Ernest

well in general it’s just not really a helpful thing to say… imagine your car won’t start and a bunch of other people say “I have zero issues with mine”

technically TMR, but yeah

NOAA is run by the US government, yes.

I’m preaching to the choir here, but Philip Labes has some very poignant protest songs. This recent one is about this headline: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xj0A2PTolCc

I’m not exactly qualified to speak on the issue, but I think it’s also important to focus on where the money gets spent. Anecdotally it seems like a lot is spent on classroom tech (“smart boards”, Chromebooks, iPads), which while nice, has abysmal value in terms of returns on cost.

Personally, I think the most important things are basic supplies, school lunches, and teacher salaries.

404 media, Taylor Lorenz

I think your starting point (allowing bot user agents to crawl the web has overlooked benefits) is a good one, but things aren’t black and white–there are clear drawbacks, too. Bots obviously have an orders of magnitude higher potential for abuse; to the point where bot traffic–as it currently stands in the real world–is qualitatively different from human traffic.

we should expand these protections from intentional/unintentional ddos irrelevant of user agent.

Sure, but targeted regulation based on heuristics (in this case, user agent) is also a widely accepted practice. DUI laws exist, even though the goals (fewer murders and safer roads) are already separately regulated.

Would it be nice if we didn’t have to do this? Or there were some other solution? Sure, but I have no idea where to even start, unfortunately.

iirc, gitea was forked from gogs, and forgejo is forked from gitea

Or why not just use (big) mirrors?

I mean, this is a thing with solar concentrators already, haha

and for those the heat is a feature :p

You can shape them that no matter how the light falls on it, it will align to the center. Kind of like how satellite dishes work but in reverse.

how do you do this, actually? I’m curious about the details because I just watched a video on compound parabolic reflectors, haha

a regular (ideal) convex lens with a single focal point will have the image move around as the light source moves across the sky. AFAIK satellite dishes tend to be paraboloids, which focus parallel rays onto the focal point, and if you change the angle of the light source, you’ll start losing focus. Stuff like the DSN and radio telescopes absolutely do have to aim and track their targets (or are forced to follow the rotation of the earth).

satellite dishes that are aimed towards geostationary satellites don’t have to move (because their targets are stationary in the sky), while stuff like starlink tracks targets with a phased array.

well, adding lenses kinda requires motorizing the panels to track the sun, right? otherwise the “hot spot” is going to move around across the day/year

is there a way to shape the lens to mitigate this?

action is the antidote to fear.

just wanted to add another answer to the wonderful ones you’ve gotten already.

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.

I don’t really have a good answer on how to find joy despite the bleak violence of reality, but I know that we must still try to find it, because hope and joy is exactly that which they are trying to snuff out.

and like, one of the options would be for live service games to say “we are planning to operate for {number} of years” and people would know to spend their money accordingly

it would be transparent and informative and people would be empowered to make their own decisions

My read on this is that he’s an idiot who wanted to air a contrarian opinion ('cause that’s how tech CEOs be), and focused in on a very literal/pedantic view of the issue without taking into account the context (which is that the Trump regime is facist and also just… lies, like, all the time).

Whether or not being a pedantic idiot is better or worse than being a Trumpist (or if it’s even a meaningful difference) is up to you, of course.

it’s a shame commonmark stalled and then markdown variants proliferated again because of that :/

deleted by creator

great article, and I had no idea that happened to Brian Krebs, of all people! o.O

I do think the EFF makes a good point though, and I think personally I tend to be biased towards content neutrality over moderation (at least, more strongly the larger the platform is, and Cloudflare is very large). Not to the point of Xitter, obviously, but I think there’s at least a reasonable argument for Cloudflare in this case.

that said, after some searching, I did find the following two articles, and I find their arguments against Cloudflare very compelling:

• https://www.devever.net/~hl/cloudflare
• http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/07/14/cloudflare-we-have-a-problem/

Fortunately I’m already using end-to-end SSL certs via Caddy, but now I’m considering just moving off Cloudflare entirely and instead providing regular backups to Internet Archive–most of the stuff I host is entirely static and very lightweight.

tell me more

• https://www.usermag.co/
• https://www.404media.co/