Pleasantly surprised to find there is now an ARM build of the #CrystalLang compiler, so I can run Crystal code in #Termux on my phone

@cstross apropos absolutely nothing: "enrichment chapters" is an anagram of "The Merchant Princes" and "mega premise" is an anagram of "Empire Games"

Followup: after blocking public scraping of a #Gitlab instance we waited for a while to see if the #LLM botnet attacks would reduce; finally (after about 3 days) one of them finally realized it was getting the sign-in page instead of actual content and seems to have given up. At least one other botnet is still trying, but load is much reduced. So there is hope! Block access and they eventually go away.

Before and after blocking unauthenticated access to a self-hosted #Gitlab instance that was being swarmed by aggressive LLM scraper bots and thus extremely slow for authenticated users. Unblockable by IP because they used a huge rotating pool of distinct IP addresses. (Access was blocked on the morning of September 2 and the login page was rate-limited later that day when the bots just wouldn't give up trying to access blocked content.)
#LLMs #AIScum

Recent discovery about the #fingerprint reader on my #Thinkpad under #Linux; it requires a light touch. I've been having trouble with it recognising my fingerprint and being very sensitive to moisture and I assumed I needed a firmer press, like you do with the readers under smartphone screens, however it turns out to be much more accurate with just a very light press. Now need to get into that habit...

The NVMe drives I have are great; fast and responsive. But the flash memory they put in thumb drives seems to be absolute shit.

Right, I'm giving up on USB flash drives for laptop backups. I've bought a dozen in the past few years and only three of them still work at all (Sandisk dual A/C drives). All of the rest are already dead, or so slow they are unusable. Like, literally a few hundred KB/s. I just fished out a 15-year-old ADATA USB-2.0 2.5" spinning drive and it still readable, reformatted fine, works fine. It's not fast for new backups but incrementals are quicker than flash. Shouldn't be, but they are.

Was just idly typing sample #password formations into https://passcheck.io to see what it thought. This one is the initials of the first line of a famous English novel and I was surprised at how many other people had apparently used it. Can you guess what it was? I asked my wife the same question and she got it right first time...
#security #literature #books

All the current American white guys running everything are sure making a good case in favour of DEI hiring

I used to run #GrapheneOS on this Pixel 7a, wiped and flashed it to stock before handing it to a repair place to replace the battery and now I've reflashed #CalyxOS
The various security, privacy, and compatibility pros and cons of sandboxed Play Services vs. microG and other features have been extensively debated elsewhere. What I *will* say is that it now feels *significantly* faster. Like I bought a brand new phone.

This is a feature I really look for in my phone case
#wtf

The existence of private detectives implies the existence of public detectives and protected detectives

My favourite #astronomy fact is in this article
https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
Which is brighter, a supernova seen from the distance the Earth is from the Sun, or a hydrogen bomb detonated while resting directly on your eyeball? The answer is the supernova, by 9(!) orders of magnitude.

Anybody in #Canada with a #degoogled phone, thinking about the "worst" banking app you use, what's the status and can you comment which bank it is and which OS?

Aliens contact you and offer to distribute one piece of science fiction technology to humanity and they want you to pick which one. What do you choose to improve society the most?

Was just in one of those natural green hippie stores and they had "96% natural dishwasher pods". What's the other 4%? Witchcraft?

Don't ask:
What's the cheapest X?
What's the easiest way to do X?
What's the best way to X?

Instead:
What are some budget-friendly X options?
What are some options to do X for non-technical people?
What are good ways to do X with their pros and cons?

Everyone has different skills, experience and perceptions of cost.

This is a really weird crossover. Don't take the kids.
#movies #FunnySigns

Even the floor can be comfortable
#Caturday

The perfect #sticker for a #Thinkpad lid doesn't exi...

Not exactly a repost; the previous one was a transparent sticker that was ugly because it partially revealed the logo underneath. This one is not transparent so the effect is better.

#Portal