Beehaw

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.22-111729/https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/03/22/israel-power-struggle-between-government-and-judiciary-thrusts-the-country-into-the-unknown_6739413_4.html

Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet voted unanimously on Friday to dismiss Ronen Bar, head of Israel's domestic intelligence service. The Supreme Court suspended the legally dubious procedure, and their decision was supported by the Attorney General. The prime minister has decided to force the issue.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.wtf/post/18430451

This could be the end of much of the fediverse, especially the more left-leaning parts.

(this one, I'm lightly editing)

Service with a smile

How to make friends and influence people while standing behind a counter

by Peter Hahnloser

The Daily of the University of Washington

Dec. 2, 1998

I can see anyone who's read my prior columns thinking to themselves, "Who doesn't this guy hate?" So far, I've covered affirmative action, religious folk, and people who couldn't write themselves out of an acorn. I realize that this has probably given people the wrong impression.

I don't intend to single any group out; rather, it's the general public that concerns me. I feel that humanity is heading downhill, not because of politics, religion or misspellings, but because of my time in the service industry. The more exposure to the public I get, the less I feel I can trust people to do just about anything.

In December 1995, I was hired for my first job. I was 16, and a job allowed me to get a car. A Boston Market opened right next to my house and one day, as I was walking home from school, I was approached by a guy offering me a job there. They offered $5.75 starting pay, and that sounded good to me.

After a week of training at another store and a week in training classes, the store opened. Throughout January, I looked forward to going to work -- and then I realized the folly of my ways.

I got one testy customer after another, until finally, I snapped. I started using the customers for personal gain -- namely, stories to treasure for the rest of my life. The beauty of it is, few of them realized I was giving them anything but top-notch service. This pattern continued through a brief stint at Arby's and then again at the Market.

So, if you have a job in the service industry, or have a temp job for the season, read on, and find out how you, too, can come up with entertainment at the expense of others, getting paid all the while.

Fun with menus

These days, many chains have modular menus -- you can move items around to change prices and available items. Beware, though: A fake price is false advertising, so be subtle. We had a modular drink board, so one of my shenanigans was making the free refills run 99 cents each. Sure, it makes no sense, but no one caught on for nearly three weeks, and we enjoyed the puzzled faces of customers who knew something wasn't quite right, but were too timid to say anything.

Labels everywhere

Sometimes you need to point out the painfully obvious to customers. I once was given the task of making cutlery labels, and produced "forks," "spoons" and "knaves" -- this went unnoticed for more than two months.

Affirm the customer's stupidity

When the customer asks a stupid question, it can be a reflex to laugh and say "Damn, are you stupid!" However, this has a generally detrimental effect on your job status. The key is to follow the customer into the land of the absurd.

One night, I was working drive-thru when a customer asked "That carved ham ... is that the same as a Ham Carver?" For those unfamiliar with the Boston Market menu of the time, one of these is a meal, located on the "meals" board, and the other is a sandwich, located on the "sandwiches" board.

Here's the kicker: One was, at the time, $5.49, while the other was $3.99. So how could they be the same? Well, I didn't want to tell the customer he was wrong, so I replied "Yes, sir, that's why it appears on the menu board two different times, and each time with a different price."

Someone else came on and corrected me, but by then I'd had my fun and went off to stock the knaves.

Point out the obvious

Early in my service career, a newlywed couple came in -- they still used terms of endearment profusely.

"What do you want, honey?"

"I don't know, sugar, what do you want?"

You can imagine how this continued. Eventually, the woman tapped on the cold case glass, pointing at the cranberry sauce, and asked, "What's this here?"

My immediate response: "That's glass, ma'am."

Her husband fucking lost it, head first into the glass laughing his ass off. I hope I didn't cause a divorce.

Yes, we don't have any

One night, a woman came in hell-bent on getting tortellini salad, which we had run out of 30 minutes earlier. When ordering her two sides, she pointed an accusatory finger at the cold case and asked as to the whereabouts of the tortellini.

I explained that we were out, and she asked if I was sure. Considering that we had this nasty habit of checking in back for more when we ran out of a side, I was pretty sure that we were out, but she assumed this was only a ruse.

"Can you check again?"

"Sure," I said, and proceeded to go in back, grab a soda and kick back for five minutes before I returned and announced that -- lo and behold -- we really were out of tortellini salad.

She went ballistic at this point -- started shaking and whatnot -- and said shrilly, "You're telling me there's no tortellini salad in the entire store?"

Essentially, yes, that's exactly what I was telling her, but this had gone on long enough, and I tired of her attitude quickly, so I responded with "There may be some out back in the dumpster, but I assure you, there's none anywhere else."

I almost got fired.

The customer is always blind

Funny thing about chickens, they all look the same once plucked, and they all have the same anatomy.

Yet a customer who ordered a quarter white declared that his meat had no skin. I quickly explained that there was skin o' plenty on the ridge of the breast, where it is commonly found.

This simply wouldn't do -- he wanted skin on the part of the breast where it met the thigh (and where, consequently, there was none). Even after explaining to him that no such chickens existed, he demanded another piece, which he then accused of also being skinless.

I finally gave up and rang him up, ignoring his shrieks of displeasure. He threatened to never come back. Darn.

Can you hold on?

Oftentimes, especially in drive-thru, a customer will ask if they can have a second to decide. A good response to this has always been "I'm sorry, we're fresh out of seconds -- would you like to try a minute instead?"

Au jus night

Alright, so this isn't really something everyone can apply to their jobs, but it should be a good starting point from which to brainstorm. It takes the ability to keep a straight face under duress, but it pays off.

The store I worked at was a very slow one, and there were only three people working at any given time. I was working drive-thru one night and decided to have a little fun.

Arby's serves french dip submarine sandwiches that come with a cup of au jus. To portion the au jus out, we had a vat that held about two gallons from which we poured these cups. In an average night, we'd sell two french dips, accompanied by two cups of au jus.

I realized that we were wasting a lot of au jus in serving only 16 ounces of the 256-ounce capacity, and decided to organize au jus night, an evening of fun and festivities wherein all drive-thru customers were offered a cup of au jus with their order.

Perhaps "offered" is a bit misleading. When repeating their order back to them, I'd throw a cup of au jus in the middle, and only one person caught me in the act -- out of around 60 orders.

When the customer would arrive at the window, their order -- complete with au jus (at 30 cents a cup) -- would be waiting. This included those who only got a beverage, and these people would invariably be surprised at the small sack accompanying their cup.

"What's that?"

"Your cup of au jus, sir."

"I didn't order a cup of au jus. Why would I want au jus with a drink?"

"Frankly, sir, I was wondering the same thing myself, but I figured you knew what you wanted."

"Well, I don't want au jus."

"No problem, sir."

Admittedly, I had to refund most of these drink-only au jus orders, but I kept the declined au jus container close at hand for the next person.

I emptied two vats that evening, and I thought for sure that the fun was over, but I later learned that the management had caught wind of my escapade.

They saw an errant amount of au jus being sold for the evening, and I think they could have seen at most two explanations: one, an employee was fucking around, and two, there was a sudden increase in demand for au jus.

Management being how it is, they took option two, and proceeded to purchase six months' worth of au jus for the next week. I got another job three days later. They probably still have the au jus.

As you can see, with a little imagination, a little confidence, and a lot of spiteful feelings, your customers can be your playthings. But, as always, be careful: It's all fun and games until someone loses their job.

Then -- it's just fun.

Catchy vibes, definitely going to be adding this to my summer music playlist this year.

Indeed, GNOME has been experiencing issues since a last November; as a temporary solution they had rate-limited non-logged in users from seeing merge requests and commits, which obviously also caused issues for real human guests.

The solution the eventually settled to was switching to Anubis. This is a page that presents a challenge to the browser, which then has to spend time doing some math and presenting the solution back to the server. If it's right, you get access to the website.

According to the developer, this project is "a bit of a nuclear response, but AI scraper bots scraping so aggressively have forced my hand. I hate that I have to do this, but this is what we get for the modern Internet because bots don't conform to standards like robots.txt, even when they claim to".

Mwmbl is a community-built, non-profit search engine that puts privacy and user control first. It offers a truly different search experience—one where the results are shaped not by corporate interests but by real people.

Key Features:

• Ad-Free & Privacy-Respecting: No ads, no tracking, and no commercial interests—just a search engine built with the users in mind.

• User-Curated Results: Instead of relying on algorithms, search results are refined and tuned by the community.

• Community-Driven Crawling: The engine relies on volunteer-run crawlers. Although the index currently holds around 500 million unique URLs, there's massive potential.

• Ambitious Growth Goals: mwmbl plans to reach 10 billion unique URLs by the end of 2025 and 100 billion by 2026, at which point it should be a true alternative to commercial search engines.

• Open-Source: The project is fully open-source, meaning you can contribute to the code and help resolve issues to push the project forward.

How to Get Involved:

Right now, the search quality is pretty rough, but that’s where you can make an impact:

• Contribute to the Index:

  • Install the Firefox Extension: Once installed, it crawls the web on your behalf.

  • Run the CLI Script: An even better option would be to use your spare computing power by running the command line crawler.

• Join the Community: The main community is on Matrix for non-development related discussions.

• Code Contributions: Check out the project on Codeberg. You can contribute code, report issues, or suggest new features to help make the search results better.

• Financial Contributions: Donate some money towards hosting costs and supporting volunteers.

• Source 1.
• Source 2.
• Source 3.

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday.

Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunchhas experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010.

Source.

By now, it should be pretty clear that this is no coincidence. AI scrapers are getting more and more aggressive, and - since FOSS software relies on public collaboration, whereas private companies don't have that requirement - this is putting some extra burden on Open Source communities.

So let's try to get more details – going back to Drew's blogpost. According to Drew, LLM crawlers don't respect robots.txt requirements and include expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in your repository. They do so using random User-Agents from tens of thousands of IP addresses, each one making no more than one HTTP request, trying to blend in with user traffic.

Due to this, it's hard to come off with a good set of mitigations. Drew says that several high-priority tasks have been delayed for weeks or months due to these interruptions, users have been occasionally affected (because it's hard to distinguish bots and humans), and - of course - this causes occasional outages of SourceHut.

Drew here does not distinguish between which AI companies are more or less respectful of robots.txt files, or more accurate in their user agent reporting; we'll be able to look more into that later.

Finally, Drew points out that this is not some isolated issue. He says,

All of my sysadmin friends are dealing with the same problems, [and] every time I sit down for beers or dinner to socialize with sysadmin friends it's not long before we're complaining about the bots. [...] The desperation in these conversations is palpable.

On one hand I think people shouldn't use Discord anyway, but also, we need to figure out how to make the services we use sustainable.