elgordio

My CDN bill recently went from about $5 a month to over $200. Turned out it was Tictok’s spider relentlessly scraping the same content over and over again.

It was ignoring robots.txt. In the end I just had to ban their user agent in the CDN config.

One of the problems Amtrak is facing at the moment is a lack of rolling stock. The author notes that the California Zephyr was running full. It’s also running a shorter consist that it would have traditionally because of a lack of units. Increasing the length of the consist, assuming the engines can pull it, would reduce the emissions per seat. The ridership demand is there, the investment into Amtraks stock is, sadly, not.

There are two tiers of side quests in cyberpunk. Gigs and full on side quests. The gigs are all pretty short ‘go to place, shoot / rescue someone’ stuff but the main side quests are generally more involved, including all the romance options etc.

The gigs can be skipped without missing much, but skipping the side quests misses a ton of story IMO.

Interestingly when austerity was being pushed in the early 2010’s one driver was the claim that having more than 90% debt / gdp ratio would cause a country to go into recession.

Turns out though the report this claim was based on had an Excel error in its formula which when corrected would have shown an ~2% growth. Amazing how such a small error can have a such huge implications.

Hannah Fry had an episode about it on the BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001r1s4

IMO the fines are made to sound scary, and are relevant for large corpos, but the ICO or whatever body for your country, has no interest in prosecuting an individual. What is a ‘percentage of revenue’ on something that makes no revenue anyway.

Even if they did take interest it would start with an opportunity to correct things before prosecution.

Thanks for the update Ernest, and best wishes for your health to improve.

Safari needs a tick in “copy urls without site tracking” since ios17 and macOS Sonoma

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/remove-tracking-information-urls-safari/

When enrolling with the 2FA take a screenshot of the QR code, print it and add it to wherever you keep your secure documents. The QR code is your private key, just scan it again to add a new device if you lose your original.

Obviously you need to keep the code secure!

Has anyone seen the Chinese TV adaptation of this, is it any good?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20242042

It amazes me that anyone will fill in their actual date of birth on an online system outside of a government or bank system. Just put a fake one in, no one is going to check! Jeez.

Alternative solution: pay for YouTube premium.

Whereby is pretty good. The host needs an account but all the participants can just visit a link, no account or application needed.