Yup. The robots.txt file is not only meant to block robots from accessing the site, it’s also meant to block bots from accessing resources that are not interesting for human readers, even indirectly.

For example, MediaWiki installations are pretty clever in that by default, /w/ is blocked and /wiki/ is encouraged. Because nobody wants technical pages and wiki histories in search results, they only want the current versions of the pages.

Fun tidbit: in the late 1990s, there was a real epidemic of spammers scraping the web pages for email addresses. Some people developed wpoison.cgi, a script whose sole purpose was to generate garbage web pages with bogus email addresses. Real search engines ignored these, thanks to robots.txt. Guess what the spam bots did?

Do the AI bros really want to go there? Are they asking for model collapse?

I’m using Finnish keyboard layout (same as Swedish basically).

I like how AltGr+7/8/9/0 gives me { [ ] }, it’s a very nice grouping. The key next to Z is < > and you get | with AltGr, which is very handy.

Only thing that’s mildy annoying from programming viewpoint is that for tilde and backtick, the keys do diacritics - you need to press the diacritic key and space. Backtick is especially fun, because it’s shift+acute, space. Meanwhile, the key next to 1 does § ½, which aren’t that handy most of the time. I often just stick backtick on that key if I’m particularly assed to customise keyboard keyouts. Similarly, shift+4 is ¤, which is another not a particularly useful character (but I don’t mind that, because £ $ € all need to be produced with AltGr, which is at least consistent).

Oh content from this blog has been popping up in random places. Methinks it’s le epic trole.

So yeah, Xfce looks the same as it did 10 years ago.

And?

Desktop environment is meant to launch apps and give me windows and maybe have a file manager. Xfce does that. It’s a desktop environment.

Hey, “modern” desktop environment enthusiasts, if you bring Compiz back from the dead, give us luddites a call, will you? Ohhhh you kids should have seen it back in the day. Windows and Mac users saw Compiz in action and were, like, “wat.” You don’t get them to react that way to modern Linux desktops, no. And all that is lost now. Thanks Wayland.

Yeah, there’s an important distinction. Just because you could use Linux doesn’t mean you can at any particular moment.

I don’t really do music production; I’m more into writing and visual arts and photography. I could do all of those things on Linux and be perfectly productive. But there’s a difference between being productive and being optimal. My current process happens to be based on software that runs on Windows. (Heck, a lot of the software I use already runs on both Windows and Linux, anyways.)

The key here being that you shouldn’t lock yourself too much to just one tool and one approach, and that actually goes both ways.

And that there is the real crime. It’s a real shame no one’s making a tape drive at the consumer market price point. Tapes are a hell of a lot more convenient for backups and archival than the giant weird pile of storage formats we’ve seen over years.

Turtles are such underrated creatures and most people don’t realise how important they are to computer science. Turtle robots! Turtle graphics! Not to even mention the very concept of shell access! And yes, turtles are probably very happy that Secure Shell was invented.

I was about to comment on this, but my Android phone spontaneously rebooted.

Anyway. Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was about to say: Firefox. It is a thing. An awesome thing.

Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.

If Chrome is known for one thing, it’s absurd User-Agent strings. Why not make it even more absurd???

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (Ahahaha; Fuck you Google; This is actually) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0

Well, since it seemed to be a way to support the site and get to see new features ahead of time, so yeah, why not? I only decided not to renew my gold access when it became very clear Spez wouldn’t ban the hate subs he loved.

As for getting gold otherwise:

I’m an introvert, ok? I mostly only comment if I have something worthwhile to say.

So the only comments I ever got gilded by others were drunken shitpost. And in one instance some random off the cuff post. …I don’t get it.

Anyway. Basically, I didn’t want to post any Gold Baits™. because that way lies madness.

Been using a Suunto 5 Peak watch since May and it’s been absolutely great. Dunno if 250€ counts as inexpensive, but like we say in Finland, poor people can’t afford to buy cheap shit that breaks right away. (I think they have cheaper options?) Suunto watches talk to phone app which at least on Android is pretty great, and the app can talk to other services which can analyse stuff further.

I was a reddit user for ages. Reddit search always sucked. Heck, Reddit could barely make their own data available to the users (which is why their user histories are so limited and why the GDPR takeouts take a week). Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, used external search engines.

Do they want to block external searches? Literally enshittify their shit further? Are they willing to hold back progress?

Just today I was thinking of Reddit Gold - back when I actually paid for it, the marketing spin was “you get to test new features before we add them to everyone else!” Literally none of the Gold features I’ve ever used made to the unwashed masses. I take it back, saving comments did.

So yeah, they will hold back progress. In fact, progress isn’t on the cards. It’s just regress. AND you can be a premium user and PAY for it.

Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

Welp, another Google service that was too beautiful for this world.

Time to move my subscriptions to other podcatcher then. [taking a quick look at various migration options] Hmmm. What to write on Google Podcasts gravestone? “Here lies Google Podcasts. It never supported OPML.”

with listeners migrated to YouTube Music

Damn. I migrated my Google Play Music purchases to YouTube Music and to this day I have no idea where they actually went. If I hadn’t downloaded the local MP3 copies with the terrible joke of a client software they had, I’d have been screwed. Went back to just buying music on iTunes.

That’s right! However, remember that bananas have potassium-40 in it, which is radioactive. Not much, though. So be very very mildly careful around bananaphones! /old joke

I use Debian because it runs on everything, and XFCE because it runs on everything and I’ve never wanted to waste much of the oomph on the GUI anyway. Looks and feels and works well enough, and that’s all I care.

Olivetti, from Italy, was pretty famous in Europe as a typewriter manufacturer. So it wasn’t much of a surprise my father’s first PC (and the first PC compatible I could use) was Olivetti PCS 386SX, circa 1992.

Turns out Olivetti is surprisingly important in computer history too. Olivetti made Programma 101, which was the first programmable desk computer/calculator, way back in 1965. If NASA bought a bunch of these, I guess it was serious shit.

There was some commercial for the Commodore 64 which basically lambasted the IBM PC for being twice as expensive while having the the same 64K memory.

I was, like, “yeah, but nobody ever bought the 64K model of IBM PC. That would have been just ridiculously limited, right? Right? Everyone got memory expansions, surely?”

Well, 64K was the stock configuration, so I’m sure those memory expansions sold like hotcakes. There was even the option for freaking 16K memory. (Now, I’m sure next to nobody bought that.) Even option to getting no floppy drives, because you could always put your glorious BASIC programs on a cassette tape. Like a caveman. (This also sounds like a rare option.)

(Extremely drunk)

I don’t remember any more.

(Fishes out a SanDisk Extreme SD 128GB card from the box)

Was this the one? I think this was the one.
The one that fucking failed.

…fuck. I had more money than sense a few years ago.

My first Reddit client was Baconreader. I can’t remember why I stopped using it, probably because it had some limitations or other. I used RIF for a while, because they were going ad-free for Reddit Gold users. Didn’t renew my Reddit Gold one day. Luckily there was a lot of hype going on around this newcomer called Sync, so I got it Sync Pro and was happy ever since. …Until this day I guess, but that’s not Sync’s fault.