Yup. Blocks ads on our iPhones, iPads, streaming services, etc. Between that & uBlock Origin on our laptop browsers we hardly ever see ads.

I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.

Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.

Some of us drive 48-wheeled vehicles.

Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” back then. They had a staff of human editors who curated answers to popular questions. Nothing they answered back then was done via search.

Source: I worked for a search engine startup in the 90’s that was acquired by Ask Jeeves when they realized they needed a true search technology since human editing wasn’t scalable.

Ask Jeeves was doing this before Google existed…

💩

robots.txt is 100% honor based. Well known bots like Googlebot, Bingbot, etc. definitely honor them. But there are also plenty of bots that completely ignore them.

I would hope the bots used to collect LLM training data honors them, but there’s no way to know for certain. And all it really takes is one bot ignoring it for the content of your website to end up in a random set of training data…

Try using “curl -A” to specify a User-Agent string that matches Chrome or Firefox.

deleted by creator

Dude sitting on the left also has six fingers. And all the hats are gibberish.

I’m just curious, but what type of content would you be watching on YouTube?

I literally use it almost exclusively for how-to styles of videos. I had to replace the throttle cable on my riding lawnmower last year. I found an awesome step-by-step video. Stuff like that…

I hope you realize that virtually every CDN provider does the exact same thing in similar ways. Sites that use Akamai, AWS, Google cloud, Fastly, etc. all give those companies access to unencrypted content. It’s just how CDNs work…

My favorite when debugging some code for a memory manager, written in the days of DOS extended memory, was shit_cookie_corrupt.

The original author called blocks of memory “cookies”. If too many cookies were corrupted then eventually the function ohShitOhShitOhShit was called, which shut everything down.

Some CDNs like Akamai and Cloudflare have options to optimize images. We use the Akamai one where I work. It means our creative teams, customers, etc. don’t need to worry too much about whether an image is properly optimized when they upload it. Akamai will, behind the scenes optimize the quality, color palette, and image type (jpg, web, png, etc) and create a number of different versions of the images. Then when a client requests the image Akamai looks at the client device (mobile vs desktop, screen resolution, browser version, etc) and serves the copy of the image that’s best optimized for that device.

So even if the URL ends with .jpg you might be sent a .webp. If you use the browsers developer tool to inspect the response headers you’ll likely see the Content-Type header says it’s .webp as well.

Our house has 5 heating & 2 AC zones that I installed Ecobee thermostats on. Three rooms also have skylights that can be opened. When we open the skylights the thermostats all turn off, and when closed they turn them back on to the mode they were previously set to.

Our house is set back in the woods on a long driveway. When either me or my wife arrives home after dark all the driveway / walkway lights turn on. And when we’re both away they all turn off.

I also have a “bedtime” button on my phone that turns off all the lights, locks the doors, turns off our WiFi speakers, puts all the Ecobees into sleep mode, etc.

You died every week (from diabetes)?

Criminal trials don’t find defendants “innocent”. They find them not guilty, which is a huge difference. It means the prosecution didn’t bring forward enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The presence of doubt means they weren’t found guilty. Not that they were found innocent.

He was proven liable in the civil trial. The additional evidence uncovered by the lawyers in that case was damning. Civil trials typically don’t require a unanimous verdict, but it was unanimous in this case.

I got royally screwed by the federal government personnel data breach that happened a number of years ago. As a result I have free identity theft monitoring with a really good company for the foreseeable future.