto on the QuietComfort headphones. I've had a pair of QC35's for 10 years now with heavy use on weekly flights.
Runs off a AAA battery which is good for like 18 hours or so. Works as regular headphones when the battery goes flat. 3.5mm cable with media controls and a mic in it.
Still in its original hard case, have replaced the ear pads a couple of times, decent pads are cheap enough on eBay and etc.
I also bought a Bluetooth insert for it for ~AUD75, it plugs in where the cable goes and has it's own rechargeable battery with only about 6 hours life which is a bit of a nuisance.
Edit: regarding audio quality, I can say that if you're using headphones in any sort of urban environment, noise cancelling absolutely trumps audio quality. But the QC35's aren't too bad in the quality stakes, especially if you're using them on the move.
As the earth rotates, the oceans follow the moon's gravitational pull (and the sun's, to a lesser extent). From an outsider's perspective it is a lump of water always bulging towards the moon, and the earth rotates underneath this lump.
By placing a resistance to the free movement of the tides you are siphoning a very small amount of energy from the rotation of the earth as you are restricting the passage of the earth through that lump of water.
So it doesn't matter if your generators spin both ways on the rising and falling tides, you are still restricting movement.
I know, instead of folders, we could use "shelves" and the Dewey Decimal System.
32 bit computers can handle 64 bit timestamps, it's just a matter of defining time_t to be 32 or 64 bits at compile time. The compiler will deal with all the mess of splitting the 64 bit value up to calculate on the smaller registers in 32 bit architectures, just like any other variable defined as int_64.
Linux kernels have had support for 64 bit time on 32 bit systems since version 5.something, so generally speaking there'll still be retro 32 bit hardware running past 2038 just fine.
How does a person get this far down a rabbit hole?
I don't know. Software engineering is tangential to my field but I have to wonder, is software efficiency even a consideration these days?
It seems that maybe a week of just solid thinking about what they have and what they need - WITHOUT touching a keyboard - could have put them in a better position. But move fast and break things doesn't seem to accommodate that kind of approach.
Ok there's a whole lot of wtf going on here.
AI codebots in the cloud doing your code for you, cool, I guess.
So you need to watch them? And presumably intervene if necessary? Ok.
So then:
They decided that they'd stream a video of the AI codebots doing their thing.
At 40Mbps per stream.
For "enterprise use".
Where presumably they want lots of users.
And then they didn't know about locked down enterprise internet and had to engineer a fallback to jpeg for when things aren't great for them. Newsflash - with streaming video peaking at 40Mbs per user, things will never be great for your product in the real world.
How, in any way, does this scale to anything approaching success? Their back end now has to have the compute power to encode and serve up gigabits of streaming video for anything more than ~50 concurrent users, let alone the compute usage of the actual "useful" bit , the AI codebots.
For say, 5 users out of a site of 200, IT departments will now see hundreds of megabits of streaming traffic - and if they're proactive, they will choke those endpoints to a crawl so that their pathetic uplink has a chance to serve the other 195 users.
All of this for a system that is fundamentally working on maybe 5kB of visible unicode text at any particular moment.
Before the celebrity chef craze?
The craze that made the cheap cuts of meat expensive?
Ohhh, now it's "traditional comfort food" and everyone wants it, so let's triple the price of that literal offcut.
Agreed.
If I have to dislocate my jaw to try and eat the burger then at that point I'd rather use a knife and fork.
The "two guys burger shop burger".
Maaaate, your burger is shit. It's a precariously stacked abomination that's 8 inches tall, has two ruined patties and half a cup of smoky bbq sauce and melted cheese on it, and then you decided that what it really needed was enough chilli on it so that all you can taste is burning.
I use MX Linux because it provides a simple way to use both the NVIDIA 340 drivers and the latest kernels with my 14 year old laptop.
because I write the software and could screw up the whole business if I wanted to be malicious.
Which is why there is the general rule of zero trust in networks. You start with nothing and you need to prove why you need a hole poked in the firewall. Some IT departments are better at actioning those requests than others. You clearly have had the joy of working with IT departments that are on the worse end of the scale.
Try harder. A simple request to filter out the nonsense in Gemini gives:
After filtering out the "nonsense"—the pop-culture references (Lord of the Rings, IT, Purple People Eater) and the random metaphors (poison, sandwiches)—the core message appears to be a critique of modern data processing or AI training compared to traditional publishing.
The "correct" message hidden in the text is:
The Core Message
It is inefficient and costly to pay humans to fix low-quality or "noisy" data. Instead of spending money to clean up automated nonsense, it would be more effective to invest in high-quality, verified sources (like books) and pay human creators fairly, as the system was originally designed to function.
Breakdown of the "Noise" Removed
"Poison and noise are the way": Likely a sarcastic opening about the current state of data. "Making a sandwich for those you love": Irrelevant personal imagery. "Off to take the ring to Mordor": Lord of the Rings reference. "Clowns in the sewers... red balloon": Stephen King’s IT reference. "Purple people eater... walking downtown": Reference to the 1958 novelty song.
The Logic Retained
The Problem: It is "not fruitful" to pay humans to undo/fix "noise" to make it "useful." The Result: This process ends up forcing people to "ingest fact" (raw data) without proper context. The Solution: "Buy the books and pay people correctly" according to the original "system."
Would you like me to help you rewrite this message into a formal argument or a professional email?
There is a FreeRTOS option for Arduino which is pretty much the next step when you want to do multitasking.
Basically, you create tasks in your setup routine by pointing to various self contained functions - each function becomes a task - and your "loop" becomes the task that runs when everything else is idle.
Your functions have their own loops so they never exit, and then when you kick-start the tasks the task scheduler in FreeRTOS does all the heavy lifting of timeslicing the various functions so that they all appear to be running at once.
If you share resources, like an I2C bus, you can add locking around it so that tasks that need the resource wait until other tasks are finished with it so you don't get tasks treading on each other's toes.