I feel like there should be a third box with Wall Street raider types, for scrapers that use Selenium browser automation.

I don’t think it’s entirely unblockable - adsense seems to know to only serve unmonetized PSA ads - but I think it’s very difficult to discriminate between “this is a real browser controlled by an end user” and “this is a real browser being controlled by automated test software”.

Wait… I just had an idea.

Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)

This.

My units and integration tests are for the things I thought of, and more importantly, don’t want to accidentally break in the future. I will be monumentally stupid a year from now and try to destroy something because I forgot it existed.

Testers get in there and play, be creative, be evil, and they discuss what they find. Is this a problem? Do we want to get out in front of it before the customer finds it? They aren’t the red team, they aren’t the enemy. We sharpen each other. And we need each other.

Love this, 100% accurate. QA people are amazing, protect us from ourselves in so many ways we didn’t even think of.

Can you still just print and mail a 1040?

2024 was my first year married, and my wife tells me I will be filing this year.

In the US? You have to pay taxes. Don’t need to file. See Substitute For Return (SFR). I’ve done this ever since the Bush administration.

Intuit are quick to point out the massive deductions you’re missing out on. Until you pay for their services, and those theoretical deductions evaporate.

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I hope they explain further. Honestly I don’t think the “oh crap I need to know if it’s good or bad right now!” camp is really going to care, but it still feels a little uncomfortable. (As opposed to the “this could be either way, I don’t have enough evidence to decide right now, and I’m ok with holding that uncertainty in my brain until new evidence moves my needle” camp)

Are forked builds possible with third party service references neutered?

Don’t worry, you aren’t missing much. That paragraph was kind of goofy anyway.

Think of a Seedbox as a cloud service provider with convenience features focused on enabling piracy, by keeping the hardware in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care what you pirate and giving you one-click easy installation methods for apps that make piracy simple. But without going so far as “Thank you for your payment, download these specific media files here.”

You debatably have to be a techie. But by techie standards it’s very easy to use.

If you really hate piracy, I suppose you could pay for one for a month, get the identity of who you paid, and use one of the apps to host a shell script that listens on one of the few public ports you have access to, that answers every incoming connection with “this is a seed box operated by ABC, with cards payments accepted by LMNOP Inc in Athens, Greece.”

But the most common usage is running packaged software they let you run (like BT clients you can remote-control, sickchill, radarr, sonarr, Plex, etc.) or remote desktops or shells. Usually implemented as docker containers.

Apologies, I did the American thing. Checks, which get turned into X9.100 files, which are just digital versions of bags of bundles of checks, with check images that were TIFF images in CCITT T.6 encoding.

I don’t know if you’re being serious, but I can confirm from my time at as a developer at a banking software company, we didn’t use a hard RT OS even for like Mosler or Hitachi high speed check sorters. Just fast C++ code. (On Windows XP still, when I left in 2016)

(Work load is basically: batch of checks is loaded into an input hopper, along with check sized pieces of paper which are headers and footers, machine rapidly scans MICR lines and they go flying towards output pockets, and our code has something like 20 ms to receive the MICR data and pass back a sorting decision.)

I feel like objecting to the “General advice about email is don’t” thing but I don’t know if I understand the objections well enough to refute them. I self host email for mspencer.net (meaning all requests including DNS are served from hardware in my living space) and I have literally zero spam and can’t remember the last time I had to intervene on my mail server.

On one hand: My emails are received without issue by major providers (outlook, gmail, etc) and I get nearly zero spam. (Two spam senders were using legitimate email services, I reported them, and got human-seeming replies from administrators saying they would take care of it.) And I get amusing pflogsumm (summarizes postfix logs) emails daily showing like 5 emails delivered, 45 rejected, with all of the things that were tried but didn’t work.

On the other: most of the spam prevention comes from greylist, making all new senders retry after a few minutes (because generally a legit MTA will retry while a spammer will not) and that delays most emails by a few minutes. And it was a bear to set up. I used a like 18 step walkthrough on linuxbabe dot com I think, but added some difficulty by storing some use and alias databases on OpenLDAP / slapd instead of in flat files.

But hey, unlimited mail aliases, and I’m thinking of configuring things so emails bounce if they seem to contain just a notification that terms and conditions are updated somewhere. I don’t know, cause some chaos I guess.

And I have no idea if my situation is persuasive for anyone because I don’t know what the general advice means. And I worry it’ll have the unfortunate side effect of making self hosting type nerds like me start forgetting how to run their own email, causing control of email to become more centralized. And I strongly dislike that.

I’m surprised I’m the first comment saying this, but all I see is a user who needs help expressing their needs but who is not getting that help. Sure they don’t have our experience with decomposing problems and anticipating technical issues, but that’s normal and expected.

Yep, mspencer dot net (what little of it is currently up, I suck at ops stuff) is 2012-vintage hardware, four boxes totaling 704 GB RAM, 8x10TB SAS disks, and a still-unused LTO-3 tape drive. I’ll upgrade further when I finally figure out how to make proper use of what I already have. Until then it’s all a fancy heated cat tree, more or less.

Agreed, one of those “technically correct but deliberately missing the point” statements. Not sure why you’re so heavily downvoted so I want to explain why I support your statement.

The original statement doesn’t suggest they fail to understand words are constructed for sharing meaning, it asserts that the statements don’t communicate anything useful because the speaker made them up.

The statement is wrong, it needs a response, but “all words are made up” is not a useful response. It’s technically correct but fails to meet the speaker halfway by understanding their position and building towards it. See also: “all lives matter.” Technically correct but not useful, and deliberately avoids trying to understand the speaker’s position.

I couldn’t find the clip, but first thing that came to mind was the StarTalk Live with Buzz Aldrin and John Hodgman.

Hodgman: “maybe they’ll find H 2 2 2 2 O!”

Edit: crap, I have to call myself out. I failed to read completely, thought the screenshotted poster accidentally changed one part of the comparison, instead of deliberately changing both parts. If the original was molecules in a cubic inch of water vs stars in the observable universe, I read this post as atoms in a molecule vs stars in the observable universe.

Apologies, I discovered I was a fool and was excited to share my discovery.

I don’t know what people call this, but I’m curious if you also need future balance prediction, basically “here’s how much left over you’re going to have this payday, next payday, etc”. I might switch from my homegrown spreadsheet to one of these recommendations if they also support that.

(I’m talking about something where you input your known scheduled debits and credits, especially for people with biweekly paychecks but monthly debits, and then you match recent actual activity with what’s expected. So you get “current balance is $1800 but it’ll get as low as $300 before you get paid next” type info to keep you from over spending.)

I have an iPhone and a gl.inet gl-e750 portable cell router, and my SIM card stays in the router. I don’t actually restrict my phone the way you’re talking about, but this gives me vpn to my home network without needing the vpn running on each client device. And if I wanted to block connections to big tech company services, I could do that.

Hmm, you have uncovered a problem with both of our ideas. Steam’s leverage is reduced after they have deposited sales proceeds, and is gone after the publisher isn’t selling games on the platform any longer.

(I’m griping about Rockstar specifically but my point is still flawed in the general case.)